46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF POVERTY. 



amusement in books. So he may but does he ? The facts \ve have 

 previously stated are the best and most conclusive answer. 



The majority of a nation must, in all ages and in all stages of civi- 

 lization, be " hewers of wood and drawers of water," and must 

 always, to a greater or a less extent, be poor, and dependant upon 

 their own exertions for subsistence. What then should be taught to 

 this majority because the end and aim of all education ought to be 

 to make men good and wise ; that is, to enable them to perform their 

 duties as husbands, fathers, and citizens not surely to read and to 

 write alone, unless it can be demonstrated that reading and writing 

 are, as a matter of course, followed by the morals of public and of 

 private life. 



A child, for example, is sent to a primary school every day, or to a 

 Sunday school once a week ; here it is placed, probably, in a nume- 

 rous class, and the attention of its teacher exclusively devoted to its 

 progress in reading. It leaves the school, perhaps, knowing some- 

 thing more than it did, and it goes home ; what does it find there ? 

 drunkenness, irreligion, and immorality. Will any man assert that 

 what it has learnt will guard it from the pestilence of example ? 



If our population is to be improved by education, education must 

 be more comprehensive than it is at present, it must go on both at 

 home and at school. The adult population is as much or more in 

 want of moral education than its children ; and no intellectual educa- 

 tion given to the latter ever can, or ever will, prove a blessing, inas- 

 much as it fails in the only point on which all instruction for the poor 

 should turn. We raise no barrier by teaching a child to read, against 

 those daily and hourly influences, which are acting upon it at home, 

 and which influences form and determine character, Nay, it is full 

 as likely to turn its capacity for reading into a channel that can only 

 hasten its moral, social, and political degradation. 



Instead, therefore, of looking for moral, social, and political im- 

 provement from teaching the children of this generation the mere 

 elements of learning, a system of home visitation, of moral culture, 

 assiduously and pertinaciously applied, of religious instruction carried 

 into the midst of their households, and of lessons of domestic eco- 

 nomy, illustrated by their own misery, should be universally adopted. 

 It is to these points that all our efforts should be directed, and with- 

 out attention to these, schools may be built, money lavished, arid 

 learning given, but we shall never make our population wiser men, or 

 better citizens. 



What, then, it may be asked, are our people to be left in the stolid 

 ignorance of barbarism would you cease to teach them to read ? By 

 no means ; but we enter our protest against this species of instruc- 

 tion being called educating the people. 



The ' l philosophy of poverty" should consist of morality, religion, 

 and content. We may educate poverty, we may give to it political 

 rights ; but we shall never improve its condition, without this philo- 

 sophy is made habitual to it. G. 



