<)00 EDUCATION OF THE LOWER ORDERS. 



But you are reversing this, and you would have the same parties 

 both workers and thinkers. Be it so : I have no objection to the 

 labouring man thinking, but I would have him think of something 

 which might benefit him ; I would have this thinking lead him to 

 the performance of his social and relative duties. Is it so here ? 

 By no means; your different orders of society are separated from 

 each other by lines of demarcation as distinct and arbitrary as the 

 castes of India. Your aristocracy shut themselves up in their own 

 circles, and take no heed of the interests of those below them, and 

 are in fact completely ignorant of their peculiarities, moral, social, 

 and political. The upper division of your middle ranks are in the 

 same condition, a similar spirit of exclusivism characterising both : 

 the shop-keepers and others of similar grade are too busy getting a 

 living, to mind any thing but their own immediate interests ; and thus 

 the basis, the groundwork upon which all your social and political 

 institutions rest, is left to heave and struggle as it will. So long as 

 this was broken into numerous bodies, having little or no coherence 

 or sameness of interest, or so long as it saw itself forming a part of 

 the general chain of society, and its interests cared for by the higher 

 classes showing a sympathy for its joys and sufferings, and so long as 

 it thought of nothing beyond making itself comfortable, it was 

 excusable that you had not a national literature for it. But now, 

 when this people are congregated together into dense masses, closely 

 leagued in interest and feeling when they are discontented when 

 your manufacturers are cursing their employers the agriculturist in 

 a great measure pauperised, and destroying the property of the 

 farmers, you turn round and say, 'you have given, and are giving, it 

 education;' that is, you have taught it to read and to think. The 

 whole is idle twaddle. I go abroad on the sabbath-day in your 

 rural districts adjoining your great towns, and find their numerous 

 places of worship almost deserted ; and although the population has 

 doubled, trebled, and even quadrupled itself within the last forty 

 years, the grey-haired fathers of the hamlets assure me that in their 

 younger days these places were crowded with devout and pious 

 hearers, who venerated their pastors and received their exhortations 

 as the " words of glad tidings ;" and yet the majority of these con- 

 gregations could not read, and few indeed could write. Where is the 

 population now, and how is it engaged on these days set apart of 

 rest and devotion ? Idling away its time in filth at home, reading 

 cheap tracts if you will, or assembled in brutal hordes in beer- 

 houses, or listening to the fanatical ravings of some ignorant 

 enthusiast or political quack, who, in place of sending it from their 

 presence with humbled hearts and in charity with all mankind, 

 dismiss it with muttered ejaculations of mistaken zeal, or its mouth 

 filled with curses and its mind boiling with sedition ! but it can read, 

 you say folly ! worse than folly ! Call you this education, which 

 covers the poor man's bread with gall instead of honey, and makes 

 him immoral and irreligious ? It is no such thing. Education 

 ought to be beneficial to man's present and immortal welfare : 

 morality is its basis happiness and contentment its fruit. You have 

 begun at the wrong end : instead of arming your people against 



