ELEVATING THE PROFESSION OF THE EDUCATOR. 113 



would adopt the office of teaching. Among the host of the craft, how- 

 few of the lower order of schoolmasters have received any other 

 warranty for the business of a teacher than their own compulsive 

 wants ! Failing in every other pursuit, either from a deficiency of 

 integrity or of common sense, they can most easily adopt a business 

 that requires no other patent than a sign board, and no capital but 

 their scholars. Frequently is this adoption the last expiring grasp of 

 beggary, which, though a little protracted by every invention of 

 trickery upon the public, is but a step from the workhouse or the 

 gaol. 



But the degradation of the office carries with it other and far-ra- 

 mifying evils. The sub-teachers, ushers, assistants, dancing masters, 

 French masters, drawing masters, and all those numerous addenda of 

 the " classical and commercial academies," they all participate in the 

 pauperising depression of the trade. The fact is well attested that 

 more than a moiety of the charges paid to them by their pupils, 

 through the hands of the master of the school, is not unfrequently 

 substracted for his (the master's) own purse : and even a heavy dis- 

 count is further deducted from the already reduced pittance. Slaves 

 to poverty and craving competition, they are forced unshrinkingly and 

 silently to submit to this skinning process ; continually exposed to 

 the tyrannous cruelty of an avaricious and indigent employer, yet too 

 abject to resist. But to examine closer into the interior of the sys- 

 tem : still more pitiable are those wretched and isolated beings termed 

 Ushers. It would not be supposed that any rational man who re- 

 tained one vibration of sensibility could submit to be the meanest 

 slave in an office, bowed down to its low^est prostration, subject un- 

 ceasingly to the stinging virulence of a superior in beggary ; yet 

 lamentable is the fact that hundreds of tender and delicate minds, are 

 rudely crushed into a service thus abhorrent from every relation. 

 But it is a necessity of the persecuted Usher that he must be either 

 the enemy of the master or of the scholars. The consequence of the 

 former would be an insupportable suffering ; he has no alternative but 

 to become the enemy of the school. The hated spy of the master, 

 every species of deception and boyish fraud is quickly acquired and 

 practised to elude his watchful suspicion. He becomes the creeping 

 reptile of the school -room and the play-ground — a scorned and hated 

 thing, whose very presence brings penalty, a stranger to every 

 grateful emotion, excised from the pleasures and confidence of the 



VOL. X., NO. XXVIII. 15 



