ON ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. 19 



parents ought, by their own exertions — so far assisted by their 

 children as in no respect to interfere with their school hours, by far 

 the most important to them, and the best preparative for future 

 prosperity and happiness — to be perfectly competent to support the 

 whole family ; if they are not, by all their exertions, and by the 

 utmost frugality and temperance, there is social disease somewhere, 

 but there is none that may not be discovered and removed. I am 

 merely pointing out the best course, not modifying my views to 

 meet prejudices, or giving way to prevailing errors. No child, till 

 fourteen, ought to be for a less period in school every day than four 

 hours ; and there would remain sufficient time for that degree of 

 moderate and wholesome labour which the parents ought reason- 

 ably to demand. 



The silly objections to over-educating the working classes, as it is 

 called, are now only urged by the uneducated. Instead of indispos- 

 ing them to labour, the great lesson which a knowledge of man and 

 his relation to Creation will teach them, that labour is no evil and 

 no degradation, and, above all, that it is called for by Nature and 

 necessity, will render them more willing as well as more intelligent 

 labourers, will induce them to abridge their own hours of labour, 

 and employ their leisure in the enjoyment of the superior faculties, 

 intellectual and moral, which would not have been given them if 

 they had not been intended for human happiness.* Some vital 

 changes in social institutions are called for to allow an improved 

 education to produce all its beneficial effects ; but these are changes 

 from ignorant and, therefore, hurtful errors to cover truth, and 

 truth is ever attended with blessings in its practical application. 

 Education will facilitate those changes even by that partial diffu- 

 sion which, in spite of vicious institutions, will follow from a natu- 

 ral over the established system. There will long be a force disturb- 

 ing the progression, drawing back the machine, but there will be 

 two steps onward for one retrograde ; gain will be made on the 

 whole, and in a future and more favoured generation it will be all 

 gain together. 



I must reserve the vital subject of the training op teachers 

 — of proper normal establishments — for another number of the 



* This is precisely the state to which we should hke to see the labouring 

 classes brought, — namely, to a proper sense of their own rights and import- 

 ance. To such a condition they will assuredly come, and the arrival of it 

 will be materially hastened by the spread of knowledge amongst all classes, 

 despite the narrow-minded opposition which vamly endeavours to maintain 

 arbitrary superiority Eds. 



