EXPERIMENTAL LEGISLATION. 759 



W'ell under his management that they wei'c imitated in all parts of the 

 kingdom, and eventually in many other parts of the world. Spelling- 

 bees were, I believe, an American invention, and had a very lively but 

 brief career. The recent courses of popular scientific lectures arose 

 out of the very successful experiment instituted by Professor Roscoe 

 at Manchester. Many attempts ai'e just now being made to provide 

 attractive and harmless amusements for the people, and this must, of 

 course, be done in a tentative manner. 



It is curious, indeed, to observe how evanescent many social inven- 

 tions prove themselves to be ; growth and change have been so rapid 

 of late that there is constant need of new inventions. The Royal 

 Institution in Albemarle Street was a notable invention of its time, 

 chiefly due to Count Rumford, and its brilliant success led to early 

 imitation in Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, and perhaps elsewhere. 

 But the provincial institutions have with difliculty maintained their 

 raison d'etre. After the Royal Institutions came a series of Mechan- 

 ics' Institutions, which, as regards the mechanics element, were thor- 

 oughly unsuccessful, but proved themselves useful in the foim of 

 popular colleges or middle-class schools. Now, the great and genuine 

 success of Owens College, as a teaching body, is leading to the creation 

 of numerous local colleges of similar type. This is the age, again, of 

 free public libraries, the practicability and extreme usefulness of which 

 were first established in Manchester. When once possessed of local 

 habitations, such institutions will, it may be hoped, have long careers ; 

 but bricks and mortar are 'usually requisite to give perpetuity to a 

 social experiment. When thus perpetuated, each kind of institution 

 marks its own age with almost geologic certainty. From the times of 

 the Saxons and the Normans we can trace a series of strata of institu- 

 tions superposed in ordei' of time — the ancient Colleges of Oxford and 

 Cambridge, the mediaeval guilds surviving in the city companies, the 

 grammar-schools of the Elizabethan age, the almshouses of the Stuart 

 period, the commercial institutions of Queen Anne's reign, and so on 

 down to the free libraries and recreation palaces of the present day. 

 Even styles of architecture are evolved by successful innovation, that 

 is, experiment followed by imitation, and this was never more apparent 

 than in the imitation which has followed upon Sir Joseph Paxton's 

 grand expex'iment at the Exhibition of 1851.* 



Now, my contention is that legislators ought, in many branches of 

 legislation, to adopt confessedly this tentative procedure, which is the 

 very method of social growth. Parliament must give up the preten- 

 sion that it can enact the creation of certain social institutions to be 

 carried on as specified in the "hereinafter contained" clauses. No 



* I do not remember to have seen the importance of this imitative tendency in social 

 affairs described by any writer, except the French engineer and economist Dupuit, who 

 fully describes it in one of his remarkable memoirs, printed in the " Annales des Fonts et 

 Chaussees." 



