4-O Human Physiology. 



proportion of the children could be got into schools, and in 

 Salford and Manchester 42,000 children were receiving no 

 education." He estimated that 1,000,000 children in England 

 ^vere receiving no kind of education. 



All this is to be changed. The nation has resolved that, in 

 future, every child shall be educated; but generations must pass 

 before vast numbers can be rescued from the evil influences of 

 past ignorance. The very brains of the people are to be 

 expanded during a series of generations, and gradually recov- 

 ered from the paralysing and embruting effects of past and 

 present ignorance. 



But there must be much more done for the people than to 

 provide schools and compel attendance, say between the ages 

 of five and twelve years. The boy who goes into the fields 

 to labour when he is twelve years old has only the rudiments 

 of education, and these are soon forgotten. Children ol 

 poverty-stricken town populations, driven to ragged schools, 

 and with compulsory attendance, what other than ragged and 

 hungry schools can there be in the poorer districts of most 

 English towns? can get no useful education. Reading, writ- 

 ing, and arithmetic will not neutralise the influence of their 

 homes ; will not make them cleanly in the midst of filth, nor 

 pure in an atmosphere of moral pollution. No, the education 

 of home precedes that of the school, and its influence is much 

 greater. When the people of England are housed, clothed, and 

 fed as human beings have a right to be, there will be little 

 need of compulsory education. 



The sad truth is, that the great mass of the people need to 

 be educated in much more than the rudiments of knowledge, 

 for they are deplorably ignorant of the most important things 

 ignorant of what are matters of life and death to them. 

 Three-fourths of the people are ignorant of the necessity of pure 

 fresh air for the maintenance of health. A large portion have 

 no proper idea of the importance of cleanliness in their per- 



