432 APPLICABILITY OF OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 



prohibited from taking any young person into their workshops and 

 factories without a schoolmaster's certificate of several years' atten- 

 dance at school. This expedient seems the only way of cutting the 

 Grordian knot. The experiment is surely worth trying. Is it too 

 much to expect of the true friends of the education of the people, 

 whatever be their opinions as to a national system, that they should 

 agree in urgently recommending such a plan as this to the Grovern- 

 ment to begin with P" 



This principle was recognized in the draft of an Education Bill in- 

 troduced into the House of Lords by Lord Kinnaird and others ; and 

 very recently an Education Bill, introduced by the Attorney General 

 of Australia, Mr. Michie, was carried by a majority of 38 to 11, by 

 which the father of a child above seven years of age, of sound mind, 

 unable to read or write, and not attending any school, is liable to be 

 fined double the amount of the school-fees, ample provision being at 

 the same time made for the gratuitous schooling of children whose 

 parents are unable to provide instruction at their own expense. 



Eeformatories seem just now to be the panacea for all the ills of 

 ignorance and vice in Britain. But surely in this case, as in others, 

 " Prevention is better than cure." It is the most practical plan, 

 the most efficient, the cheapest and the most beneficent. Eeforma- 

 tories are excellent as auxiliaries, but what can they effect alone in 

 the large cities of Great Britain and of the United States where 

 ignorance and crime amongst the masses are so general ? Until 

 recently it was acknowledged that in the case of England and Wales 

 alone there were a million of children, of school age, receiving no 

 school education of any kind. Such a condition of things accorded 

 with the statement of the Prison Inspectors, who in their report 

 for 1853 say that of 98,484 prisoners, 93,766 could neither read 

 nor write, or could only do so very imperfectly — were, in fact, 

 absolutely uneducated ; while only 4,158 could read and write 

 well, and 167 had received a superior education. 



In a most instructive work lately published in London and written 

 by Alexander Thomson, Esq., of Banchory, it is shown that with all 

 their efibrts to arrest the progress of juvenile crime, there is a fresh 

 annual supply of 20,000 or 25,000 young criminals coming forward 

 to keep up the number of the criminal population, which is estimated 

 from the recorded convictions at a total for Great Britain of 104,988. 

 " Let the reader," so writes the Editor of the Glasgow Guardian, 



