being given where the school exists, which is supported by the fund named.

At Dunstable, county of Bedford, £330 10s. annual income, (a. pound is equivalent to almost five dollars of our money,) supports Torty boys.

At Bedford, same county, a school with £90 income, teaches four hundred and twenty children.

County of Berkshire, town of Reading, £1043 158. 9d. teaches twenty-two boys.

At Tilehurst, same county, £16 10s. 6d. teaches a hundred children. County of Cambridge, town of Bassingbourne, £7 6s. 4d. teaches one hundred and sixty children; while in Ely, same county, £231 1s. teaches twenty-four only.

County of Cornwall, town of St. Stephens, £192 13s. 4d. teaches six boys; and in the town of St. Bunyan, same county, £8 Ss. teaches one hundred and fifty children.

County of Devonshire, town of Plymouth, £596 12s. 3d. teaches seventeen boys; while in Brixham, same county, £78 teaches two hundred children.

County of Hertfordshire, town of Berkhamstead, £269 teaches thirty children; while in Therfield, same county, £2 teaches forty. County of Kent, town of Greenwich, £625 14s. 4d. teaches twenty boys; while in Sundridge, same county, £10 teaches seventy children. County of Lancashire, town of Manchester, £2608 3s. 11d. teaches eighty; while in Bibchester, same county, £20 teaches one hundred. There is a single class of schools in England,-those founded for giving instruction in the Latin and Greek languages,-sixty-five of which have an income not exceeding £20, and fifteen have an income of more than £1000. Several of this class have an income of four, five, or more thousand pounds, per annum.

But this is enough to show how unequally the means of education are distributed in England even where they are enjoyed at all, and how difficult it must be to introduce a general system, for the whole people, when many or most of the leading families already have schools of their own. Such, too, is the natural consequence of having no National system, -one in which the whole people can participate. These facts are full of admonition to us, for this is the state of things towards which, eight years ago, we were rapidly tending." p. 85.

"A few extracts from documents authenticated by the government itself, will serve still further to show the inequality of the means of education, which exists in England.

One of the late parliamentary committees on education describes the condition of a schoolroom in the following words:

'In a garret, up three pair of dark, broken stairs, was a common dayschool, with forty children, in a compass of ten feet by nine. On a perch, forming a triangle with a corner of the room, sat a cock and two hens; under a stump bed immediately beneath, was a dog-kennel, in the occupation of three black terriers, whose barking, added to the noise of the children and the cackling of the fowls on the approach of a stranger, was almost deafening. There was only one small window, at which sat the master, obstructing three-fourths of the light. There are several schools

Such is the state of popular education in England,-a country distinguished by its power, its resources, the extent of its dominion, the trophies of its arts, its arms and its genius. The policy of that country has always been an arbitrary, grasping, selfish one. Much of the social inequality that exists there, doubtless results from the narrowness and injustice of her commercial regulations, whose grinding and oppressive influence is so seriously felt by the laboring classes, but it is mainly attributable, we believe, to the

in the same neighborhood, which are in the same condition, filthy in the extreme.'

In the same town, I saw a school-house erected for the wealthier classes, which cost more than four hundred thousand dollars!

In the same report, it is said, that 'one master, being asked if he taught morals,' answered, That question does not belong to my school; it belongs more to girls' schools.'

Another master, who stated that he used the globes, was asked if he had both, or one only. 'Both,' was the reply; 'how could I teach geography with one?' It appeared that he thought both necessary, because one represented one half, and the other the remaining half of the world. 'He turned me out of school,' says the agent, when I explained to him his error.'

It is thought unlucky for teachers to count their scholars. 'It would,' said a mistress, 'be a flat flying in the face of Providence. No, no, you shan't catch me counting; see what a pretty mess David made of it, when he counted the children of Israel.'

The Rev. Edward Field, Inspector of National Schools, in his report, (1840) after speaking in commendation of certain schools, adds, "This guarded and qualified praise, I am unable to extend to the teachers of dame schools. Too often, the rule of such schools, when any profitable instruction is given, is a harsh one, and in others, the honest declaration of one dame would apply to many: 'It is but little they pays me, and it is but little I teaches them."

Some of the accounts trace this ignorance, as a cause, to its legitimate effects.

'In the locality where, in the year 1838, the fanatic, who called himself Sir William Courtenay, raised a tumult which ended in the loss of his own life, and the lives of several of his deluded followers, out of forty-five children above fourteen, only eleven were, on investigation, found able to read and write; and out of one hundred and seventeen under fourteen, but fortytwo attended school, and several of these only occasionally. Out of these forty-two, only six could read and write.'

In February, 1840, Mr. Seymour Tremenheere, assistant poor-law commissioner, reported on the state of education in that part of Wales in which the Chartists, under Frost, made a sudden rising. From this report it appears that, in five parishes, having an aggregate population of 85,000, there were but eighty schools, and only 3,308 children in attendance.

The following are extracts from a late report of the National (Church) School Society:

"There is only one small school for the daily education of the poor in the whole parish, containing about 12,000 inhabitants; that school educates about 100. As one result of this neglect, the parish became, last year, the focus of Chartism; and the most bitter spirit of disaffection still exists among the lower classes.'

total absence of judicious and wholesome provisions, on the part of the government, for the education of the people. Give the latter knowledge and you give them power; you give them a position in society; you make them sensible of their rights; you cause them to love liberty; you make them alive to sentiments of honor; you render the idea of oppression odious, and its yoke intolerable; you prepare the way to raise the humble, to depress the proud, to reward honest labor, to punish extortionate exaction, and to impart

"The population of the village of which I am the incumbent, is not less than 20,000. There is no free school in the whole place; hundreds of chil dren receive no education whatever.'

'I am vicar of a parish which contains a population of 10,000 souls, and I grieve to say there is but one school-room in it.'

'Our situation is briefly as follows: The parish contains 1500 soulsthere is nothing which can with propriety be called a school. The demoralization and extreme ignorance which prevail among this mass of human beings, are truly deplorable. No language of mine can convey any idea of its extent.'

'I find a population of 10,000 souls committed to my charge, with only one church, and a still smaller school in connection with the church.'

'The population of the township is about 15,000. We have no definite school; we rent two small places, which swallows up the subscriptions.' 'The district belonging to my church contains a population of 5000; and I regret to say that the children are in a state of darkness and ignorance beyond description.'

This parish is without a building of any kind wherein to assemble the children, either for a Sunday or a week school.'

'I am the curate of a poor parish with 3000 of population, and there is no school-house of any kind.'

'This district has a population of 8000. The only instruction which the children receive is given to about 100, for an hour or two on the Sunday.' Such quotations as the above might be almost indefinitely extended. The Manchester Statistical Society, in their report on the state of education in York, remark, that, 'however imperfect the education received at Sunday schools may be, when compared with a reasonable or a foreign standard, it affords nevertheless the most valuable training within the reach of the great mass of the industrious population of England.'

Upon this, an able writer of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,' remarks: 'Yet this training extends only to a few hours every week, is given by persons who are generally elevated only a little above their scholars, and whose only valuable recommendation is, that they are in general animated by a benevolent and pious spirit. There are, however, indirect effects which abate the good of Sunday schools, particularly in the spirit of sectarianism and bigotry which, as at present constituted, they tend to foster; the undue opinion of themselves which they are apt to engender in the minds of the teachers; the rivalry which they excite and the jealousies which they keep up between the different schools; and, above all, the pauperizing influence which, more than other charity schools, they exert on the scholars. So long, indeed, as scarcely any other book than the Bible is employed in Sunday schools, the training which they afford must be very defective, unapproached in its excellence as is that holy book when well understood and rightly used. But an exclusive acquaintance with it, is not

to society in all its relations the elements of justice and equity, on which alone it depends for permanence and prosperity. The press, with its ten thousand instrumentalities in the shape of cheap publications, is now busily and unceasingly at work with a view to these very results-the overthrow of every form of oppression, the diffusion of intelligence, the establishment of popular rights, and a powerful engine it is for these purposes. When Lord Brougham said that the "schoolmaster was abroad," he meant the press. There has never been any "schoolmaster abroad" in England but the press, we mean for the people at large. There have been schoolmasters for the titled orders, but none for the people save the press. And here the order of nature has been reversed. The teacher should go before the printer, and not the printer before the teacher. People must learn to read, before they can estimate the value of books. Teach them

sufficient to expand the mind and prepare it for the duties of life. Without the aid of other knowledge, it is not possible that those distinctions and qualifications should be made which parts, at least, of the sacred Scriptures require, and which are rendered necessary by the lapse of ages and by the existence of a totally different order of circumstances. If these distinctions and qualifications are not made, the most erroneous conclusions may be drawn from the Bible, and the most unrighteous purposes may be in appearance made to receive a sanction from it. The Scottish Covenanters justified their murders by appealing to the severities practised by the Israelites. The German Anabaptists made use of the disinterestedness of the first Christians in sharing their property with the destitute in an emergency, in order to authorize their spoliation of the goods of others. The madman, Thom, appealed to the Bible in support of his delusions. Chartism flourished most vigorously, and in its most offensive form, in cases where the Scriptures were the text-book.'

The civil commotion which has prevailed, during the greater part of the last year, over a considerable portion of Wales, affords a fresh instance of the perversion of the Bible in the hands of ignorance. Large bodies of the farmers of Wales, feeling themselves aggrieved by the number of turnpike gates, and the high rates of toll exacted for passing through them, combined together and commenced the work of midnight demolition. In the prosecution of their enterprise several lives have been lost, and a vast amount of property destroyed. A military force has been marched into the country to put down the disturbances; and a judicial commission raised to try the offenders, is now sitting. These violators of the law and depredators upon private property, profess to be very religious. They derive their name, and justify their outrages, from Scripture. They call themselves 'Rebeccaites,' or 'Rebecca and her Daughters;' and they quote the following text as a sanction of their proceedings: 'And they blessed Rebecca, and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.'-Genesis xxiv. 60. According to their interpretation of this passage, they are the seed of Rebecca, and the owners of turnpike stock are 'those which hate them,'— whose 'GATES,' therefore, they are commanded to 'possess,'—that is, to destroy."

to read, and then the cheap publication, the newspaper, the penny magazine, the popular tract, will speak to the heart in tones of truth and power. A nation of readers is a nation of freemen, or it will soon become such; but reading, writing and printing united, form an alliance, before whose resistless force no power of injustice, untruth and usurpation can long prevail.

The evils resulting from the adoption of a partial, in preference to an universal or national, system of education, as developed in the reports of these English commissioners, are, the glaringly unequal distribution of the means of instruction among the people,-the enormous disproportion in the salaries of the teachers, who receive an amount depending not on their qualifications and fitness, but upon the endowment of the institution; the very low standard of education which prevails in many of the schools, and the ignorance of whole masses who receive no education at all, or such as is of very little value. To these may be added, the mischievous character of the text-books employed in the schools,-books prepared by infamous compilers and used by teachers as infamous, "full of vile caricatures and low ribaldry, at once degrading to the taste and fatal to the moral sensibilities,"—an evil which prevailed also to an equal extent in Ireland, before the introduction of a national system of education into that country.

It will be difficult in England,-it will be difficult in the United States, or in any country where this partial system has once obtained foothold, to overthrow it. There is a morbid sensibility, on the part of government, in respect to the supposed rights of teachers, who have hitherto had the control of the whole business of education-as far, at least, as the higher orders of society are concerned-and an unwillingness to interfere with those rights: and, on the other hand, there is a strong jealousy, on the part of teachers, towards any contemplated action of government on the subject. They have expended time, capital, labor and skill in building up profitable institutions, and are disposed, from motives of interest, to unite against the introduction of any new establishments likely to prove hostile to their own:

"When the 'Central Society of Education,' in England," says Mr. Mann, "were lately prosecuting their inquiries in regard to the relative numbers of children in school and out of school, in different towns, they were obliged to proceed with the greatest caution, lest they VOL. VII.—NO. 13.

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