years went by, and he was able to set up a loom of his own in his master's mill. From that moment his progress was rapid. He lived on in his old quiet way, never spending much more than the pound or thirty shillings a week which had sufficed for his simple wants when he was first married. At last the great change came. Wealth began to pour in upon him after an almost miraculous fashion. Instead of a loom in somebody else's mill, John Brown has a mill of his own, and employs his thousands of hands. His income is multiplied by a hundred, nay by a thousand, and he is already, as his admirers and toadies say, "one of the merchant-princes of England." The little house that has served him for so long is abandoned at last; in its stead he inhabits a magnificent villa at Higher Broughton, or at some other half-rural place. He knows nothing of architecture, so he trusts himself to a builder, who puts together for him a gorgeous Italian palace, in which he is miserable. He knows as little of art; but it is the correct thing to buy pictures, so he goes to Agnew and explains his desires. The picture-dealer happens to be an honest man-rather a rare thing in his profession, perhaps—and treats him well. Mr. Brown's dining-room is accordingly furnished with some of the choicest specimens of modern art, at a corresponding price. His drawing-room is even more luxurious. The picture-dealer has received a drawing from the decorator, with certain places marked upon it thus: "Here a drawing-evening effect; say thirty-six inches by twenty-four." No further direction is needed. The dealer knows what is wanted, and the best works of the last fashionable painters glitter in splendid frames round the rich man's room. For himself, Mr. Brown does not care much about these things, except as symbols of his wealth and position. He still gets up at six o'clock, and is in his mill before eight. He goes on Change at noon, and half-an-hour afterwards retreats to dinner. Perhaps he is a member of the Union Club. There he finds all that he can desire-rich meats, strong wines, and unexceptionable beer. He is, moreover, shut out from the profane world, which might scoff at the rich man's midday dinner and post-prandial fuddle. For him the ingenious architect has devised a room lighted wholly from the top, where he can sit and gossip over his bottle of port-good sound wine, sir, three years in bottle, as strong as brandy, and as fiery as a red-hot poker-without interruption from the vulgar herd. At last four o'clock strikes; our millionaire rises, stretches himself, retires to his counting-house, dictates a letter or two, and at five steps into his carriage to go home to tea. Once at home, observe the transformation that takes place in his outward appearance: he changes his clothes, not for the dress-coat and white tie of civilisation, but for a rusty old velveteen jacket and a "bird's-eye belcher." The beautiful drawing-room is left untenanted, and the millionaire sits down to tea with his "owd woman" in the back-kitchen. For a while they chat in the broadest Lancashire Doric, and at nine o'clock the house is quiet.

But the door is left "on the latch" for the eldest hope of the family-Mr. John Brown jun.—who represents "young Manchester”— and is not altogether satisfactory. He seems, indeed, to have too much. money and too little brains. His education has, of course, been of the narrowest, seeing that he was born during the period when his father was amassing wealth instead of spending it. Now, our hero is devoting himself to the latter business with the most amusing energy. He plays billiards very badly, but he plays them constantly, and loses a moderate income over them. He plays at cards also, much to the profit of about six of his choicest cronies. He knows nothing about horses, and rides like a tailor; but is in all ways one of the "horsiest” of created beings. His opinions on such subjects are not worth uttering, but they are always backed with a heavy bet. Of his morals one cannot say much. The outsider regards him as a cockney Don Juan, and half his stories of his own exploits as mere rhodomontade. At present his connection with business is merely nominal. Two-thirds of every day are spent in the invigorating pursuit of billiards, and the rest in drink, smoke, and his shabby little amours. Before long, however, all this will pass away. The young man will marry-probably a plain cousin with some money; he will take to business assiduously, and if he is very fortunate indeed he will lose every shilling which his venerable father has left him. Then, indeed, there is a chance for him. He may contrive to make a fortune for himself; and having learned something by the way, may be able to spend his income profitably, not merely to his own world, but to that of others. His children may receive a better education than himself, and in time may grow up to make the name of Brown a little more famous than its two first possessors have left it.

Number three in our little portfolio is a personage of a very different metal. Mr. Sebastian Smith is a cadet of a tolerably good Lancashire family, well educated, and gentlemanlike in manner. He has entered early in life upon trade, but money-making has not been his sole object. Had it been, he would have been far richer than he is. Not, indeed, that he is poor. Far from that, he has an income much in excess of that of ninety-nine professional men out of a hundred; but yet his position, when measured by that of his contemporaries, is rather low in the social scale. And yet this man is the chosen friend of scores of London artists and men of letters. He buys pictures-not through a dealer, or to fit into certain corners of his rooms, or into certain panels which would otherwise be blank, but because he has a taste exquisitely refined by long contact with the best artistic minds of his day. Dine with him and he is the most hospitable of men-and you shall sit in a room crowded with shapes of beauty, and glowing with colour and light. On your left-hand gleams a Millais of priceless value; before you are some ten or a dozen of the choicest works of the modern school-Leightons, Poynters, McCallums, Solomons, and the rest.

You go into his, or rather into his wife's, drawing-room, and you find new reason for admiration. The walls-of a pale, cool, painter-like gray are almost covered with water-colours: Turner, Millais, Cox, Hunt, Burne, Jones, all are represented; and, what is more, you find that your host and hostess both take a most intelligent interest in the art-treasures they possess. Neither bores you with raptures; but you feel instinctively that you are in the presence of people who love art for its own sake, and not because it is fashionable to admire Mr. So-and-so, and fashionable to depreciate Mr. Somebody-else. If you would know more about them, you must ask some of the men who a few years ago were poor and struggling. Two or three of them can tell how "that good fellow, Smith, came to me with a capital commission, sir, just as I was on the point of giving up." More than one also could tell his story of friendship and delicate kindness and generosity; and if you talk to Mrs. Sebastian Smith, it is a hundred to one that she will, without meaning to do anything of the sort, drop a word which will explain why such and such a painter or newspaperman, whom you know to be as poor as Job, was so carefully tended in his last illness, and in spite of his poverty was buried so respectably. Such men and such women as these are, happily, not rare in Manchester. When, a few months ago, the staff of Punch came down to give a performance for the benefit of the family of one of their number lately deceased in poverty, what sort of a welcome did they receive? Were they not fêted, caressed, and applauded, as though they were personal friends of the entire community? Was not every one of them received as a welcome and an honoured guest into the family of one or other of the great commercial princes of Cottonopolis? and was not the subscription for the bénéficiaires the largest which has yet been received? Who did all this, Manchester and the Punch staff know full well. The Sebastian Smiths and their like are quite numerous enough to explain all such matters as these. But the kindly feeling, the opportune generosity, the early recognition of struggling merit in the arts-these are as common, though perhaps less well known, than the hospitalities and princely liberality of the northern metropolis. One who has experienced, and who has learned to appreciate all, may be pardoned for preferring to quit the subject of "Manchester Men" at this point, instead of going on with more attempts at portraiture from subjects such as the Browns and their like. As in all human societies, good and evil are of course mingled in Manchester; but while there are some hundreds of members of the class of Sebastian Smiths, it can scarcely be said that the latter predominates amongst the inhabitants of the metropolis of manufacture.

VOL. V.

G

TECHNICAL EDUCATION

THE circumstance must have been these many years obvious to every impartial and perceptive man living in any Christian country save Abyssinia, that the old-established educational systems of Christian people were fraught with elements of dissolution. The Christian limitation is here employed in no polemical sense, and with no religious significance. It was needful to specify with some approximate degree of correctness the limitation of area wherein the spirit of educational disquiet was at work; and thus it seemed that by the word "Christianity," in a mere geographical sense, we should nearly arrrive at what the conditions of our argument required.

Assuredly this geographical expression will not import the materials of any grave omissional error. On inquiry, the investigator would even find that the spirit of educational change has expanded far beyond the Christian limits of the globe, whether real or conventional. When Mahometans work in European dissecting-rooms, and Hindoos cross the pariah-making ocean in quest of such materials of knowledge as Europe supplies-all this in spite of tradition, of religious precept even; when we find the Japanese constructing steamboats, using Dahlgren ordnance and breech-loading small-arms-it is impossible not to admit that the new educational spirit is not merely coördinate with the limits of Christianity, but that it has extended far beyond.

It is with the progress of this educational spirit in our country that we are most concerned, and it is that we propose to consider, if not exclusively, yet in the chief degree. Though the circumstance is one too obvious for disputation, yet probably the opinions relative to the spread of new educational opinions will vary within limits remarkably wide. To people endowed with a certain character of mind, the present revulsion of educational feeling is a necessary sequence of a recent political change. Others would attribute it to the fear lest British handicraft should be worsted in the field of open competition. Yet others will view it as a protest against a certain mediæval régime too far extended into a modern period.

The words "technical education" have lately grown into vogue. They have been uttered, and they have gone forth, more as a war-cry than as the rational exponent of any well-defined and consistent scheme. As most generally understood, these words would seem to contemplate an educational system in which the ancient languages are ignored, and the physical and experimental sciences and modern languages are made to assume a prominence commensurate with their recognised importance in the ordinary conditions of life under which we now find ourselves. Latent too, but not the less demarcative, is the feeling that

technical education, or education of the new régime, would too completely set aside the religious element-that churchmen, who have assumed to themselves the function of educational guidance hitherto, would be displaced by mere secular teachers, to the disparagement of society.

It may be as well to discuss the influence of this latent feeling first, whereby hereafter the limits to the clerical function in respect to educational guidance may be made the more manifest. This is a point on which it behoves each one who addresses himself to the educational question to speak unambiguously, testifying to the convictions which have arisen in his own mind, which have become to him the landmarks of right and wrong; by deference to which, or departure from which, he must be judged as either having obeyed the spirit of truth or disobeyed that spirit; a disobedience which, be it manifested in word or act, becomes a lie. It seems to follow, from the very nature of things, that there must be a phase in the existence of any community having a religion-and no community is without religion-in which the priesthood naturally and inevitably become the chief, if not the only teachers. They will naturally continue to be so up to a certain point of educational development-a point to be specified as the one at which inductive reasoning manifests its claims upon human reason. In all matters of belief there are only two means whereby conviction is attainable. We must either accept a statement on faith, or prove it by demonstration. Now, it is manifest that the latter is only compatible with a somewhat advanced social organisation. It presupposes, amongst others, three conditions-leisure, the means of investigation, and a knowledge of the way to use them. At times anterior to this grade of social organisation the human mind will take most of its belief on trust. Each particular tenet of such belief will be a matter of faith, and in some sense a tenet of religion. Naturally, in the condition of society referred to, the priesthood, having most leisure, their needs requiring an amount of mental ratiocination beyond those of the laity, will be the chief teachers of a community: thus has it ever been, and thus it will ever be. When the inductive point is reached, then it needs no argument to prove that educational development is not only foreign to the tenor of mind engendered by the conditions of a priesthood, but is in many ways antagonistic to the same.

There can be no doubt that the somewhat bitter contest now entered upon as to the claims of educational systems derives much of its acerbity from the question, veiled and latent though it be, whether the clergy shall or shall not continue to assume the chief educational functions. If the result be the conclusion that inductive knowledgein other words, knowledge acquired through experiment-shall assume an educational rank proportionate with the deductive branches of learning which have hitherto constituted the staple of our British schools, then the result will prove, if proof be needed, that the religious