Horace Mann, of the Massachusetts Board of Education, taking the hint from Mr. Chadwick, issued a circular letter to manufacturers of all kinds, machinists, engineers, railroad contractors, officers in the army, &c., with a view of obtaining from them the results of their experience regarding the productive ability-where natural abilities were equal-between the educated and uneducated; between a man or woman whose mind had been awakened to thought, and supplied with the rudiments of knowledge by a good common school education, and one whose faculties had never been developed or aided in emerging from their original darkness and torpor by such a privilege. The results are every way noteworthy. T. K. Mills, Esq., writes:-"The average number of operatives annually employed for the last three years is 1,200. Of this number there are 45 unable to write their names, or about 3 per cent. "The average of women's wages in the departments requiring the most skill is 2 dollars per week, exclusive of board. The average wages in the lowest departments is 14 dollars per week. "Of the 45 who are unable to write, 29, or about two-thirds, are employed in the lowest department. The difference between the wages earned by the 45 and the average wages of an equal number of the better educated class is about 27 per cent. in favour of the latter. The difference in the wages earned by 29 in the lowest class and the same number in the higher is 66 per cent. "This statement does not include an importation of 63 persons from Manchester, in England, in 1839. Among these persons there was scarcely one who could read or write; and although a great part of them had been accustomed to work in cotton mills, yet, either from incapacity or idleness, they were unable to earn sufficient to pay for their subsistence, and at the expiration of a few weeks, not more than half a dozen remained in our employment. "In some of the print works a large proportion of the operatives are foreigners. Those who are employed in the branches that require a considerable degree of skill are as well educated as our people in similar situations. But the common labourers, as a class, are without any education. and their average earnings are about two-thirds of our lowest class, although the prices paid to each are the same for the same amount of work. "Among the men and boys employed in our machine shops, the want of education is quite rare; indeed, I do not know au instance of a person who is unable to read and write, and many have a good common school education. To this may be attributed the fact that a large proportion of persons who fill the higher and more responsible situations come from this class of workmen. "From these statements you will be able to form some estimate, in dollars and cents, of the advantages of even a little education to the operative; and there is not the least doubt that the employer is equally benefited. He has the security for his property that intelligence, good morals, and a just appreciation of the regulations of A A his establishment always afford. His machinery and mills, which afford a large part of his capital, are in the hands of persons who, by their skill, are enabled to use them to their utmost capacity, and to prevent any unnecessary depreciation." H. Bartlett, Esq., writes: "I have no hesitation in affirming that I have found the best educated to be the most profitable help; even those females who merely tend machinery give a result some what in proportion to the advantages enjoyed in early life for educa tion. Those who have a good common school education giving, as a class, invariably a better production than those brought up in ignorance." J. Clarke, Esq., says: "We have in our mills about 150 females who have, at some time, been engaged in teaching schools. Many of them teach during the summer months, and work in the mills in the winter. The average wages of these ex-teachers I find to be 17 per cent. above the general average of our mills, and about 40 per cent. above the wages of the 26 who cannot write their names. It may be said that they are generally employed in the higher departments, where the pay is better. This is true; but this, again, may be, in most cases, fairly attributed to their better education, which brings us to the same result. I do not consider these results as either extraordinary or surprising, but as a part only of the legitimate and proper fruits of a better education and fuller development of the intellectual and moral powers." Jonathan Crane, Esq., a large contractor on the railroad, says of a quite different class: "Not less than 3,000 different men, nearly all Irishmen, have been more or less in my employment during the past ten years, and the number that could read and write intelligibly was about one to eight. Independently of their natural endowments, those who could read and write, and had some knowledge of the first principles of arithmetic, have almost invariably manifested a readiness to apprehend what was required of them, and a skill in performing it, and have more readily and frequently devised new modes by which the same amount of work could be better done." Joseph Whitworth, Esq., of this country, a large employer of labour, and one of the commissioners appointed to attend the Industrial Exposition at New York, arrives at very similar conclusions from his visits to the seats of manufacturing industry in the United States. He affirms: "That considerable effects were produced in the manufac tures and productive progress of the United States, which were in general ascribable to the higher intelligence, arising from the wider prevalence of education amongst the working population" through the common schools of the country. He says that details he had collected in a report made by him "show, by numerous examples, that they leave no means untried to effect what they deem it is pos sible to accomplish, and that they have been signally successful in combining large practical results with great economy in the method by which the results are secured; that they eagerly call in the aid of machinery in almost every department of industry; that combinations to resist its introduction are there unheard of, and that workmen hail with satisfaction all mechanical improvements, the importance and value of which, as releasing them from unskilled labour, they are enabled to understand and appreciate." Those common schools have brought this to pass, that the hardest labour of that young Republic is mostly done by cattle or by the forces of nature-wind, water, fire-which the working men have harnessed by their own devices, and set to work in their stead; that in New England most of the remaining work which requires little skill is done by Irishmen, who are getting a certain and a higher culture by it, and that the intelligent wage-class have new power over the elements, larger invention, and a greater amount of human time set free. Their danger arises from the very fact of superior aptitude developed by their education, since this has created a dislike of the old apprenticeship system, by which alone a thorough initiation into all the details of a trade or manufacture seems to be practicable. The wages of the working classes of England are variously estimated at from two to three and nearly four hundred millions per annum. That merely represents the worth of the productive power of those who earn them, in their present most imperfectly educated state. If the facts and evidence which I have adduced be true and reliable, and if, as I firmly believe, mind is the sole capital of a country, what would be the increase of the productive power of our wage-class, not only in the earlier stage of their initiation into the methods and processes of their trades and manufactures, but also in the last results, could we set aside our miserable sectarian jealousies, eliminate our doctrinal differences from our National, British and denominational schools, relegate them to the home and to the Sundayschool, and, as one great and united people, resolve that the raw mental faculty of our people should receive a common discipline and culture in common schools supported by all parties, as citizens of one commonwealth and economists of our enormous resources, physical, mental and moral. An education that should drill our physical powers into habits of order and cleanliness, which should cultivate our observing faculties with regard to place, number, action, time, order, form, size, colour and the objects of nature, which should initiate us into a knowledge of mechanical forces and the qualities of material commodities, and which should fairly discipline our reasoning powers, so that we might thoroughly utilise and thereby consecrate this present life, would, I verily believe, not only increase very greatly our material resources and pecuniary wealth-say only 10 per cent. and it would give £30,000,000 per annum-but helping us to make the most of the here and now, it would impart a dignity as yet unknown to the temporary scenes of the present, enable us to move liarmoniously with God's laws in the sweep of its august extent; to correct its abuses, abolish its evils, multiply its blessings, diffuse its happiness, develop its latent possibilities, and empower us to see that all our duties, in perfect harmony with all our interests, direct us to mingle our souls' divinest feelings with life's lowliest toil, and out of the blocks of its cheapest opportunities to hew and build the achievements of our highest ideals. EDUCATION. President. THOMAS CHAMBERS, Q.C., M.P., Common Sergeant. This Department deals with the various questions relating to education whether of the upper, middle, or lower classes of society. SUMMARY OF PROCEEDINGS. THE following special questions were discussed in this Depart ment: 1. What better provision ought to be made for the Education of Girls of the Upper and Middle Classes? 2. What farther Regulations of the Labour of Children are required to promote their Education? 3.-Does or does not the present mode of Government Payment for Particular Subjects promote the efficiency of Education in Primary Schools? In addition to the papers printed in the foregoing pages, the fol lowing were read in the Department. - "Industrial Training in Schools." By E. T. Craig. "The Teacher's View of Payment for Results." By John Paton. "The Failure of our National System of Education to Afford Elementary Education." By W. F. Spray. "Education for Those who Need it Most." By A. O. Charles. "On Education Among the Sclavonic Christians of Turkey in Europe." By Miss Muir Mackenzie and Miss Irby. EDUCATION OF GIRLS. What better provision ought to be made for the Education of Girls of the Upper and Middle Classes? The papers on this subject, by the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Miss Dorothea Beale, and Miss Elizabeth Wolstenholme, will be found at pp. 268, 274, 287. DISCUSSION. Dr. HODGSON said: It is very easy to speak when one has anything to contradict, but in the papers now read I do not find any points for special notice in the way of remonstrance, objection, or opposition, or even of modification. One reflection arises strongly in my mind in consequence of the difficulty the secretary of the department has had in deciphering some of the MSS. sent him, that one branch of education is extremely neglected, in the case of men if not of women-namely, that of caligraphy: and that in so far as regards the papers we have heard to-day, in that respect the education of women seems to have been better attended to than that of men. But, leaving this, allow me to say that, having last year delivered a lecture on this subject, especially in connection with the examination of girls, then instituted by the University of Cambridge as an experiment; and, having subsequently received several letters from friends in which objections have been taken to the views there expressed, views precisely similar in sense and substance to those which have been maintained in the papers to-day, I must take the liberty of adverting to these objections. One friend who holds a high educational position very politely said, my doctrines were all "bosh," and he proceeded to contest them on grounds which I find it difficult to explain or to do justice to. But it did appear to me that it is for those who object to the equalisation of the instruction of boys and girls to show in what respects the two ought to differ, and in what respects the characters of the two sexes are so widely distinct as to involve the necessity of a separate education for each. You will at once see that it is a question of importance on which side the onus probandi lies. Is it for those who maintain that girls should be taught in the same way as boys to prove elaborately that the essential features of human nature are alike iu both; or is it the duty of those who desire to make the education different, to show what are the particulars in which the mental constitution of the two differs? I, for one, believe most firmly that the burden of proof rests on the latter; and that it is for those who would draw a wide and deep line of demarcation between the plans for the instruction of the two sexes, to show in what respect the mental characteristics of the two differ so as to involve this practical conclusion. Now let us ask ourselves for a moment what are the subjects, if any, on which boys should, and girls should not, be taught. I have not been able to hear from anyone the suggestion of even a single subject. This question was somewhat discussed at our last meeting at York. One gentleman, the Rev. Canon Trevor, an intelligent man and of considerable power, said, that in his opinion the systems of education should be widely different. That was his general proposition, but, when he came to deal with details, and touch on special subjects, I noticed, with considerable surprise and even amusement, that he mentioned no single subject which he did not frankly admit to be applicable fairly to the education of both. There is one subject which is commonly confined to the instruction of boys-I mean the classics. Now, Canon Trevor was candid enough to say that he advocated no monopoly whatever, even on that subject, and that he did not see why girls should not be taught classics as well as boys. In this opinion I cordially agree with him, provided always that the time and mode of teaching be judicious in the case of the one as well as of the other. But one important exception Canon Trevor did make: he stipulated this only, that i girls are taught classics they should be taught them from books specially |