The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1859-07-05 00:00:00

LORD SHAFTESBURY AND RAGGED
SCHOOLS.

An address and • picture were presented to Lord
Shaftesbury by the Ragged School Union at a meeting
held on Tuesday night in St. Martin's-hall for that

intgre•
Chairman (Mr. J. Payne) having opened the pro-
ceedings in a suitable speech,
The Treasurer read the address, of which the follow-
ing an abstract :
- - -

" We whose names are appended to this address have
had frequent occasion to admire your lordship's many
Christian virtues, public and private, and have often
been impressed with the debt of gratitude which we
owe to you for the encouragement you have ever been
ready to afford us. Your lordship's fifteen years pre-
aidency of our Union has been no mere nominal tenure
of office; and the feeling that we were following a
leader himself so unwearying has often encouraged us
to renewed exertions. These sentiments have long been
deeply impressed epee our hearts, and we have assem-
bled this evening to beg your lordship's kind .ceep-
tance of an humble token of the gratitude which we feel.
We wished to fix on something which might be •
memento of your lordship's °Deflexion with our own
valued institutions. We hope in some measure to have
attained that object in the choice of a work of art repre-
senting a member of the Ragged School Shoe Db.+
, Society enjoying a morning meal at his station behind
St. Clement 's Church, in the Strand. Many such other-
wise friendless lads has the society over which your
lordship presides raised Irons degradation and misery,
led to the house of God, and taught to earn their daily
, bread by honourable toil. In thus endeavouring to
seek and to save them that were lust, your lordship has
not shunned to follow the exan.ple of our Heavenly
Master, by taking a personal share in the blessed work.
We feel, therefore, that we are only rendering honour
to whom honour is due, in paying an unaffected tribute
, of respect to one who rejoice, thus to lay his coronet at
the feet of the Redeemer."

The Earl of Shaftesbury, when the cheering had sub.
sided, mid—My good and dear friends, it is, I assure
you, with great delight, but with no little embarrass-
ment, that I now rise to acknowledge the address which
I have just received. It would, I think, have been
more appropriate if, instead of your inviting me. I had
invited you to listen to and accept an address from my-
self, and, in a great measure, the counterpart of that
which lias just been read. It would have been far
more appropriate that I should have come to you and
gone with you step by step through the difficult and
anxious progress of this great question—marking to
you bow, from the smallest beginning, you have attained
to your present dimensions and efficiency; how, from
three or four schools, you have grown up into some •210
or :100; bow, from a few children, you now number
some 2:1,000! You are cleansing the streets, the alleys,
the dens, the recesses of vice and ignorance and misery,
from their foul pollution. You have dived into the
lowest depths of sin and human suffering, and, by the
blessing of God, you are dragging up hundreds and
thousands of children to the eye of day, there to bask in
the light, life, and liberty of the Gospel. Your example
has been imitated in the great provincial towns, and
you have created • haven that is diffusing its benefi-
ficial and blessed influence through the trading millions
of the whole of our population. And how have these
gnat results been achieved? Have they been achieved
by power, by wealth, by rank, by station, by argument,
by eloquence? No, by none of these, singly or collec-
tively. They have been achieved by singleness of eye
and singleness of heart—they have been achieved by
plain, determined, simple, enthusiastic adherents to the
evangelical truths of the Gospel. Here lathe very prin-
ciple of your existence. This is the very charter of your
life, the secret of the whole of your success. After
hearing this address read, and the signatures enume-
rated, and the various classes by whom it has been signed
designated, never again let us hear of small people hav-
ing but small means to do good in their generation.
Never again let us hear the argument urged, " I am too
weak or too poor to do anything." This document
shows what mighty, what unspeakable results it has
pleased Almighty God to effect by instruments no
feeble, by agencies seeming to be deserving only of the
contempt of the great sinai of the public. See what
these feeble instruments can do, and bear this in mind.
that no man and no woman was ever sent into the world
for no purpose at AIL There is no human being who
has not the means of doing some good in the sphere
in which that human being moves. fily fervent and
earnest prayer for you all shall be that you may be
blessed in your basket and in your store —that you may
be blessed in the desires of your hearts and in the work
of your hands.

"Glom may conceal dross."—Bow often hare we to admire
the ingenuity and skill of a people, who, tho' astly inferior Pa
ourselves In most of the greiel feature. 1.1 civil:Wiwi, yet.
extvl in celouriv and in the Tiosel arts—but we arc indueed
to hesitate before we encourage the adaptation of the beautify -
hie proem to an article al diet ! That the Chinese apply
ism-derail colour to the great bulk of Tic: ant to England is a
well known fact, and that the main object in title, i to increase
their profit at the consumer's expense, for by making all
growths appear of the Wile coloUr the brown flaourie.iu Inman
are ia,,,ed off at a full price with tie, bait, lieme the disap-
pointment es often complaints' id by the col.tlttlers of the
black airy and the bleefat attractive kinds of Tea, whose
"plow is drees."—The remedy for this I. Bondman's Pore
Tea, cithout powdered colour on its surface ; being the Spring
growth it has no brown flavourless leaves, to divuire, and is
therefore "always good alike." Agents are cowl:erste:l in
our advertising columns.
It may be profitable to our fair readers to know that the
1 01.151/ILLD PATIST 9TAIIOI, which has been exclusively wad in
II ER MAJESTY'S LAVXDIT for many years, may now he
obtained front all respectable Grocers &kneel as cheap as the
most comnion kinds made, for although it necessarily urea
acm more, the large quantities sold yield, in the 6r
profit than the inferior kinds, and moreorertiErellgriro-e, I ir
,wArve the satisfaction of selling an article which they know
will please their customers, and are at the same time the
medium of supplying the middle and working Cluota with the
wine article a bused In the getting up of the Lame and
Linens of lIER MAJESTY and the ROYAL FOAMY, and
which the Queee's laundress, with her great experience
and every Means at her ovuonand for procuring the seep
104 I.f everything, has pronounced To la Tint TEAT FIRST
BTARCH Be, ryz& Oviv.--Orerrasok Advertiser.