The Express.
London, England, 1846-12-23 00:00:00

But if there be a motive which might operate upon
ea
the zl or ambition of the French to go to war with
us, it would be the knowledge that we were totally
unprepared even for defence. Louis Purtierz, in
arguing with our statesmen on the relations of the
two countries, has frequently declared his opinion that
there exists no obstacle to a French army capturing
London in a week. Nor could any of these statesmen
refute that royal opinion. Now, even in acquitting
the King of the FRENCH of any idea of acting upon such
a conviction, does it not sway his policy ? Does it not
Had him to count more upon our obsequiousness
than he otherwise might?
The French have an army of 400,000 men. In the
opinion of some they might throw a force of 80,000
men on the coast of England without much difficulty.
How many soldiers, with all our railroads, could we
concentrate against them? About 15,000! For we
have no more than 20,000 infantry in England.
With such facts before us, we recommend no in-
crease either of the army or its estimates, but a
better training and creation of military de fenders of
the country. For this we learn ministers are about to
provide. And the plan, we understand, originated
with Earl GREY when he was at the head of the
War-office.
The intention, we have beard, is to put at once in
force the law limiting the service to ten years, and to
release all the soldiers who have served that term,
adopting towards them similar arrangements with
those adopted towards the pensioners. Like the
pensioners, they are to be enrolled at their place of
abode, and be subject to be called out for exercise or
for service. This may take place once a year,
and each reserve or retired soldier will re-
ceive two shillings a day whilst thus engaged.
This is something like )4arshal SOULT'S plan of a
military reserve, except that the French soldier,
engaged for eight years, serves really but four, and
remains the other four in reserve.
The great objection to our adopting so short a term
of service, or even that of ten years, is the large pro-
portion of our army on colonial service, which would
lead to such expense and trouble in continually send-
ing home men whose term had expired, and sending
out recruits to replace them.
This objection is, however, not so formidable
as it may at first appear. Our military
force at present amounts to 139,000. Of
these there are about 80,000 beyond sea, half that
number being in India. Now there is scarcely any
expense to be calculated under the head of sending
home soldiers from India. Being better paid in that
country, and occupying a higher level than at home,
soldiers like the service, and, instead of returning
with their regiments, volunteer to others which
remain. This gives rise to the tragical paragraphs
which we find in newspapers from Greenwich, telling
us how such a regiment, after so many years' ab-
sence in India, landed with a hundred men. This is
wound up by deploring the loss of the remainder.
But the remainder had merely volunteered to other re-
giments, preferring India to home. Out of the last four
regiments which returned from India, 2,000 men
volunteered to remain. The increased expense, there-
fore, is limited to the remaining 30,000 in the other
colonies. And of these few would return from
Canada, for example, or from Australia.
The retirement of the soldier after ten years service
would of course greatly diminish the demands on the
pension list ; and the Ni hole of the intended reform is
a self-remunerative one, that is more lessening than
increasing expenditure. But it is important, both
towards the retired soldier locating himself profitably
in civil life, and towards his being useful as a soldier
of reserve if called on, that he should belong to a
better class, and that, in fact, he should belong to
the respectable peasant population of the country.
We trust the intended reform may attain these
desirable ends.

A CLEVER and sensible pamphlet has been sent us,
entitled, National School Teaching, tchat it is and
what it is not. The writer dwells strongly on the
want of adaptation of the system of instruction to the
circumstances and capacities of the children for whom
it is intended, and points out some of the results aris-
ing from exclusive cultivation of the memory, and
total neglect of the awakening of the understanding.
" The national school requires silence, passive recep-
tion of certain ideas, quietude, and obedienee"--ele-
ments of order not to be neglected, but most pernicious
in their results if cultivated alone. The greater pro-
portion of the schools for the middle classes make the
same requisitions as the national schools, and like
them are conducted on the principle of sparing the
labour of the teacher as much as possible. Our
illustrations of the errors of the system shall be drawn
from both, for we arc of those who are finnly per-
suaded that the education of the poor is not the whole
—nay, that is not even the most important part—of the
question of national education.
All that the majority of English teachers demand
from their pupils is simply acquiescence. " Doc-
trines," the author might have added, " and all other
formularies must be learned by rote." ln plain
terms, children are taught like parrots. The system
is an admirable one for concealing the ignorance and
incapacity of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses ; it
reduces the whole duty of teaching to mere listening,
and precludes the necessity of labouring to understand
any subject whatever. If any proof of this be want-
ing, it may be found in the extensive use of PiNstoen's
and other catechisms—works which have wrought
more evil to the rising generation than it is within
the power of man to calculate. It has been our for-
tune to visit two ladies' schools and to go into both at
a time when a class was receiving a lesson in astro-
nomy ; in the first school the teacher was giving an
explanatory lecture in simple language, referring the
pupils to a resume of the science as a text-book, keep-
ing alive their attention by interrogatories, and
always requesting them to answer in their own words :
in the second, the teacher was examining a class out
of Pinnock's Catechism, and the only direction she
ever gave her scholars was, " Verbatim, ladies." Here
anise° systems, the first of which is rarely found in
Britain, while the second flourishes almost univer-
sally. Let us compare them ; in the first, the teacher
thoroughly understood her subject; in the second, as
we happen to know, the mistress knew no more about
astronomy than she did about Chinese. ilad PINNOCK
published a Chinese grammar, she would undoubtedly
have undertaken to teach the language. In the first,
the pupils were learning ; they were aim t, attentive,
pleased, and excited by the acquisition of new ideas
beyond the rigid limits of staid decorum. A physi-
cian will tell you that their bodily health was thus
advanced not less than their mental cultivation. But in
the second the pupils were as listless and inert as so
many automata; they differed from Wirearsroxes
speaking machines only in a spontaneous tendency
to yawn ; they were victims of physical and moral
lethargy, and the lesson they repeated was to them as
unmeaning as Abracadabra. The pamphlet before us
justly condemns this mechanical and memorial sys-
tem in the national schools, but, in truth, the charity
schools of Britain are less objectionable in this re-
spect than the schools in which extravagant sums are
charged for tuition. Take another instance : a boy
has just come home for the vacation honoured with a
prize fur proficiency in arithmetic. His name has
been paraded in the county paper and a congratula-
tory letter, addressed to his delighted parents, which
will assuredly bring to the youth weighty pockets at
Christmas. Now, this boy really knows no more of
arithmetic than he does of the Calculus; be can me-
chanically put in practice any rule which he finds in
his Bonnycastle, but of the reasons on which the rule
is founded he knows not a particle. He cannot tell
you why, in multiplication, he places the first figure
of each line successively a place mare to the left
as he goes through the successive figures of the
multiplier, and thg,only differencehe knows between
direct and inverse proportion is, that the sums belong-
ing to the latter are farther on in the book than those
belonging to the former. It was even news to him
to be told that the value of a fraction was lessened
by increasing the denominatoit-
So much for the prize arithmetician. Turn next to
his cousin, the prize geographer. He has learned the
whole of Goldsmith's Geography by rote ; he could not
have found in England a better text-book, but unfor-
tunately on that text he has had no commentary. He
knows nothing of the causes of day and night ; the
subject of the longitude is a puzzle beyond his com-
prehension, and he doubts whether the equinoctial line
be a piece of whipcord tied round the globe, or a
black tracing accomplished by some mysterious
navigator. Some may exclaim against this statement
as an exaggeration ; let parents take advantage of
this season to examine their children when they come
home without the book, and they will soon find their
confidence in school-prizes and schoolmasters letters
greatly abated.
The pamphlet further complains that the connecting