The Express.
London, England, 1847-04-02 00:00:00

ght earprogi.

MAILS.
Thu Owbob nib kr Ocirshar, Mahn. Onment leldew kielehei
ftet.Afra.Cityks. Hansplia“,enti Mos, ea lanlbseples,
WI -be We up ea the suirebe abbe Nd Are&
The hr lkide North Andes. Dennrik and the United
hafts, vet be was so ea the go Ind APO-
he Stoll hweassialissr is 61110 hem Li
all.ve
rpool olon tho
pra. Oar Saw Yea; Woo doom die Stli
!Ye Wee elle he Draft the Thar Me, Manta Vales, Fermat.
*Alm mg Aprus, will be made up ea the
wrrlr/dre AFL
The wale SW V/A OW* IMFNNW*, and Otbraner,
wit be wok we so me imusies of Ow rei April.
The owelmil dumb mei% to the 3folllenollooe.
Egypt, Parre, Ourfes. leak Ms, Sows be.. will be abbe 4ca
aerobia elan AFL
me-Watt Ms asoludlettbsee Ifestso, liswistree, are
Ow Hanalei bu tarts op es theresuwln utllto Mk Mei
The eagle pip sew *nth Weld, yr Diessuto Lem/. ert Nov
Ittoluod will be ark up an disarming or the dolt Art.

TO 0011RESPONDBOTO.
' gma Mho et am DAILY NEWS" sad "MI MS "
low— Imo MOIMW ti on. narr-vrazse, to N. 10,
11017,111MOMST.IILIZIWIREST, sostliessi le the !eft
osns.
Ss etwordimmaa imbed for Ths /Woo. Laidesorosisipager,
Bog to Al the 0000 VI Two estcek as the Amy at pabilistbs.

MGR WATER AT LONDON-BRIDO&
T•g DAl—ltorning, 2 min. Feu 3 ; AftWOOOM, 19 eds. put 3.
"10.310“02-3IonsIsp, S ols. put 3 ; Aftusue, 31 W. put &

LONDON, FRIDAY, APRIL:2.
NOTHING has more surprised us in the controversy
that has unhappily been raised respecting National
Education, than the assertion that the interference of
the state to secure the duo instruction of the people
is contrary to the principles of nonconformity. Of
whom are Nonconformists more generally and more
; ustly proud than of the brave old puritans,thepilgrim
fathers of New England ? Those conscientious men,
driven by intolerance from their native land, sought
and found " freedom to worship God " in the wilds
of America : to support religious voluntaryism they
abandoned home, fortune, and friends ; and
yet, by these men was recognised the great
principle that it is the duty of the community,
and therefore of the state as representing that
community, to provide for the instruction of
its members in their rights and duties. One
of their earliest ordinances sets forth that none of the
brethren shall suffer so much barbarism in
their families as not to teach their children
and apprentices so much learning as may enable them
perfectly to read the English tongue.' Otto of the
first laws passed by the colonial assemblies of the in-
fant states sets forth : "To the end that learning may
not be buried in the graves of oar forefathers, it is
ordained that every township, after the Lord bath
increased them to the number of fifty householders,
shall appoint one to teach all children to write and
read ; and where any town shall increase to the num-
ber of one hundred families, they shall set up a gram-
mar-school, the masters thereof being able to instruct
youth gofer as they may be fitted for the university."
Six years after the arrival of Wl:armor, the general
court voted a sum, equal to a year's rate of the whole
colony, towards the erection of a college. " Every
child," says BANCROFT, with pardonable pride, "as it
was born into the world, was lifted from the earth
by the genius of the country, and in the statutes of
the land, received, as its birthright, a pledge
of the public care of its morals and its mind." These
were the puritans of the olden time, men of uncom-
promising principle, and imperishable fame. To the
pilgrim fathers we have reverently looked for the
genuine principles of dissent, and we find a recogni-
tion of the duty of the state to provide for the educa-
tion of the people, and that most prominently set for-
ward, and most sedulously practised.
It does not raise our opinion of the honesty of the
opposition made to the ministerial measure, to find
that no one of its leaders has male the slightest allu-
sion to the system of public instruction established in
the United States of America. In all eases this
abstinence cannot have resulted from ignorance, for,
unless our memory deceives us, this system is
described and praised in " The Modern Traveller,"
a very clever compilation, which bears on its title-
pig the name of JOSIAU CONDE& We beg leave
most respectfully to remind oar opponents
that all honest logicians hold suppceseto ceri
to be equivalent to artggestin falei, and that there is
a concealment hardly teal guilty than false assertion.
It grieves us inexpressibly to hint such censure ; but
if we thought that the great dissenting body adopted
the opinions and sanctioned the practices of those
Mho have set themselves forward as their leaders, we
should almost despair of our country. But we have
good reason to believe that such is not the case : some
we know have been deceived by the cry that this
system has been borrowed from the despotic states on
tile continent : others have been deluded by the itsi-
dims assertion, that it was taken from France, and
th it its results would be similar to those ascribed to
the French system, in a work of no authority, called
" France as it is;" and others have been actuated by
a desire not to disturb the unanimity of the dissenting
body generally. We have, therefore, every reason to
believe that this present storm of opposition, begun in
error, and continued in obstinacy, will share the fate
of the many senseless cries which have, within our
memory, quickly burned themselves out by their
own intensity.
We have advocated neither church nor sect, but the
general interests of the community, and more especi-
ally of the working classes,—classes which have
been very harshly treated by some of the leaders of
the opposition to the government measure. We can-
not comprehend any true patriot lamenting that the
extension of the suffrage should be impeded by the
deficiency of education, and then insisting that the
means of education ought to continue deficient. We
cannot understand the demand that a London
university should be endowed for conferring degrees
on the children of the wealthy, and schools of design
for the encouragement of artists, and at the same time
declaring that there should exist no endowment for
the children of the labourer and the artisan. Wo
cannot comprehend bow it should be essential to
" manly independence," that the children of
the poor should be indebted for their edu-
cation to the precarious and capricious charity
of the wealthy, instead of claiming it as •
right from their common country. There is
in all this a semblance of hostility to the working
classes, which we sincerely deplore ; and there is
something more than a semblance in the list of
eections published by Messrs. Cox and HARKEY,
when the attention of government is called to the
danger of rendering oar artisans too skilful, and our
labourers too well acquainted with their business.
The inconsistency of the objections made to the
ministerial measure is too glaring to escape notice.
On one side it is condemned for giving some ideal
superiority to the Established Church, and on the
ether it is assailed for placing Catholics and Seel-
miens on the same level as other Christians. Some
people have a very strange idea of the real nature of
liberty. A story is told of a celebrated anarchist,
who loudly exclaimed, " I wish I were free ! I wish
I were free!" A bystander asked, " Well, are you

not free to do u you please?" To which the I
anarchist candidly replied, " Aye, but I am not free
to make you do as I please ;" and the anarchist's
answer embodies what too many mesa when they
plead for freedom of education.
We see, by the educational reports in the United
Stator, the beneficial results that have followed from
the adoption of the educational principles laid down
by the fathers of dissent—the genuine apostles of
nonconformity, the pilgrim fathers of America—
" Every school that is established," says one of the
Kentucky reports, "every child that is educated, every
school-house that is built, are new and additional
pledges for the perpetuation, and the growth, and the
moral influence of our institutions." We, like the old
puritans, desire that oar institutions should be per-
petuated, that they should grow and advance with the
growing and advancing intelligence of the age, and
that their moral influence should be extended, by
education, to every member of the community. The
pilgrim fathers of New England are surely safer
guides for modern nonconformists than the
Jesuits of France, whom they have so faithfully
and sedulously imitated in their present agitation.
They now exhibit that anger which is characteristic
of the uneasiness men feel when they have a lurking
consciousness that tizey have fallen into error; bat
we pray that they may not feel the pangs of a late
repentance if on them should devolve the merlons re-
sponsibility of having caused the rejection, or even
impaired the efficiency, of the measure. If means be
not taken to check the growing mass of juvenile
depravity, which no one can deny to be on the in-
crease,
a few years more will render crime and
punishment in England a scandal to the civilised
world; and it will be a sorry consolation for the
multiplication of offences that sectarian rancour pre-
ferred the gaol to the school, and the executioner to
the instructor.
While writing we have received Dr. VAUGHAN'S
candid and manly letter, which will be found in
another column. We quite agree with him that the
plan which he has proposed would be preferable to
the ministerial measure, and we also concur with him
in the belief that the country is not yet prepared for
its reception. But, because we cannot get the beet
posible, we will not reject the best attainable; and we
know from some practical experience, that as the
government measure gets into work, it must daily
approximate more and more to the scheme suggested
by Dr. VAUG HAN. As to the rejection of government
grants by the nonconformists, we have only to say
that the Presbyterians of Ulster expressed similar
determination when the national system was intro-
duced into Ireland, but when they saw that the
system was worked fairly, honestly, and efficiently,
they not only ceased from opposition and sought
assistance from the board, but became its zealous ad-
vocates and firm supporters. There is no reason to
fear a greater manifestation of obstinacy in the nos-
conformists of England.

Some Irish noblemen and gentlemen have been
jogging the elbow of the Premier, and asking what
has become of the emigration part of the ministerial
plan for regenerating Ireland. A plan of emigration'
for Ireland, approved, as to its leading principles, by
the Archbishop of DUBLIN, the Earl of DEVON, Mr.
BERNAL OSBORNE, Mr. JOHN O'CONNELL, sad Mr.
W. H. GREGORY, among others, has been
to Lord JouN Russell,. The letter whiles:lsm."
ponied it will be found in another column.
We are glad of this: for although emigration. per
se, could not by any possibility suffice to remedy the
social evils of Ireland, emigration is an indispensable
ingredient in any comprehensive measure for their
alleviation.
Ministers have hitherto replied to all questions asked
of them in parliament relating. to their views of
emigration as one means of alleviating Irish distress
that they rely u . the spontaneous and natural flow
of emigration. e numbers who annually find their
way from Ireland across the Atlantic is certainly
great, and, under the pressure of this year of scarcity,
it is greater than ever. Bat it is totally inadequate
to relieve the pressure of population upon the means
of employment and subsistence to such an extent as
will enable the condition of society in Ireland to right
itself. Besides, the utterly destitute class—the class
that would derive most advantage from emigrat-
ing—is not enabled to get out of the country
by this natural flow. Government is not asked to
give any artificial stimulus to the desire to emigrate :
the numbers who actually emigrate, and still more the
greater numbers who anxiously seek the means of
so doing, are a guarantee that no stimulus is required.
The emigration will be spontaneous : government is
only required to remove the obstacles interposed by
natural poverty to check the natural flow.
The emigration actually in progress is of a nature,
ri=der existing circumstances, to do almost as much
harm as good. Ireland has labour in superabund-
ance : its main want is capital to turn that labour to
account. The existing emigration is making its little
capital less. In Ireland, as everywhere, labour is
constantly making capital ; but the poor man, who
saves from fifty to two or three hundred pounds,
has no means of investing it. Some curious
illustrations of this phase of Irish society will be
found in the evidence relative to Tipperary, collected
by Lord DEVON'S commission. The money-making
peasant has nothing for it but to turn money-lender
on precarious secardy, and at usurious rates. The
bulk of the emigrants, under the " natural system"
are those money-making men who carry their small
capitals to countries where they can turn them to
better account. It would startle such as have not
looked closely into this emigration, could an accurate
and authentic return be obtained of the aggregate of
money thus drained from Ireland in the course of the
last twelve months.
The difficulty of finding secure investments for
money in Ireland suggests another illustration of the
necessity of emigration on • large scale. Capital
is required to set the surplus labour of the country to
work. To this end the capital must be employed
either in Ireland or out of it. But there is such a preys-
' lent opinion of the insecurity of Irish investments,
that capital will not go there at present in the na-
tural way of business. It was one objection to Lord
GEORGE I3ENTINCK'S railway bill, that the sum he
asked was far too great to be lavished upon one class
of undertakings; but a more insuperable objection
was the utter want of confidence in the securniafrez
the repayment of the money. Irish railway
were valueless before and independent of the famine.
Since, therefore, capital cannot be got to employ Irish
labour in Ireland, the experiment must be tried to
get capital. to employ Irish labour out of Ireland.
Experience has shown that English capital and Irish
labour can meet with mutual advantage beyond the
Atlantic.
There is a still more weighty reason than has yet
been touched upon, why government should undertake
—not to stimulate an artificial emigration—but to
facilitate and direct the existing spontaneous emigra-
tion. It is the duty of government, as the great na-
tional trustee, to take care that the destitute who quit
their country to relieve the pressure of population on
the means of subsistence do not suffer in consequence.
It would be less inhumane, to effect the clearance by
killing them at once, than to leave them to die of pri-
vation and neglect on a foreign shore. The natural"
system of emigration has been little better than re-
moving surplus population, as a gardener weeds out
surplus plants, and throwing them down on a distant
land to wither and die. It has literally been a
" shovelling out of paupers," to get them out of our
way. In the British provinces of North America
they have been known at times to die off like sheep
when the rot gets into a flock. In the United States
they are barely tolerated as a " serviceable nuisance."
The anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia, and the ex-
istence of a " native American " party, having for its
sole bond of union enmity to the Irish, show what
kind of home Irish emigrants find in that country.
Government is bound to care for the future of those who
remove in order that those who remain behind may
have room to prosper. In other words, to do justice to
the Irish poor, government must colonise as well as
promote emigration.
We admit that, though not insuperable, there are
great difficulties in the way. There is no colonising
department of government, and little hope of getting
one. Again, the Irish emigrants are a peculiar class,
and must be managed in their own way. From
England and from Scotland, individuals of the
middle and upper classes axe easily found to
proceed to new colonies as employers or leaders.
The Irish emigrants have so little in com-
mon with the middle or upper classes of their coun-
try, that it were in vain to think of forming Irish
settlements in this way. The Roman Catholic clergy
present almost the only class from which each settle-
ment might receive a nucleus. These considerations,