The Sun.
London, England, 1863-10-03 00:00:00

cave :--

"Full mar/ a gem of purest ray serene
The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear,
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air,"
So it is with my fellow-countrymen. There are mi'.
lions of you who are possessed of great abilities, of
wonderful capacity, who are bound down and gro-
velling in a state of ignorance. Why is this, Sir, I
would ask you? What are the pleasures of an igno-
rant man ? I would ask you to make a comparison
between the pleasures of that man and those of
the educated man, and by that comparison would
woo you to see that intellect exalts each man who
has availed himself of the advantages of education.
And why ? The uneducated man is born to labour,
and passes the greater portion of his life in labour
but there are hours when he is unemployed,hours_
of leisure. And how does he employ
those h ?
OUTS
Unfortunately, for the most part in sensual
tjo
ments ; unfortunately, drink is the great meaensbyy-
which he obtains a solace, by which he recreates
himself, by which he gets rid of that which is more
painful than labour, the tedium of his leisure time
which is more painful than labour, the tedium of
his leisure time which sometimes he acquires. Now,
sir, what does an educated man do ? His enjoy-
ments are multitudinous. I can speak for myself,
that if a man had come to me in my youth with a
fortune in his hands, and had said to me, "I will
give you this on condition that you never learn to
-read," I would repel the gift that he offered me, and
say it was worth as nothing in comparison with
that which he desired me to forfeit. No hour of my
life, no hour of any man's life may be without the
enjoyment of a book. I have often said, sir, that a
book is better than a friend. No matter what may
be your state of mind, no matter what may be the
tate of mind of those who surround you, a book is
over your
equable, calm, and generous friend. You
-vett
it, and there is spread out before you the
and mind, and language of the author. On
ewreearlythOesion he is willing to come forward and
benefit you-
The friendship of a book is above the
friendship 0f
I would say to you, learn all
Irdri;e by which you are surrounded
that the knew e
; and there is one thing above all
can give to 9°-
others which I desire you to remember, and that is
the reach of every working man to
that it is within
nearly all the enjoyments of
attain to pretty -
t speaking of the enjoy-
civilised life. I tin/ not I am not talking to
menu which wealth givesplendid garments, of
mY
Women friends of hter) that is not
jewels, of fine ribands---(laug
the kind of pleasure I would Point out to them.
I would point out to husbands and would tell
d
ife
'them that all the pleasures of ei .
but on are
ly
"
within the reach of all classes of society,
to be obtained by the improvement of the intellect.
(Cheers.) Now, sir, I dare say yOU know, what
that I am one
many of those present may not know,
- is 'a.
of that terrible class of politicians called Rad'L
(Laughter avd cheers.) My Radicalism, however,
does not consist in putting everybody down
desire is to raise everybody up. (Cheers.) I be'l'l've
the working men of England have—and I F 3 ay it
advisedly—as much power of obtaining all the
elegances of life as the man who dwells in a palace.
Suppose now—and let me urge this upon your at-
tentinn—suppoqe s yonpg men marries early in life
and becomes the father of a family, and that family
grown up into boyhood and girlhood. 7 Su no.° the
children are instructed and the father is not. The
father, if he be a good man, stays at home in the
evening with his wife and children • , he does not go
abroad for excitement in the pothouse, but stays at
home with his wife and children, and his children
availing themselves of the knowledge they have ac-
quired, read to that father, and thus convey to him '
the knowledge which they have obtained by means
s of the advantages which
of availing themselves
associations like this
bestow. It is that more than

anything else which I wish to point out to my fel-
low-countrymen. Foreigners invariably remark—
and I beg you to pardon me for what I am going to
say; it may be unacceptable, but it is true—fo-
reigners remark th`t though in England there
is perfect liberty—a man may say anything he
pleases, so long as he do not injure his neighbour,
and may do what he likes so long as he do not
injure his neighbour—there is no great potentate
—(laughter)—to say you shall not print, you
shall not speak, you shall not think ; any man
may speak, think, and do what he likes, so lon
that long,
as I have said, that he do not injure his
between
the various classes of Englishmen
neigh-
bour. Yet the foreigner remarks
thereisa
greater chasm and a-greater separation than there
is in any country on the Continent
.that the labour-
ing man in England is not in any way a companion
for, and has no means of
consorting with, the gen-
tlernan; and it is tree. The gentleman, also,
although he may be kind
all his relations of life,
yet he shrinks
he may be a good man
from the bench of the labouring
man. Why is in
that ? It is because the labouring
class of this country
is not endowed with the win-
ning manners that the labouring classes of other
countries possess. They aro morose, they are sus-
picious ; I may say they are a repulsive set of people.
Not that they have not all the capacities of the other
class—for they have all the capacities of some of
their wealthy and happy brethren ; but the pecu-
liarity is that they fancy themselves a class apart,
having no communion with and no share in the
society of their well-to-do and happy brethren.
Now, I want to break down this barrier of separa-
tion; I want to make the labouring man in all
things—in his character, in his manners and his
intelligence—quite equal to any man in the coun-
try. You, sir, and your fellows are laying down
the groundwork of that equality which will make
Englishmen indeed " a band of brothers," which
will make them present a front such as the world
cannot put down, which will make them, indeed,
the leaders of mankind. (Cheers.) Well, my
friends, I tell you all that this is within your reach.
Now, we are told, our much-esteemed friend here
has told us this evening, that the little people, the
quarrymen, go to work at seven years of age. This
is a mistake ou the part of parents. (Hear, hear.)
It !s throwing away their capital, it is living
upon their capital. If you sent your children to
school until they were of the ago of twelve, and
then had them back after they had gained the
means of acquiring knowledge of an elementary
character, the education given them would be far
richer for the poorer class of men than if they were
sent to work when seven years of age. Oa an oc-
casion like this, however, I cannot enlarge further
upon this topic; but I would beg to impress on the
minds of my fellow countrymen, the 'labouring
classes, that their own interests ought to impel
them to have their children educated in the best pos-
sible manner. (Hear, hear.) Now, sir, I will en-
deavour to address myself to those who are striving
to educate the class by whom they are surrounded.
There are some things now that I think I can say
to you, though I dare say you have heard it before,
but I will say it again on the present occasion—
something which may prove a solace to you, and a
solace to those who hear me. The great difficulty
you have in educating the people is that the fathers
take their children from school too early, but if they
were told, by allowing their children to remain at
school until the age of 12, what advantage they
could acquire from the habit of reading, what great
use and what great pleasure they could obtain by
acquiring the habit of writing, and what great ad-
vantage they could obtain by acquiring the first
rules of arithmetic, every one of them I think, would
say with us that it was a great point gained.
(Cheers.) Now, sir, it happens that amongst my
friends ono who is very enthusiastic, one who has
paid great attention to the subject of teaching, with
his friends has endeavoured to find out whether the
hours of instruction might not be greatly shortened,
and I moved, sir, in the House of Commons for this
return, which I believe was printed by order of the
House of Lords. This is a return containing an in-
quiry into the advantage of what is called the
"short time" system in teaching. My friend and
his friends thought that the time of children was
occupied too much in teaching and that their minds
were strained and overburdened, and that they did
not learn nearly so much as they would if halt
the time were employed in teaching them,
and they advised the adoption of the short time
scheme—taking half the usual time for instruc-
tion, and the other half for drilling them as
Volunteers are drilled and as sailors are drilled.
They employed these means, and tbo consequence
was that the children who spent half their time in
scholastic instruction learnt quite as much as those
who spent their whole time at it, and that they freed
themselves from awkward habits by means of the
Volunteer and naval drill. Now, I wrote to my friend
when I was first spoken to on this subject, asking
him to tell me what he thought on the question, and
he wrote me a letter which, with your permission, I
will read. It is very instructive and very amusing.
The hon. gentleman then read the letter of his friend,
in which the writer said that the systematic inflic-
tion of punishment, mental as well as bodily, insepa-
rable from the old plan of teaching, was altogether
wrong. He made it a rule to discharge any groom
who whipped his horse, for where one required
punishment 99 out of 100 were spoilt by it, and so it
was with children. Schoolmasters in the half-time
schools and schoolmasters in some of the best schools
in the land never used corporal punishment. With
respect to the reduction of long hours of study, he
was of opinion that after too long a period of seden-
tary confinement the attention of the pupil would flag,
A good teacher would adapt his lessons to the capa-
city of the child, and would make the value of the
lesson sustain itself by the interest he infused in his
manner of teaching. When the voluntary attention
of the scholar flagged, when coercion was required to
keep up his attention,; then it.was time to stop. The
writer proceeded to mention what he had been told
by Sir Edward Hay, who had great acquaintance
with children, respecting a small school which he
had visited. The hours were reduced from six to four,
and the system of drilling had been adopted, and
during the first year of the new plan the number of
non-attendants:on account of illness was but one-tenth
of the number formerly. The reduction of the long
hours was the reduction of great weariness, and the
consequence was that the number of malingerers, or
those who shammed illness, was very great. The
scholars were not now so desirous of escaping from
school as formerly, and did not wend their way to
school with such gloomy forebodings of punishment
as before. The children, the writer continued to say,
should
a relish for their lessons. The give
eavnge
vt
meh em
them
n t
aa:
exercises should be so adjoined as to stimulate each
other. One point (continued thgaelftw-htreiirateer)setho be en-
forced
is it ah connection
atinstead
sacrificing the
fie i half-time
domesticl s-
teme
Ye
os
nomy to:the school, the school adapts itself to the
domestic economy. Children cannot too soon be got
into the moderate exercise of the business of life
ale f -ti m
reference e system,
to if
theiti s
actualproperly
buas
at eersns a
at endd,
instruction should
should the h
uldhav
duties of life,while the elementary
make the children cheerful and happy. The first ob-
ject is to enable children to read to their parents
at
night, and every boy who has acquired the necessary
education is thus in a position to derive alt the plea-
sure and advantage that reading gives to the reader.
Then the penny weekly newspaper brings them the
sews of the world for the whole week. However bad
that newspaper may be, it must be admitted that
impression conveyed in the worst paper
not
the worst
an improvement on the worst impres.
can but be
1 by the voice, and it' you get them to
,ien con vt'Ye‘ 8
nee regularly it would be much
real ‘•the conversation of idle,
listening to
het ter ill ,n
people. Then the writer pro-
ceeded to say
With such obsolete and perni-
cious nowspapers went, they
h ft. (Laughter.) No family
cious ideas as wituucra
dissolute, or
odlOaryiltaa:
who read a weekly newspaper, would believe in
witchcraft. In all elementary o•
encouraged a Dl'
lasses vocal music
ought to be encoura
nane of cheering the
family circle. I will stop one moment here (con.
tinued Mr. Roebuck) to describe the school that was
established by Mr. Ottery, a
clergyman of the
Church of England, who has a cure nt Windsor, and