The Sun.
London, England, 1834-04-17 00:00:00

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that house.
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mass of benefit which the country had derived from the
diffusion of education, it was indebted to no other chits of
I men save that much caluinniated'Orde, the clergy of the
church of England. , Aria interference with the system
which Was it. 4 adopted through their instrumentality
was that the children Wefe.not kept at th'ein long enough.
nity.That, however, was the fault of the parents of the wwhouielhd ‘theePcrloderg)uct,
hadive oef mstaboiriesheettvilinthtanheigroodretpteoctlihNe.e c.poamiiing il ie-s
The only fault which now attached to the schools
chil-
dren, not of the clergy who silperintended such schools.
Improve the condition of the poor, give them sufficient
wages 0 Winibtain themselves and their fainilieit ill com-
fort And respectability, and yon will have no reason to
complain that they do 'not leeep their children long enough
at school. Rikt it; things were now administered, no
sooner Nvas a child able to earn something for his
parents, than he was taken from school, and his edu-
cation was altogether neglected, He insisted that
wherever schools had been established in parishes, there
had been no dillichlty in providing schoolmasters for them
competent to afford all the information required by the
children. He denied the right of Parliament to pass a law
imposing a rate for the purposes of education. Such a rate
was very different from the rate imposed for the mainte-
nance of the poor. The maintenance of the poor by a com-
pulsory fund was justified by the necessity of the case, but
no such necessity existed with regard to education. On
whom, too, would such a rate fall? On the landed inte-
rest, which they had recently been told was in a condition
of great and long-continued depression. The noble and
learned lord again proceeded, but in a tone of voice which
rendered him inaudible in the gallery, to complain of the
ex parte statements Which his noble and learned friend had
advanced upon the authority (as we understood) of the
corporation commissioners:
The LORD CHANCELLOR—One word, and one
word only, in explanation. His noble and learned friend
seemed to suppose that he had got his information from the
reports of the commissioners appointed to examine into
municipal corporations. Now, that was not the fact. The
information of which he had availed himself was ob-
tained from the reports of the commissioners appointed
by act of Parliament to examine into the state of chari-
table institutions commissioners who had examined
both sides, and had had a full hearing of the trustees them-
selves. There were cases mentioned in those reports in
which trustees had wished to employ the money committed
to their charge in a more beneficial manner than that
-which the donor had contemplated, but had found them-
selves prevented by the existing state of the law from mak-
ing the improvements which they desired. For instance,
in the manufacturing districts of Yorkshire, at Wakefield
—no, he believed it was at Leeds—a revenue of 3,0001. or
4,000/. a-year was now devoted to the maintenance of a
grammar-school. Now, according to the construction put
by the law on the term " grammar school," it was a
school in which Greek and Latin and Hebrew, one or all
of them, was to be taught, but not ciphering or arithmetic ;
and yet there could be no doubt that in such a district the
latter branch of information was more necessary than the
former. Now in such a school, unless you taught Greek,
Latin, and Hebrew, it was doubtful whether you had any
right to apply the funds of the school to the teaching of
arithmetic. Certainly, until the funds were provided for
the teaching of the former, you had no right to teach the
latter. The trustees had been asked in one or two
such cases whether, if they were authorised to teach the
last they would do so ; and their answer had been, that
they did not feel themselves zs:ithorised to move against
the intentions of the donors, r. id that they therefore pre-
ferred to leave things as they w ere. With regard to the
obligations which the country owed to the clergy of the
established church, he preferred considering those obliga-
tions in the light in which they had been viewed by a noble
earl on a former night, to considering them in the light in
which they had been viewed that night by his noble and
learned friend. Judging from the speech of his noble
and learned friend, you would suppose that all the benefits
now derived from the more general diffusion of the benefits
of education were owing to the exertions of the clergy of
the church of England. God forbid that he should say or
do anything to diminish the debt of gratitude due to that
venerable body for teaching, preaching, and successfully
exerting their money and their time in promoting the
planting of schools, and in advancing the education of the
people. He would be the last man in the world to whisper
a doubt respecting the great merits in this respect of that
learned, pious, and enlightened body ; still he would say
that there were other parties to whom some portion of
credit was also due for having co-operated, and not
without effect, in the same great and glorious cause. In
consequence of the exertions made, he would not say by
that much calumniated, but by that little-eulogized com-
mittee of the lower house, which sat in 1818 upon the subject
of education, and of which he had had the honour of being
chairman, he hoped that he might be permitted to arro-
gate to that committee the credit of some of the beneficial
effects which had since been produced ; for he believed
that he might, without the slightest exaggeration, assert
that the benefits of education were diffused twice as far
now as they were then. In that committee, " quorum
pars minima fuerat," he had given full credit to the clergy
of the church of England for the exertions which they had
made in different parts of the country. There was like-
wise another cause which had been pioductive of great be-
nefit to the further diffusion of education. What did his
noble and learned friend think of the exertions made by
the sects of the country ? What did he think of the in-
valuable labours of the enlightened and pious clergy of the
different congregations of dissenters ? They had been
great coadjutors with the committee of 1818 in increasing
the education of the people. They had spent their money
and their hard-earned money, willingly in that cause, and
they ought to have the more credit for spending it, for they
had less to spend. When a rich clergyman of the church,
with an income of 3,000/. or 4,000/. a year, spent his 40/.
a year in promoting education in his parish, the dissenting
clergyman, with an income of barely 100/. was often
spending his 31. or 4/. a year on the same object. He
gave the dissenting clergymen, under such circum-
stances, as much credit for spending their minim, as he
gave to the church of England for spending its million. He
thought that the exertions of the one ought not
to be passed over in silence, whilst they were straining
their throats and making the walls echo with the praises of
the other. He had been told that the whole of this bene-
ficial arrangement was owing to the example of the church
of England. The example of the church of England !
Why, who set the example? Dr. Bell and Joseph Lan-
caster were used as the champions on each side of this
question. Dr. Bell created the schools which were now
called the national schools ; Mr. Lancaster the schools
which were now called the British and foreign schools.
There was a controversy as to whether Dr. Bell or Mr.
Lancaster invented the Madras system of education, by
mutual instruction and by writing in the sand ; but there
was no controversy, there was not even a doubt as to this
point, that if Dr. Bell was the inventor of the system, it
was, as far as he was concerned, an hidden invention,
which had never shed a blessing on mankind, and that
Joseph Lancaster was the first person who had ever prac-
tically taught schools upon that plan. Joseph Lancaster im-
ported it ; and the importer of an invention was, as his
noble and learned friend knew, entitled to take only a patent
for it.. He therefore gave his praise as a patent to the im-
porter, but in so doing he had no wish to withhold his
praise from the inventor. The noble lord then proceeded
to give a history of the manner in which, and of the parties
by whom, the different schools upon the Lancasterian
principle were founded. Among those distinguished
personages the late Duke of Kent stood prominently—a
i name never to be mentioned but without honour, where
education or charity was spoken of. Then there was the
name of the Duke of Sussex, not to be held in less distinc-
tion. There was the Duke of Bedford, the late Lord So-
merville, a Presbyterian by-the-bye, but all the rest were
Baptists, Quakers, Moravians, Unitarians, all manners of
sects, but scarcely one churchman. One thing that asso-
ciation did—it produced action on the part of church,
and thus the church kept pace with the dissenters. The
dissenters, then, having begun in 1810, and having conti-
nued during the year 1811, induced the church late in the
year 1812 to come forward also and to found their national
society. If gratitude were to be measured by priority, the
dissenters, who began the system, were certainly entitled
to the larger share. He was not, however, prepared on
that account to assert that if the dissenters lad not
founded a single school, had not taught a single boy, and
had not founded any society, the church would not have
done that which everybody knew that it subsequently
had done. When the dissenters had evidently suc-
ceeded, and it was morally certain that the people
would be taught, though it was uncertain how, then,
to his infinite delight, he had seen the clergy of
the church step forward to take a portion in this holy
task. He would mention another debt of gratitude
which was due to the same venerable body. The insti-
tution of infant schools was admitted to have been of great
benefit to the cause of education. A few of us mertoge-
ther in the year 1818, and after some deliberation planted
an infant school in the city of Westminster, not more than
a quarter of a mile from the place in which he was then
speaking. We carried it on successfully for two or three
years ; and of the eight persons who, during that period,
had the superintendence of it, he believed that only him-
self and the Marquis of Lansdowne were churchmen. We
had no connection whatever with the clergy of the church.
One or two dissenting clergymen assisted us, and, to his
great delight, the scheme met with complete success.
Other schools on a similar principle were established in
other parts of the country, and in three or four years after-
wards he was gratified to find that the clergy of the church
of England followed—no, he would not say followed, for he
meant nothing disparaging to that venerable body—were
not behind us, but came forward willingly, and were not
deterred by a consideration which might have influenced
weaker minds and more grovelling dispositions—he meant
the fear of imitating other men, and of acting upon the
example set them by the dissenting clergy. They gal-
lantly neglected all such considerations; they boldly fol-
lowed in our wake; they were stimulated by the ambition
of making themselves useful, and they propagated infant
schools with as much success as the dissenters had propa-
gated them previously. There was also another mode in
which the clergy of the establishment had greatly bene-
fitted the progress of education. In the year 1827 we
formed the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.