The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-07-02 00:00:00

Ktterature.

POE'T'RY.

THE RAINBOW.

" Sehones Kind der Bonne
Bunter Regenbogen."—HEßDEEt.

Bow of the clouds ! Fair daughter of the sun !
Bright arc of heaven of ever-varying hue
Above those threatening clou s I view thy throne,
And hail an image of bright hope in you I

In thousand varying colours now appears
The breken sunbeams' bright and glancing ray,
Wrapped in a veil of gently falling tears
Where those dark clouds are softening into grey

And far and wide thy noble arch's span
Is stretching, till rem 'ter distance shroud,
And on the horizon's distant verge we scan
Thy stable pillars on the driving cloud.

Alas I alas l too short thine empire reigns—
Dim, pale, and changed. thy colours swiftly fade ;
Of these bright pillars nothing now remains
Save one bright cloud fast mei ing into shade.

But lo! once more we hail a calmer sky:
The vault of heaven assumes its azure hue,
The sun shines forth in all its majesty,
And the moist meads exhal: their fragrant dew !

Away ! away ! aye perish every one
Fair floating visions seen in youthful dreams
Away ! away ! bet let the noontide sun
Rise on my soul, and bathe me in its beams !

Bright hues of hope ! all I^vely though ye be,
Still arc ye but the broken sunbeam's ray.
Children of tears ! to Trut i I turn from ye,
And hail in her the sunlight of our days !

NOTICES.

Remedies suggested for the Perils of the Nation. Lon-
don : Seeley, Barnside, and Seeley, 1841.
SECOND NOTICE.]
In a former notice of this excellent work we remarked
briefly upon its general plan and object; and, in accord-
ance with our promise, we now propose bringing before
our readers, in detail, some of the remedies which the
writer purposes to apply to the evils which now press
upon our social fabric. At the head of these is a RETURN
TO SCRIPTURAL PRINCIPLES as the true basis of legisla-
tion and regulator of our conduct as citizens one towards
another.

" The root and parent stock"—the author maintains—
"of all effectual remedies must be the exaltation of God's
word to its rightful place of authority in all human
affairs. From this it has been too long cast down. The
most opposite and conflicting parties have agreed in this
one practical falsehood. In the high places of the realm,
in the houses of legislation even a man of Mr. Wilber-
force's peculiar personal influence could scarcely ventureaa
allusion to God's own word without danger of personal
insult. On all sides ' they snuffed at it ;' and the custo-
mary feeling of the house was, " Who is the Lord, that
we should obey him ?' "
But, independent of this irreverence of feeling and con-
duct, a more fatal and practical result of the neglect of
scriptural principles in legislation was the character of
the philosophy, sanctioned by even high and reverend
names, which seized fast hold of the mind of the nation.
Wealth, national and individual, was the idol which that
philosophy set up—wealth as contradistinguished from the
morals or the happiness of the people. Capital was to be
protected at all hazards—to be permitted to feed upon the
vitals of our industrious population; whilst labour was
only to be regarded as something subsidiary, by the op-
pression of which masses of wealth were to be drawn to-
gether. Our poor were told that they should be thrown
back upon their own resources, deprived of the support
which, under a beneficial law, had been afforded them by
property ' • and the monstrous proposition was even ha-
zarded that they had the remedy for their distress and a
sure recipe for bringing about a state of prosperity, within
their own reach, by abstaining from marriage!! The
whole of the legislation of past years, with a few excep-
tions, such as the bill of Lord Ashley for regulating labour
in the mines of Great Britain, has been tainted by this
spirit of mammon ; and no principle is, at this moment,
more distinctly recognized in parliament than this :—that
the interests of humanity, the dictates of Christian cha-
rity, the moral and religious welfare of the people must
all give way and be sacrificed when their proper obser-
vance and advancement interfere with the operations of
capital and the gripings of the usurer.
In accordance with these principles we have remodelled
our poor laws and erected in the land a tyranny which
threatens us, as its results, with disaffection, wide spread
and deeply seated; we have refused to strike the chains
from off the limbs of hundreds of thousands of children in
our factories ; we have gone on, year by year, encroach-
ing, by inclosure bills and other devices, upon the rights
of common enjoyed by our industrious agricultural popu-
lation ; we have, by precept and example, encouraged the
system of large farms, the " laying of field to field," by
which thousands of our yeomanry have been dispossessed
of their holdings and driven back into the class of labour-
ers ; and we have congregated in our large towns toiling
masses, immersed in compulsory ignorance and vice,
whom a week's deprivation of employment might at any
time plunge into outrage and bloodshed or drag down into
the horrors of starvation.

Having purged ourselves, in the first instance, of our
slavish recognition of this fatal philosophy, and embraced
as our guide in legislation the precepts of that code, of true
wisdom which enjoins upon us humanity and charity to-
wards our suffering brother worms rather than the indul-
gence of our selfish love of accumulation, the writer pro-
ceeds to point out as the next step in our curative process
the necessity of
ORGANIZATION—CHURCH EXTENSION—EDUCATION.
The first of these, a better organization of our popula-
tion into smaller masses capable of being better handled
legislatively than in its present imperfect division into un-
wieldy parishes, is urged as desirable, in order to forward
the application of the remedial powers of church exten-
sion and education. By the division of the country into
parishes containing, say 2,000 souls, it is contended that
the wants of all could be more perfectly arrived at, and
the necessity of churches and schools be more conclu,ively
made manifest. " The minister of a parish of 2,000 or
3,000 may know something of his people individually ; but
what pastor can profess, or even hope, for the least per-
sonal knowledge of such parishes as Shoreditch or Spital-
fields ?" And such personal knowledge is desirable to
enable us to wield either church extension or a well regu-
lated system of education to real advantage. " Divide
the whole kingdom into parishes of proper size—none
exceeding 2,000 or 3,000 in population—and the first step
is really and rightly taken. Church extension then comes
in, in its just and proper place, and with its lawful and
unanswerable demand. here are so many hundred or
thousand parishes, in each of which there is no church
and no school.' We should know at a glance the real
state of the case, and the whole cost of supplying the de-
ficiency. The minister who would thus grapple with the
question, even if he went no further than to ascertain and
exhibit the want, would deserve the gratitude of his coun-
try...

And more especially is this the case with respect to the
efficient working of a system of government education.
"No parish of a proper size—i.e., from 2,000 to 3,000 in-
habitants, can be considered to be properly provided until
it possesses a schoolmaster for boys, a schoolmistress for
girls, and a third teacher (master or mistress) for infants.
These three instructors will need an annual outlay of £2OO
a year. How many parishes of 2,000 or 3,000 people are
there in which it is easy to raise by voluntary subscrip-
tions, &c., this £2OO a year? How many are therein
which even £lOO per annum could he regularly obtain-
ed ? In all countries, almost, except in England, strth
a provision, or some provision, for the education of. the
people is made by the government. Prussia eBlabluhes
schools, and calls upon all children to attend them. Ame-
rica empowers her parishes to assess themselves for the
maintenance of such schools. In England we leave the
matter wholly neglected, except so far as we can benefit
by voluntary efforts.
But the quality, equally with the quantity, of the edu-
cation which we thus dole forth to our population is mi-
serably deficient. Of cne of our chief manufacturing
towns, an eminent government inspector (the Hon. and
Rev. B. W. Noel) reports, that, in the first classes of the
schools he visited, he received such answers as these :
"Q. Who was the eldest son of Adam 7—A. Abraham.
" Q. What is a Levite 7—A. Gethsemane.
"Q. Who wrote the Bible ?—A.—Moses.
"Q. Who were the Pharisees ?—A. Publicans.
"Q. What was the chief city of the Romans C.—A. Jerusalem.
Q. What is Liverpool?—A. An island.
" Q. What city did Jesus live in 7—A. Egypt.
" Q. What country was Nazareth in ?—A. Bethlehem.
"Q. Of what religion was Paul before he was a Christian C—A.
Roman Catholic.
" Q. What other countries are there in Europe besides England?
A. America, Asia."

Nor is this a singular case, but one which is equally com-
mon in the agricultural districts, where the opportunities
afforded for education are greater, and the time devoted
to it more continuous. And in addition to this, where
education has been administered upon a system leading
to more decided results, so far as the acquisition of merely
secular knowledge goes, its effects have been rather to
produce disaffection and crime than good moral conduct
and social improvement. Thus our author reminds us
that—

---
" The progress of crime in these kingdoms during the last twenty
years, has been appalling. The committals in England in 1820,
were 13,710, in 1838 they were 23,024. In Scotland they were, in
1820, 1486; in 1838, 3418. And during all these years the greatest
efforts were making to increase the means of education, and of in-
tellectual improvement, for the working classes. Besides the na-
tional schools, of whose imperfections we have already spoken,
divers efforts have been made by the advocates of what is called
" useful knowledge," to give to the poor a " non-sectarian education."
But " experience has now proved that the mere education of the
Poorer classes, without any care of their religious principles, has
had no sensible effect in counteracting the influence of these demo-
ralizing circumstances, or preventing, by the extension of know-
_c_ rna
ons
ufendmental resources, the growth of human depravity. This
is _ trated as clearly as that two and two make four: happy if
Idbe safely said that the influence of such merely scientific
education has only been negative, and that it has not positively
added to the sum total of general wickedness."
From all these considerations, it is contended that " we
must claim to have our parishes so divided, that neither
the boys', the girls', or the infants' school, which are
requisite in each, shall contain more than one hundred
scholars. Then, and only mnndywe hope to have
each child known, and followed,n ardecognised, and
an
cared for ; and their hearts engaged, some of their
souls saved, and most of their characters permanently
ameliorated."
Here for the present we must pause, first giving the
general conclusions of the able writer upon the subject
under consideration :
" That, for the safety and well being of the whole community, it
is absolutely necessary that its paroch al organization be frequently
reviewed ; and placed from time to time, in a correct and efficient
oondition:
" That if, by such reorganization, di4triets are brought to light
which are destitute of tho means of instruction, mental, moral, or