The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-12-29 00:00:00

NATIONAL EDUCATION.

The Daily News is one of the abler advocates of the
" Good time coming ;" and, though we consider it too
good news to be true, we are always ready to bear, how-
ever much we may be abused for our scepticism in not
becoming a convert to Perfectionism, as it is called in
America ! percute sed audi. The babblement about Na-
tional Education has issued from many pens—Dr. Hook,
Mr. (Leeds) Baines, and others, all contending for an
enlarged system, and all differing as to what that system
should be. The Daily News would introduce " Philo-
sophy" into legislation ; and the Spectator " Theory"
into the policy of governments. The former says :
'• Having publicly stigmatised the utter barbarism of our
divisions of coins, weights, and measures, we cling to
them contentedly, because philosophy does not add to the
Popularity cf a statesman in Britain; and because an
English legislator fears nothing so much as the puerile
sarcasm directed against the Gregorian reformation
of the calendar :—' He has found out an evil which does
nobody any harm, and suggested a remedy which will do
nobody any good.' We coot t the aid of the Church in
accomplishing our great object; but we only claim of zealous
and indiscreet churchmen not to claim for the Establish-
ment more than it can carry into effect, lest despair of
doing all should lead to nothing."
In answer to others, the Spectator argueth as follows :
—" Education, besides its own merits and requirements,
is a sort of transition question by which something of
philosophic theorism is to be introduced into our states-
manship. England must be England in Education as in
every thing else. She has been great, she is great, because
faithful to her traditions ; vitalise them with a certain
amount of theory, or perhaps we should rather say of
idealistic tendency, derived not from transcendentalism,
or communism, or any other foreign speculation, but
from doing as much justice to her imagination as she has
hitherto done to ber common sense. It is the men that
impregnate English common sense with English imagi-
nation who will form the statesmen of the next genera-
tion, or, probably, after a few year:, of the present; men
who, without despising traditions, will still aspire to some-
thing in the future sublimer than traditions disclose.
These are the men destined to feel and perceive what edu-
eation means, and to give it a comprehensiveness of orga-
nisation worthy alike of the bygone glories of England,
and of those instincts of a diviner civilisation which are
stirring the world." Such are the reformers of the age !
[We contend that education, on any plan, without reli-
gion, is teaching Infidelity by system.—En. Salop Jour.]

LEGAL DURATION OF THE PRESENT

PARLIAMENT.

A correspondent of the London Times writes :
"As there appears to be a Question as to the precise
period when the present Parliament will die a natural
death. allow me to call attention to the Septennial Act,
the Ist of George 1., stat. 2, cap. 38, which enacts as fol-
lows :—' That this present Parliament, and all Parliaments
that shall at any time hereafter be called, assembled, or
held, shall and may respectively have continuance for
seven years, and no longer, to be accounted from the day
on which by the writ of summons this present Parliament
hath been, or any future Parliament shall be, appointed to
meet, unless this present or any such Parliament here-
after to be summoned shall be sooner dissolved by His
Majesty, his heirs, or successors.'
"As this Parliament was summoned to meet in October,
1841, there would seem no doubt that (unless previously
dissolved) it can legally sit until October, 1818, being
seven years from the return of the summons."