The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-06-16 00:00:00

THE RAGGED SCHOOLS.

The following speech was delivered by Lord Ashley, at
the annual meeting of the Ragged School Union, last
week. His lordship said, " his personal experience,
during the past year, had shown him the absolute neces-
sity of Institutions of this kind, which, at the present time,
enabled them to meet and abate the evils which pressed
upon them on every hand. The want of religious and
secular education for the rising generation was apparent,
and it was proposed to supply this deficiency by the
extension of the National School system' on the one
hand, and by enlarging the operations of the British and
Foreign schools upon the other; but the class whose in-
terests they were met to advocate and support, was
one apart from those which formed the peculiar con-
cern of these great Societies—a class peculiar to
large towns—a class in an especial manner peculiar
to the metropolis; and as it was a peculiar evil, they
were justified in attempting a peculiar remedy. (Cheers.)
He had drawn up certain queries which had been for-
warded to the different schools, to be able, by the returns,
to be in a condition to understand himself, and to make
the public and the legislature to understand, the condition
and necessities of that unfortunate class of their fellow-
creatures to which their attention was directed. These
returns were not yet complete, but he would read the
return from one school, which, from the circumstance of
its having been some time established, and other causes,
was rather a favourable specimen than otherwise of the

general condition. Upon hearing the detail they would
reflect that if this was the condition of one, what must be
the condition of all the others. At that Sunday-evening
Ragged School, during the past year, the average attend-
ance was 260. Their ages ranged from five years to
twenty years. Of that number, forty-two bad no pa-
rents, twenty-one had stepmothers, seven were children
of convicts. The answer to what were their apparent
means of subsistence was, that as far as could be ascer-
tained, they lived by picking up coals, and other things
on the banks of the river, and by strolling and other simi-
lar means. Of these twenty-seven had been imprisoned ;
and then he put the question, what drove these children
first to crime ? The answer was, that in some cases the
parents sent them out, saying that they must get their
living how they could. o;hers had no parents, and were
unable to resist the temptations to which they were ex-
posed ; thirty-six had run away from their homes; nine-
teen slept in lodging-houses: forty-one lived by begging ;
twenty-nine never slept on beds; seventeen had no shoes
nor stockings; thirty-seven had no hats, caps, or bon-
nets, and twelve had no body linen. That was the
class of individuals in whom they were interested,
and he asked whether that did not prove the necessity
of en nit c t:

“. (111 Litr,J, 7ALIII lIUL LV
strict and pedantic rules of discipline, and where it was
not necessiry, as in other schools, to appear with
clean hands and faces, and decent apparel, as was the

rule in nineteen-twentieths of the Sunday schools, and
which excluded the vast majority of children in that
particular class of life? If they took children at all, they
must take them as they are, and their object was by de-
grees to clothe them and give them those habits of de-
cency and order which would raise them to that particular
scale which others have attained, and to fit them for par-
ticipating in the blessings offered by other schools in the
metropolis. (Hear, hear.) During the last year, 7,899
persons under the age of twenty years had been in custody,
and of that number there passed through the prisons of
this metropolis, for longer or shorter periods, no fewer
tha❑ 6,073. (Hear, hear.) Now, if the process of im-
prisonment bad a curative tendency, they would rejoice,
but if, from the most authentic sources of information it
appeared that these 6,073 prisoners came out of their
gaols in a far worse moral condition than when they
entered them, the absolute necessity to make some effort
to stop this evil at the source became apparent. (Hear,
bear.) The population of this country was rapidly in-
creasing, and the juvenile population had no inconsider-
able share in those ontr/ges which had occurred of late
years in Bristol and Nottingham ; and unless steps were
taken in time, what was there to prevent a repetition of
those horrible tragedies by the 40,000 or 50,000 of this
class of the metropolitan population? If they were actu-
ated by no other feeling than the safety of society, they
would give to these children some principles of self-
controul. (Cheers.) He was delighted to say, that in
many instances they had succeeded in their efforts, and
done more than could have been expected by the small
means at their disposal."