The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-11-25 00:00:00

FRIDAY

MORNING, NOVEMBER 25, 1542

The intelligence communicated by the last mail
from India and China has been received by the com-
munity, in which we dwell, with almost unbounded
satisfaction. We were about to say, with pride; but
we cannot conscientiously say that such has been the
unalloyed feeling of any Englishman. Pride we do
feel in the unconquerable valour of British troops, as
evinced in the triumphant conclusion of the wars in
China and Affghanistan. But that the moral character
of our country has sustained any increase of which
Engtishmen can be proud—that one moral wreath has
been added to the hitherto stainless laurels of Great
Britain—we do not believe, and we therefore utterly
deny. We rejoice, then, in the conclusion of these
struggles; we value to their fullest extent the ad-
vantages which, as a nation, we derive from the con-
clusion of one of them ; but we value victory in the
other only so far as it goes to maintain the prestige
of the. British name in India, and as it has secured to
us the lives and liberty of our fellow-countrymen and
countrywomen, held in captivity by the ruthless chiefs
of Affghanistan.

We 'congratulate our fellow-countrymen upon the
termination of these UNJUST w.k.us. We hesitate no
more to call them such, in the hour of victory, than
we did in the hour of defeat. By the terms upon
which British valour has been able to insist in China--
we have as yet only the approach to such terms in
.frghanistan—a vast market is opened to our com-
Just or unjust as may have been that war, the
opening of four new ports to our commerce—four
kingdoms we may call them, if we bear in mind the
extent of territory and population commanded by the
concession to us of the right to trade to those inlets to
the Chinese Empire—cannot be viewed as an unim-
portant concession, or as worth less than all which the
late war has cost us in blood and treasure. But whilst
rejoicing in these victories and their fruits, we cannot
lose sight of the means by which they have been
attained; and whilst, therefore, we congratulate our
country, we have no thanks to bestow upon the faction
by whose aggression British valour has been driven to
wring them by violence from an unoffending people.
We are released, however—the commerce of the
empire is released—from the distractions which, for
the last two years, have impeded its energies in our
Eastern dominions. An impetus will thus, we trust,
be given to our domestic industry, and to our foreign
trade with those possessions. Already it has been felt
in our own community. It has unlocked the fetters
which have during those years been imposed upon us, and
given revived hope to the enterprise of our merchants.
It has done this, however, not solely because of the
success of our arms in India and China; but, more
than all, because our fellow-townsmen trust that, by
the present Conservative Governor-General of India,
success will not he pressed into aggression upon the
rights and liberties of the conquered. It has done
this because of the confidence of our fellow-townsmen,
that the power of Great Britain will, from henceforth,
be directed, in the East, to that peaceful extension of
the capabilities of our mighty empire in that quarter of
the globe, and to the cultivation of that peaceful inter-
course with the Chinese Nation, which are alone
calculated to advance the interests of British com-
merce, and to add honour and permanence to British
influence in those countries.

merce

That a mighty change has, for the past twenty years,
been working in the minds of the British people, no
observant man can have failed to notice. Twenty
years ago, the noxious weeds of dissent threatened to
sap the foundations of our Established Church, and to
!:cr pure doctrines and observances. The con-
venticle reared its unsightly form by the side of the ve-
nerated fabric of our ancestors. The ravings of the lay
preacher overpowered the voice of the educated minis-
ter of our holy apostolical religion. Rampant schism,
full of the bad passions which it engenders in the heart
of man, lorded it in vestries and at parish meetings;
and the conviction was abroad, and openly boasted of,
that the reign of mingled fanaticism and "liberalism"

was about to be established in this land.
But how altered is the present aspect of things
How changed the state of national feeling in which we
live ! Dissent, allied, as it has become, with the move-
ment party in politics, has lost its hold upon the
respect of the right-minded body of the people; whilst
a sound and reverent feeling of Church of England-
ism has spread and is spreading amongst us, deepening
its roots in, and overshadowing with its beneficent in-
fluence, the heart of the nation. Not the educated por-
tion only of society,—not the wealthy or the frivolous
only,—but the poor as well, have turned with loath-
ing from the hollowness, the insincerity, the frantic
passion, and the unchristian factiousness, which make
up the very being of dissent. Men are no longer
sneered aside from their allegiance to that church,
beneath whose roof their fathers worshipped, and
beneath whose green graves they found rest. They
fly no longer from the devout observances of that
church, to find license of thought and action in the rant-
ing worship of the conventicle. They shun no longer
the pure doctrines and faith of that church for the
more highly-spiced meats administered in the " whited
sepulchre" of dissent; but rather cling to them, after
their wanderings, with the renewed affection of the
returned prodigal.

We have our own deep convictions of the inducing
' causes which have produced this gratifying state of the
national mind ; but we forbear, at present, entering
upon their consideration. Our object now is to notice
its bearing upon the important question of NATIONAL.
EDUCATION. For years past, it has been the darling
object of dissent to get possession of the young intellect
of the etnpire,—to control and pervert to its own
aggrandizement the education of the rising generation.
In our own community we have witnessed the tem-
porary success of its efforts, as well as the revulsion
of public feeling which has since driven it with indig-
nation from its usurped position. Nor is this feeling
confined, at all, to this or any particular locality. The
conviction has circulated throughout the empire, that
such education as dissent would give—that mere utili-
tarian and secular knowledge—is absolutely worthless;
and reflection has brought about, in the minds of the
great mass of the people, the well-grounded belief that,
under the supervision of the Clergy of the Established
Church of England, and in the principles of that
church, the education of the youth of the empire may
with the greatest safety and advantage be conducted.
`We have been led to remark upon this cheering
revolution of public opinion, by a pamphlet before us,
which affords us the additional gratification of ob-
serving that, if the nation be sound upon a question so
vitally important to its best interests and the interests
of the whole human race, the means will not be found
wanting to carry out into efficient practice its deliberate
convictions. Our readers are perhaps aware that,
somewhat more than a year ago, an extensive establish-
ment was founded by the National Society, at Stanley
Grove, near Chelsea, as a " Training College for
Schoolmasters," under the superintendence, as its
" principal," of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, M.A.
A very able letter has just been addressed, by that
gentleman, to the secretary of the society, explanatory
of the progress of the institution and the nature of the
training pursued, from which we purpose offering to
our readers a few extracts.

The following will serve as an explanation of the
society's views ; and, whilst quoting it, we cannot but
accord to them our sincere approval :

" The object being to produce schoolmasters for the poor,
theapendeavour must be, on the one hand, to raise the stu-
dents morally and intellectually to a certain standard,—
while, on the other hand, we train them in lowly service,
not merely to teach them hardihood and inure them to the
duties of a humble and laborious office, but to make them
practically acquainted with the condition of that class of the
community among whom they will have to labour. I say,
on the one band,' and on the other,' not that there is any
real contrast either in the means taken or the ends proposed.
The labours of the house, the field, and the garden, are in-
tended to elevate, not depress : the studies of the school-
room, not to exalt, but to humble. Both alike may be made: