The Sun. — 1850-02-15 (London, England)

LONDON, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1850.  Cordial, and be it said to the honour of the House of Commons, unanimous was the consent yielded last evening by the national representatives, when Mr. EWAItT moved for leave to bring in a Bill fur enabling town councils to establish, not only museums, but public libraries. When this most excellent and judicious measure shall have passed through its different stages in the Legislature, another great step will have been taken in the way of popular education. For, if the opinion of EDWARD Gunton be correct, an opinion referred to yesterday by the Honourable Gentleman the Member for Dumfries, namely, that selfeducation, that is to say the education which a man gives to himself when he has left the porch of the academy for the market-place, is better, is more efficient, is far more important than the editcation acquired from the instructions of a teacher—. then is a Bill of this simple character, to a considerable extent preferable to some more ostentatious measure, involving the expenditure of millions of the public moneys in the construction of national schools and universities. By opening to the working classes 1 libraries stored with the treasures of ancient and modern literature we shall be holding out indeed an irresistable temptation from ignorance. The fascination of knowledge will soon manifest its influence among the more populous classes of the community if we only afford those classes an opportunity of developing their intelligence. To do this nothing more effectual can scarcely be conceived than the very scheme which the Member for Dumfries last night found himself empowered by the Committee of the last session to submit to the consideration of the House for the acceptance of the British Parliament. Are we desirous of appreciating the force of the innate tendency to accumulate fact or fiction from literature—this tendency which first evidences itself in each and all of us in the inexhaustible curiosity of childhood—let us observe the avidity with which the wretched catchpenny periodicals of Holywell-street (that Grub-street of the present generation) are bought up and devoured. The curiosity of infancy, just mentioned as being the first testimony of the innate yearning of our race for information, is, in truth, so remarkably manifested in all classes and conditions of society, from the palace to the cottage, in the garrets of Whitechapel and in the drawing-rooms of Belgravia, that we might with perfect .correctness designate Childhood a walking and thinking Catechism—consisting wholly of questions and wonderment. As the offspring of the wealthy and the well-to-do grow up, this wholesome hunger and thirst of the intellect after the aliment of knowledge is directed by judicious teachers into proper channels for its acquisition ; whereas the unfortunate children of the over-worked and the destitute are abandoned to the accidental teachings of the streets—those peripatetic schools of depravity. There, from the shop-windows, stored with the last numbers of the cheap publications—the veriest garbage of literature, licentious in tone, and reeking with the grossness of the depraved imaginations from which they have emanated—the child of misery learns first of all to acquire that taste for the lowest species of romance, the melodrama of literature, which is confirmed into a passion by the tawdry scenes witnessed from the twopenny gallery of some squalid suburban theatre. These are the real nurseries of crime, the hotbeds of felony—where the outcasts of the ') op ulation, incited :to all kinds of infractions of the law, from petty larceny to homicide, by the pages that delineate a burglar in the light of a hero—furnish occupants, for the hulks and victims for the hangman. To counteract, in some manner, the pernicious influence of such allurements to vice, should be among the foremost aspirations of the political philanthropist, and to effect this the most readily and effectually no better project could be adopted than the supplying of the masses of the people with es, ame food for the mind in the chap f 04,..„.. Att. Let the people have access to i p abli‘;'libra 'ties , anal their will soon prefer the mental I aliment they cbtein there'f*the fori products of some ricketty hand.ptes4—prQd\icts for the intellect, more, T \;,1A7,4,e44-9,'"--ii  -r`kl  ~~  ets, fs Itsll7, - •Ft , ot. 0, 4 • , - 1 U ARO