80 titudes were looked upon as the entire property of their rulers or conquerors, and were governed in the most absolute manner. Their princes imagined that they had a perfect right to work them, tax them, enslave them, imprison them, or slaughter them at pleasure, and they acted accordingly. Pharaoh's estimate of the masses may be gathered from his treatment of the Israelites. The insolence of Sennacherib and the pride of Nebuchadnezzar inust have looked with the utmost contempt on the vulgar herd of sub growth of yesterday, they are probably much older than Babel. Before the flood, "the earth was corrupt and filled with violence," and therefore the rights of the multitude were not regarded. After the deluge we behold an effort at centralization in the building of "a tower whose top was to reach to heaven." This design was offensive to Jehovah, that he defeated it by the confusion of tongues. What a barrier to ambition and tyranny the diversity of language has presented! The frustration of their hopes by this miraculous event checked,jects and slaves that trembled before them. but did not destroy, the spirit of despotism. Nimrod became "a mighty hunter before the Lord;" we have reason to believe that he was a hunter of men rather than of wild beasts. The Hebrew might be translated, "He began to be a hero in the earth; he was an heroic, or mighty, desolator"—a successful freebooter; and his presumption was such, that he laid claim to the patronage of Jehovah; probably he thanked God for his successful plunder. In Ezekiel we find the word here rendered "hunter" applied to the hunting of souls, and in Zephaniah (chap. iii. v. 6), to the desolation of cities. The history of heroism is little more than the history of murder and plunder on a large scale; men, and not animals, have been the game; and Jehovah has been invoked to aid these mighty hunters, and celebrated by "Te Deums" when their efforts have been crowned with success. All warriors and despots lay claim to the honour of being the especial favourites of Heaven, and consequently esteem themselves "mighty hunters before the Lord." The Scriptures intimate that the empire of iniquity began, and shall end, in Babel. The kingdom of Nimrod is the first we read of; and the millennium is ushered in by the shout "Babylon is fallen, is fallen!" That mighty freebooter was the first chief, after the confusion of tongues, to gather and centralize the fragments of despotism, which were shivered by Divine interposition, and his success called forth a host of imitators; and the tyranny and vassalage of after ages, down to the reign of Antichrist, and the Eastern and Western despotism of our own day, are only the fac-similes of that system of oppression of which Nimrod afforded so pernicious a type. Pharaoh, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Napoleon, &c., &c., are the brethren of that celebrated tyrant. All carry on their foreheads the "mark," the stamp, or, as in Greek, the "character of the beast." Prussia, France, and Russia are only modernized specimens of the spirit, domination, and empire of that ancient desolator. In all this long run of ages it is vain for us to expect any recognition of the rights of the masses, or any correct views respecting the education of the people. The mul The "rage and fury" of the latter monarch became ungovernable, "the form of his visage was changed, and he commanded that the furnace should be heated one seven times more than it was wont to be heated," because the three Hebrews asserted that they had a will and conscience of their own. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, and Daniel in the lion's den, are fair specimens of the estimate which ancient monarchs attached to the lives and liberties of their subjects. What idea had Nero, or even Constantine, of the real dignity of human nature, or the claims and capacities of mind? And, passing by a long list of names which pollute the page of history, and coming down at once to our own age, perhaps we should not find, even in England, one individual in ten thousand that has ever yet duly weighed the subject of popular education; and therefore, under such circumstances, it has been utterly impossible to elevate the masses to their proper rank and dignity. With all the vaunting of continental systems of instruction, yet the chief power in which the priests and the princes of these countries confide is that of the sword. Prussia has educated herself into a nation of soldiers. What an insult to their own people, to their neighbours, to humanity, to civilization, and, above all, to Christianity, are the military forces of Prussia, and the barricades of the Citizen King! Is it any wonder that infidels mock when they see nations laying claim to the honour of being the followers and favourites of Him who was "meek and lowly of heart," armed cap-a-pie, and ready to deal death and desolation around? The individual or the nation that must be kept in order by a bayonet has no right to the rank of civilization; and those princes who imagine that their subjects must be ruled by the sword have no correct views of the nature of man, nor the natural docility of the human mind. To imagine that the people were called into existence for no other purpose than to be labourers, mechanics, or soldiers, is altogether to mistake the great design which God had in view in creating man in his devouring the lungs, as to hope that society will be mentally and morally vigorous while the masses are ignorant and depraved. The earth is strewed with the ruins of empires, and the want of education was the principle of decay which overthrew them all. Kings and conquerors have despised and neglected the great body of their subdespotism have recoiled with tremendous vengeance on themselves. Their thrones and kingdoms have disappeared, and their names remain only to be branded with everlasting infamy. The age for worshipping military or regal heroes has passed away; and the great truth is about to be heralded through the world, that before any nation can be strong, or any throne secure, the whole body of the people must be free, and must be enlightened by science and civilized by Christianity. and consequently that they should receive a high degree of mental culture. The alarm lest education should be unfavourable to labour and due subordination is without the least foundation; because a well cultivated mind would at once perceive, that industry is associated with health, profit, and pleasure, while indolence is alike fatal to every species of rational enjoyment. The exam-jects; and their hauteur, insolence, and ples which some adduce of the sad effects of instruction on the masses, are examples not of over but of under education. The mind that has been trained aright delights in activity, views all labour as respectable and honourable, and is ready for any honest employment. They are only half educated who stamp with various shades of infamy or respectability the useful callings of life. Surely, he who ministers to the wants of another is really more valuable to society than he who participates the benefit received from such services; and hence the clown, whose labour feeds the country, and the operative, whose skill "clothes the inhabitants in scarlet," are benefactors to the world of no common dignity, and among the most useful and honourable of the human species. Solomon has said, "Moreover the profit of the earth is for all, the king himself is served by the field." Now all are indebted for this profit to the labourer. The monarch owes his bread to the peasant, and his purple to the loom. How many hands must toil before any lord or lady can appear in court attire, or any prince clothe himself in royal robes. If we admire the pageantry of palaces and regal feasts, we should also admire the labour and the labourers that called all this splendor into existence. What is military prowess, but the courage of the people? What are revenues, but contributions from the hard earnings of the people? What are palaces, but structures erected by the people? What are cultivated fields, and thriving arts and commerce, but the results of the labour of the people? The masses are the bones, muscles, nerves, limbs, and soul of every nation; and surely these ought not to be neglected or oppressed, or allowed to become intellectually or morally diseased. Should this be the case, the plague will spread; the leprosy in the wall or the garment will not be limited to one spot, but will cover the whole. All history shows, that where the people have been ignorant and corrupt, every rank and order in such nations have been contaminated. "The whole head has been sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there has been no soundness in it, but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores; they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment." It would be just as rational to expect health, while scrofula is eating into the bones, or consumption 7. Military ambition has presented an almost insuperable barrier to the spread of education. To describe all the evils directly or indirectly connected with war would require volumes. Military glory and intellectual and moral excellence are incompatible with each other. The army is said to be the school of vice. It is not unfrequently boasted that British troops are the best disciplined in the world; and we pay a great deal for schools, chaplains, and Bibles for our regiments; and yet one of the greatest calamities that can befal the religion and morals of any neighbourhood is to have a body of soldiers and their officers sojourning among the people. Were a military commission to be appointed, similar to that which visited the mining and manufacturing districts, and the same questions to be proposed to our soldiers and sailors which were put to the factory boys and miners, we fear that Lord Ashley would have to lament in Parliament that ignorance and vice, bordering on barbarianism, are not confined to collieries and cotton-mills. And if the boast is true, that our army is the best, most enlightened, and moral in the world, what must be the condition of the troops of other countries? And then, if we go back to past years, and review the intellects and morals of the men who marched with the infidel Frederick of Prussia, with Charles V., with the Crusaders, the Saracens, the Turks, the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, or Babylonians, in their various expeditions, what a horrid mass of everything vile, vicious, and disgusting is presented before us! Rational freedom and military discipline can hardly subsist together. The soldier must be ready to do everything that his general commands. His trade is that of murder and plunder. The State feeds him and clothes, that he may always stand prepared to sack, burn, or desolate any city, country, or people that his leaders may doom to destruc tion. His sword must be kept burnished and "his powder dry," that, as often as the command is given, he may launch the souls of his fellow-creatures into eternity. He must ask no questions respecting the justice or injustice of the deed, but must yield implicit obedience, or be whipped worse than a brute, or despatched by the bullets of his comrades. The drayman who should give three hundred lashes to a horse, and tear his flesh from his bones, would be deemed worse than an incarnate demon. Human beings thus doomed to the most abject slavery, and to perform, without exception, the vilest tasks that can possibly be assigned to any mortal, can hardly be called free agents. Their profession sets morals and Christianity at defiance. Hence the lives of the soldiers of Europe are too polluted to be written or read. It would create a moral plague to publish the characters and deeds of the officers and men of the far-famed educated army of Prussia; and every military station in our country could attest, that in Christian Britain the soldiery and their leaders have little cause to taunt their brethren on the Continent with their vices. What then must have been the character of the brutish mass which followed Tamerlane,Zengis Khan,Charlemagne, Julius Cæsar, Alexander, Xerxes, Cambyses, Sennacherib, and others? And yet these were the beings in whose hands were lodged the intellectual and moral destinies of the nations. The spirit of military ambition and of rational education can never exist together; and hence we search in vain into the records of antiquity for any example of a people who had been raised to their proper dignity by means of the due cultivation of their mental and moral powers. And yet all these generations that have thus passed away in ignorance, vice, and slavery, possessed the same essential qualities of mind as Milton or the Apostle Paul, and were all naturally capable of being as highly refined and civilized as any nation of our own day. There has also been among mankind a religion, the gates of whose temple have been open to proselytism to any extent, and whose precepts are adapted to purify the whole world. But the people did "not like to retain God in their knowledge ;" and having rejected the truth, nothing remained for them but error and all its consequent viciousness. What millions upon millions have been immolated to the Moloch of war and ambition! What myriads of the bitterest execrations must have greeted the spirits of Alexander, Napoleon, and others, the moment they entered eternity! In these tremendous hecatombs of souls, the rivers of blood that polluted the earth and insulted heaven are an item of minor importance; it is the sacrifice of mind, the effacing of the image of the Creator, the brutalization of the human heart, the perdition of the immortal spirit, that makes one thrill with horror. All these immense masses of mortality had intellects that might have been irradiated with Divine light, and affections that might have glowed with seraphic love; but ambition and tyranny shut them out from the light of heaven in this world, and doomed them to the darkness of the second death in the world to come. And, alas, the mark of the beast is worn by the majority of modern despots; and at the shrine of priestly or military domination the people are still sacrified by the million. War and Christian education are as opposed to each other as light is to darkness. We cannot civilize the mind by the sword; and those who are taught to use the sword can hardly be said to be civilized. Christian love teaches us to die for our enemies; and therefore, how we can love a fellow immortal as we love ourselves, and yet take away his life, is a question which the casuistry of the schools would find it difficult to explain. But this is not the only way in which war presents an impediment to education; its spirit, being the very opposite to peace, tranquillity, and security, interferes with every thing. It is a general disturber. Agriculture, trade, manufactures, commerce, and education are all interrupted. But for military ambition, how many a "waste howling wilderness" would have been cultivated long ago, and have "rejoiced and blossomed as the rose." Arts, manufactures, and commerce would also, but for this vile intruder, have enriched and blest the whole world; and, above all, knowledge and Christianity would have "covered the earth as the waters cover the sea." In peaceable times, printing, science, books, schools, and pure religion would have dispensed their blessings; and probably many of our most important modern improvements might have been invented or discovered centuries ago. Printing, to which we are so much indebted, existed in China from a very remote period; and Christian intercourse would have enabled the world to adopt that most valuable art. The shield which the Saracens threw around men of science might, under the influence of universal peace, have anticipated the inductive philosophy of Bacon. It is impossible for us to estimate the blessings of peace or the calamities of war. The ills with which the latter has scourged mankind only eternity can reveal. The cultivation of the mind, like the cultivation of the fields, requires peace. The student cannot pursue his train of thought, the philosopher cannot conduct his experiments, the scholar cannot devote himself to literature, nor can the schoolmaster give his lessons of wisdom amidst the din of arms. When once the dogs of war are let loose, every thing is in jeopardy; and learning and learned men are swept away as with the besom of destruction. Archimedes is not a solitary victim; nor were the Goths the only desolators whose barbarian conquest proved so fatal to knowledge. Every age has groaned under the Scourge of the sword; and to its baneful influence the present degraded state of mankind may in a great measure be attributed. 8. The condition of the great body of the people has hitherto been very unfavourable to general education. Continual labour, low wages, deep poverty, and miserable dwellings, have all had the most baneful influence on the minds and morals of the people. That man is intended to be a labourer, and that labour when limited to reasonable hours is conducive to health and enjoyment, will be generally allowed; but when the people must "rise up early, and late take rest," and pursue their toil for fourteen, sixteen, or eighteen hours a day; or when the employment is of such a wearisome character as thoroughly to exhaust the strength, we shall find but few comparatively who will attend to their intellectual and spiritual improvement. In many parts of the manufacturing districts labour has absorbed so much of the time of the operative as to leave him but little for reading or religious exercises; and in the agricultural counties the employment has been so fatiguing, and so little alleviated by machinery, that the peasant has had no inclination when his toil has been ended to apply himself to the cultivation of his intellect. We distribute tracts and religious books among people in this condition, but they are in many instances not read, or, if so, not understood. Unfortunately, also, the adult population is not the only portion of society thus doomed to sacrifice mind, morals, and eternal prospects, in working hard to obtain "the bread that perisheth;" the young of both sexes are early consigned to the same destructive process. In "The Reports of the Special Assistant Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, for 1843," we have one continued chain of evidence respecting the sad effects of early labour in interfering with the tuition of the rising generation. In some instances children are sent to the fields as early as four years old; and the toil sometimes has been so hard, that the mothers declared they were compelled to tie up the blistered hands of their children and send them to bed when they came home in the evening. One female stated, that her daughters returned from the fields too tired to eat. The facts brought to light by the "Commission to inquire into Mines and Collieries" are most appalling, and show how useless it is to expect that an enlightened and Christian population will spring up around us, while the rising generation is thus debarred from the benefits of an early intellectual and religious education. And The the evil is not of the growth of yesterday; it has been going on for ages. The history of the masses, as far back as we have any records to guide us, is one scene of toil and oppression, in which we see little else than the immolation of mind and morals on the altar of injustice, despotism, and ambition. We are no advocates for indolence. idleness of the Italian, the Asiatic, or the wealthy of most countries, is nearly as fatal to the cultivation of the mind as the hard or prolonged toil of the labourer and operative. Both are fatal to the character and happiness of man, and altogether incompatible with that enlightened and happy condition which our Heavenly Father intended to be the birthright of all his children. Insufficient remuneration for their labour has also operated most fatally in preventing the tuition of the young. "The workman is worthy of his meat." The Apostle James calls upon the rich men who had kept back the wages of their labourers, "to weep and howl for the miseries that were to come upon them." We shall not enter here on the discussion of wages, but only remark, that in a really Christian country neither competition nor speculation would proceed so far as to grind the face of the poor; nor would the cupidity of the buyer, or the avarice of the landowner or manufacturer, doom the labourer to a state bordering on starvation. He who purchases an article cannot call himself a Christian if he wishes to obtain it at a price which would rob the operative of his daily bread. And surely the receiver of rents or profits to the amount of thousands a year can lay no claim to the sympathies of humanity, if the peasants or operatives by whose toil he gets his wealth are the recipients of such paltry wages as to exclude them from the ability of giving to their children a proper education. "The cries" of these oppressed victims of avarice, luxury, and ambition "enter into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth." Education can never thoroughly prosper until the people can educate themselves. Charity-schools hitherto have been a failure. What costs nothing is generally but little esteemed. Besides the responsibility of training their offspring aright, ought not to be taken from the parents' hands. To do so is to contravene one of the most valuable and benevolent intentions of our Heavenly Father; and therefore every parent in the country ought to have ample means of bringing up his children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." For ages poverty has been the antagonist of education. The labourer has been so poor, so badly paid, that to gain a few pence per week he has been compelled to rob his offspring of all the means of tuition. We are no croakers respecting the present times; we believe that our age is the best that has ever dawned since man fell; yet bad is the best. The scene is truly dismal the farther we penetrate into antiquity. The slaves that built the pyramids, and the serfs of after ages, were miserably remunerated for their toil, and not more capable of paying for the schooling of their offspring than the negroes who still groan under the yoke of bondage. We have reason to believe there were no general schools for the peasants and operatives of past ages; but had such institutions existed, the multitude would not have been able to avail themselves of the benefits thus conferred. Deep poverty has always been of a demoralizing tendency on the generality of mankind. "Give me neither poverty nor riches," is a prayer which exhibits no common degree of insight into the philosophy of character. We have heard the poor lectured on the blessings of poverty; but after all, we have rarely seen those who descant so eloquently upon the advantages of such a condition abandon their wealth for the sake of participating the benefits of destitution. That want may be sanctified we do not deny, because all things work together for good to them that love God;" but then it would be difficult to point out many profits derivable from this source which might not be obtained at a less costly rate. Besides, we find the Scriptures continually speaking of indigence as an evil; and the ignorance and vice with which it is commonly associated are painful examples of its baneful influence on the minds and morals of its unhappy subjects. God has made ample provision for the wants of all his creatures; "He openeth his hand, and satisfieth the want of every living thing." The fowls, the beasts, and the fishes are well clothed, well housed, and well fed. Many of them he clothes in the richest robes, and feeds with the most delicious dainties. And surely it was not his wish that man, who is the especial favourite of the skies, should be doomed to such incessant toil and abject poverty as to be unable to cultivate his own seraphic powers, or educate his offspring. The miserable dwellings of many of the poor have a most demoralizing tendency. Man is a being of many wants; and his intellectual and moral character is intimately connected with his physical condition. The food on which he lives, the garments in which he is clad, the house in which he resides, and the scenes on which he looks, all exert a most important influence on his moral nature. The Commissioners who inquired into the condition of women and children in the agricultural districts, frequently refer to the dwellings of the peasantry as having the most baneful influence on their characters. Mr. A. Austin, one of these gentlemen, gives the following diagram of the bed-room of one of the cottages which he examined :— Bed A was above and one below. The bed-room was The dwelling contained two rooms, one by the sides of the chimney, which were ten feet square, not including the recesses eighteen inches deep. There were eleven persons living in this miserable hut, and all slept in the same bed-room. occupied by the father and mother, a little boy a year and a half old, and an infant four months. Bed B was occupied by two twin daughters aged twenty, and another sister aged seven; and four sons. Silas, aged seventeen, John, aged fifteen, James, aged fourteen, and Elias, aged ten, slept in bed C. The roof was thatched; the sleeping-room in the middle was seven feet high; and there about fifteen inches square, and which was was one window opposite the fire-place, the only one to the room.* Sir F. H. Doyle, another of these Commissioners, states, that in Northumberland the dwellings of the farm labourers generally contained but "one He adds, "In point of construction and room-perhaps seventeen by fifteen feet." ventilation nothing could be said for them." He further remarks, "When we find that a whole family, father, mother, and children of both sexes and of all ages, live together, and have to sleep together in one and the same room, any degree of indelicacy and unchastity ceases to surprise, and the only wonder is, that the women should behave so well as they do." An inquiry into the miserable and crowded dwellings in Man elsewhere, would most revolting to chester, London, and bring to light scenes humanity, and deeply disgraceful to our to hear much of the horrors of the middle professed Christian philanthropy. We used passage, and of the numbers of negroes that were sacrificed in the pestiferous holds of slave-ships; but we have among us, perhaps under our own eyes, dwellings quite as baneful as the hulls of the slaver. The African was doomed to these floating *Report on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, pp. 19, 20. + Ibid, 298. |