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The torpor of

it is possible for a human creature to become. his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble or tender sentiment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging. ...His dexterity at his own particular trade seems to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, solid and martial virtues.' These evils were to be palliated, though not removed, by the provision, ‘at a very small expense, of the most essential parts of education, namely to read, write and account.' And this would be accompanied by the further advantage that the more the masses of the people were 'thus instructed, the less liable they would be to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition'.'

Remembering what reverence is due to Adam Smith's character, and how vast the service which in other directions he rendered to economic thought, do we not feel that there is much to regret in the tone and tacit assumptions of this passage? It had a mischievous influence. Comparatively few people there were, all through those early days of the Industrial Revolution, who spared a thought for the needs of the new populations, rising then in such startling numbers and with such unanswerable claims on national care. The very people whose hearts would have been, under present conditions, most sensitive to their distress, had been somehow or other brought under the spell of thinking the whole black business 'inevitable,' and to be mitigated, if at all, by the spelling-book and the multiplication table. Yet then was the time when institutions should have put forth unexampled efforts to grapple with social problems. For more than twenty years, at the end of last century and at the beginning of this, England was at war on two fronts, and not the least perilous to her real civilisa

1 Wealth of Nations, Book v. chapter I.

tion was the struggle, so long neglected, with barbarism and ignorance and social degeneracy in the industrial districts of the North, and the rapid increase in the poor quarters of great cities. This national failure in timely sensitiveness to an urgent social danger has borne evil fruit for us ever since. Had not the opportunity been missed, the spiritual and intellectual movements at the beginning of the century might have found a common ground of effort and thus of better mutual understanding, while the new social conditions were still plastic enough to mould into fitting shape, and in time to avert the inconceivable waste of resources which has marked English life throughout the whole century.

But just as the economical writers brought about a partial view of social problems, so did many of the political writersby leaving out all but the more mechanical aspects of government-lead many people unconsciously to attach undue importance to the administrative and mechanical, as distinguished from the ethical and institutional, elements in plans for political reform. And similarly the educational writers on both sides (though more on one side than on the other), by leaving out of account many elements necessary to the character-forming side of education, and by their frequent lack of insight into the true needs of child-life, led many people to attach an undue importance to mere mechanical routine in elementary education. When the real significance of the omission began to be perceived, it dismayed those who understood that education is necessarily concerned with duty and conduct, and that in order to measure the difference between varying types of liberal, as distinct from technical, education, one must ascertain the attitude of each towards that point in human character which has been called the focus of 'thought, affection and endeavour.'

One of the first to realise the danger of the new movement and to define what was really needed and what were the special difficulties which would be met with in England in

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providing the right kind of popular education, was Wordsworth. To him we owe an incalculable debt. And in the earlier years of the century we find in this matter of education, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and what one may call the Burke tradition, ranged against Brougham, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. These are the two sections, as then divided, to which I referred before. It is true that within each section there were then and afterwards inner divisions and sharp conflicts too. But, speaking broadly, the best minds and hearts in England ranged themselves under one banner or the other according to their instinctive sympathies and their sense of dominant need.

If we steep ourselves in the literature and memoirs of a great movement, such as were the Utilitarian or the Tractarian movements, do we not come to feel that what really was guiding the judgment of the leaders of it and colouring their aims was not so much the formulated expression of their doctrines (that comes later and gradually, and the more precise it is the more certain a signal is it of approaching rupture), as the larger and deeper, though unformulated and only instinctively felt, notions and tendencies behind it? Great bodies of doctrine like that of laissez faire proceed from deep-seated and long-standing social causes, and the formulated, codified expression of those opinions always fails in some measure to reflect the indefiniteness of the governing impulse or to expose its underlying assumptions, while at the same time it tends to exaggerate the lucidity of the dominant aim.

This may be said to be true of those who represented the two conflicting ideals about national education at the beginning of the century and at that most critical time when, if ever, some kind of unification might have been possible. Each section lived in a world, in an atmosphere, of its own. A striking proof of this is found in the lives of the two men who were respectively, and during the same term of years, the chief organisers, behind the scenes, of the new Anglican developments and of English political democracy-Joshua Watson and Francis

Place. Both were Londoners, born in the same year, 1771; both left school before they were 16; both were early engaged in trade; the one, a wine-merchant, the other, a tailor; both were men of extraordinary abilities and tact in organization, conducting negotiations, and working for great national objects, through committees and without self advertisement; both were indefatigable, both sincerely devoted to ideal aims, both preferred to work behind a curtain; both had very much indeed to do with the educational developments of the time— Watson with the foundation of the National Society, Place with the early conduct of the British and Foreign School Society; both lived to ripe old age, and the two died within a year of one another. During many critical years of anxious and extremely important work the two must have been constantly within a mile of one another in Westminster. Yet they might have lived and worked in entirely different hemispheres. The outlook of the two men was wholly different. Not once, I believe, is Place's name mentioned in Watson's Memoirs, or Watson's in Mr Wallas' admirable life of Place. Had Place had reason to think or speak of Watson, or Watson to refer to Place, I fear that in each case it would have been with some horror at the other's proceedings and without much sympathy for what was present in the other's work and lacking in his own. These two men are really typical of the two sections in the then active English life. Neither section seems in the least to have realised that the other was anything more than, as the case might be, a repulsive temporary phenomenon or the lingering survival of an obsolete superstition. Neither perceived that the other derived from a line of spiritual and intellectual ancestors extending back over two centuries; neither imagined that the other would have, in one form or another, developers of its tradition without break in the succession.

On both sides of the controversy were men of the highest ability and noblest aims. Yet the one side exaggerated the importance of purely intellectual training and the other side.

underestimated the extreme urgency of doing quickly whatever could be done to meet the startling dangers of the new social developments. One idealised book knowledge, the other (under the influence of Coleridge's idea of clerisy) idealised the actual performances of the existing Establishment. There was some bitterness and contempt on both sides and much needless, as well as much inevitable, misunderstanding. Both, in the early years at any rate, had a mechanical idea of education, and, as Wordsworth said in 1828, "from not understanding the composition of our nature and the composition of society were misled and hurried on by zeal into a course which could but lead to disappointment." Slowly each side began to perceive the failure of its efforts and the mistaken limitation of its aims. A succession of mediators began to appear--Sarah Austin on the one side, Dr Arnold and Dr Hook on the other—all these, with Frederick Denison Maurice later, carried on in effect the tradition of Burke, Wordsworth and Coleridge. At every point throughout the century when a revolutionary stir has come into the air and when after periods of slumber or fatigue sudden progress has begun to be made in the development of social ideas, the same controversy has begun to quicken. All education really involves the question of conduct and of moral aims. At bottom there is a conflict among us in regard to moral and social ideals. It is this, far more than any difference of opinion on the purely intellectual instruments of education, that has been in this country the secret cause of educational deadlock. The governing fact of the history of the educational struggle in England during the whole of this century has been this instinctive divergence of moral and social ideals—a divergence the depth and significance of which have only slowly been realised, if indeed they have ever been fully realised at all. In former days each party hoped to supersede the other and to foil as the case might be its revolutionary or reactionary plans. And whenever the true nature of the disagreement is suspected, a new danger arises in a disposition

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