picture. The ticket-bearer yields his badge of honour to whoever can excel him; and the desire of obtaining and the fear of losing the mark of distinction, create, as may easily be conceived, no common degree of enterprize and exertion. Boys have a prize when they are moved from one class to another, as the monitor has also from whose class they are removed. Mr. Lancaster has established a sort of paper currency of tickets. These tickets are given for merit two tickets are worth a paper kite; three worth a ball; four worth a wooden horse, etc.

It is no unusual thing for me to deliver one or two hundred prizes at the same time. And at such times the countenances of the whole school exhibit a most pleasing scene of delight; as the boys who obtain prizes commonly walk around the school in procession, holding the prizes in their hands, with a herald proclaiming before them, "These good boys have obtained prizes for going into another class." The honour of this has an effect as powerful, if not more so, than the prizes themselves.

A large collection of toys, bats, balls, pictures, kites, is suspended above the master's head beaming glory and pleasure upon the school beneath. Mr. Lancaster has also, as another incentive, an order of merit. No boys are admitted to this order but those who distinguish themselves by attention to their studies, and by their endeavours to check vice. The distinguishing badge is a silver medal and plated chain hanging from the neck. The superior class has a fixed place in the school; any class that can excel it may eject them from this place and occupy it themselves. Every member, both of the attacking and defending classes, feels of course the most lively interest in the issue of the contest.

Mr. Lancaster punishes by shame rather than pain; varying the means of exciting shame, because as he justly observes, any mode of punishment long continued loses its effect.

The boys in the school appointed to teach others are called monitors; they are in the proportion of about one monitor to ten boys. So that, for the whole school of one thousand boys, there is only one master; the rest of the teaching is all done by the boys themselves. Besides the teaching monitors, there are general monitors, such as, inspectors of slates, inspectors of absentees, etc.

298. Automatic Character of the Monitorial Schools

(The Philanthropist, vol. 1, p. 83. 1811)

The following description is taken from an article in an issue of the above-mentioned magazine, entitled "On the Importance of Promoting the General Education of the Poor." It shows well the automatic nature of the school, and also reveals the organizing genius of Lancaster,

One of the peculiar features of this plan is the extraordinary manner in which the talents of boys are drawn forth, and many instances may be given, where young lads, acting upon this system, have evinced energies which are rarely to be met with in mature age. In the Royal Free School, at the Borough Road, a little boy of twelve or thirteen years of age often commands the whole school, and that with the same ease to himself, and with equal obedience from the many hundred children of which the school is composed, as a military officer would experience with a body of well-disciplined troops; the firmness, promptness and decision attendant on military order are interwoven into the school discipline, but without the least severity; a constant activity is maintained, by which the minds of the children are amused; they acquire the more important habit of fixing their attention; their duties are made a pleasure, and their progress in learning is proportionally rapid.

In Shropshire and Staffordshire in the space of only eight months a boy scarcely seventeen has lately organized schools and instructed schoolmasters for above one thousand children; the affectionate and mild but firm conduct of this amiable lad rendered each school a scene of pleasure and delight, in which his steady application of the system of order proved its utility and excellence. When he took leave of one school, in order to open another at a different place, it was a most delightful sight to behold the whole school of children lamenting his departure, as they would the loss of their nearest friend. He introduced the system so completely into one school that the children required very little attention to execute the plan, and thereby teach themselves; to a person not an eye-witness it would scarcely seem credible, but it is a fact, that the master, who was a shoe-maker, would sit at the head of the school with his last and leather, and alternately work and overlook the tuition of the school; he had no occasion to exert himself to prevent confusion, for the order of the system was so far introduced into the habits of the children, that they would themselves be the first to correct the smallest disorderly movement; the success of this boy's labour was so great in one instance as to induce a countryman to go to the clergyman of the parish, who was the patron of the school, to complain that his children learned so much and so fast that, as he did not get on at such a rate when he was a child at school, he thought witchcraft alone could produce such an effect upon his children. The worthy clergyman, though scarcely able to refrain from laughter, was obliged to put on a grave countenance, and assure his parishioner that neither magic, incantation, nor witchcraft had anything to do in the business.

There are other young men who, before they were eighteen years of age, have organized schools for more than two thousand children.

299. The First Parliamentary Grant for Elementary Education (Montmorency, J. E. G. de, State Intervention in English Education, pp. 239-40. Cambridge, 1902)

From 1807 to 1833 was a period of investigation and discussion as to the need for state aid for elementary education, and the year 1833, when the first grant of parliamentary funds to help build schoolhouses was made, is a dividing point between the old condition of affairs and the new. This grant of aid, small as it was, formed a precedent from which the House of Commons has never turned back. The following description of the passage of the Act making the grant reveals something of the attitude of many Englishmen toward the question of public education.

On Saturday, August 17th, 1833, in a very empty House of Commons, a vote of £20,000 for the purposes of education was passed after a hot debate by 50 votes to 26 votes. Mr. T. B. Macaulay voted with the majority in favour of the grant. Lord Althorp explained that the object of the grant was to build schools where there already existed the means of carrying on such schools. In the debate Lord John Russell pointed out, in answer to a complaint that no ground for the experiment had been shown, that in the Report of the Education Committee in 1818 there were cases referred to of parishes which, if they could have been assisted in the first outlay, would afterwards have supported their own schools. This was still the case in 1833, and justified a vote for building grants. Mr. William Cobbett, the Member for Oldham, opposed the grant on the ground that education was not improving the condition of the country. In the country districts, he said, the father was a better man and a better labourer than his son. Reports on the table of the House proved, he declared, that men became more and more immoral every year. Then what had become of the benefits of education? Education had been more and more spread; but to what did it all tend? "Nothing but to increase the number of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses that new race of idlers. Crime, too, went on increasing. If so, what reason was there to tax the people for the increase of education? It was nothing but an attempt to force education it was a French - it was a Doctrinaire - plan, and he should always be opposed to it." It is difficult to realize that Mr. Cobbetta praiser of times past, a hater of State intervention, a despiser of French philosophy was the advanced reformer of his day. One does not usually couple such opinions with the conceptions of reform. Mr. Joseph Hume opposed the grant on the somewhat reasonable ground that it was too small to constitute a national system, and without such a system there was no justification for the grant. In the division on the grant he acted as one of the tellers for the Noes. The form

of vote was as follows: "That a Sum, not exceeding Twenty thousand pounds, be granted to His Majesty, to be issued in aid of Private Subscriptions for the Erection of School Houses, for the Education of the Children of the Poorer Classes in Great Britain, to the 31st day of March 1834; and that the said sum be issued and paid without any fee or other deduction whatsoever." The vote of £20,000 appears in the Revenue Act, 1833, as a grant for the erection of school houses in Great Britain.

300. Lord Macaulay on the Duty of the State to provide Education (Extract from an Address in the House of Commons, in 1847. Reported in Barnard's National Education in Europe, p. 747. Hartford, 1854)

Among the early champions of a general state system of education for the masses was Thomas Babington Macaulay. In defending the minutes of the Committee of Council on Education relative to nationalizing education, he said, in part:

I hold that it is the right and duty of the State to provide for the education of the common people. I conceive the arguments by which this position may be proved are perfectly simple, perfectly obvious, and the most cogent possible. . . . All are agreed that it is the sacred duty of

every government to take effectual measures for securing the persons and property of the community; and that the government which neglects that duty is unfit for its situation. This being once admitted, I ask, can it be denied that the education of the common people is the most effectual means of protecting persons and property? On that subject I can not refer to higher authority, or use more strong terms, than have been employed by Adam Smith; and I take his authority the more readily, because he is not very friendly to State interference; and almost on the same page as that I refer to, he declares that the State ought not to meddle with the education of the higher orders; but he distinctly says that there is a difference, particularly in a highly civilized and commercial community, between the education of the higher classes and the education of the poor. The education of the poor he pronounces to be a matter in which government is most deeply concerned; and he compares ignorance, spread through the lower classes, neglected by the State, to a leprosy, or some other fearful disease, and says that where this duty is neglected, the State is in danger of falling into the terrible disorder. He had scarcely written this than the axiom

FIG. 78.

was fearfully illustrated in the riots of 1780. I do not know if from all history I could select a stronger instance of my position, when I say that ignorance makes the persons and property of the community unsafe, and that the government is bound to take measures to prevent that ignorance. On that occasion, what was the state of things? Without any shadow of a grievance, at the summons of a madman, 100,000 men rising in insurrection a week of anarchy Parliament besieged your predecessor, sir, trembling in the Chair- the Lords pulled out of their coaches the Bishops flying over the tiles - not a sight, I trust, that would be pleasurable to those who are now so unfavorable to the Church of England thirty-six fires blazing at once in London the house of the Chief Justice sacked the children of the Prime Minister taken out of their beds in their night clothes, and laid on the table of the horse guards and all this the effect of nothing but the gross, brutish ignorance of the population, who had been left brutes in the midst of Christianity, savages in the midst of civilization. . . . Could it have been supposed that all this could have taken place in a community were even the common laborer to have his mind opened by education, and be taught to find his pleasure in the exercise of his intellect, taught to revere his maker, taught to regard his fellowcreatures with kindness, and taught likewise to feel respect for legitimate authority, taught how to pursue redress of real wrongs by constitutional methods?

...

Take away education, and what are your means? Military force, prisons, solitary cells, penal colonies, gibbets all the other apparatus of penal laws. If, then, there be an end to which government is bound to attain if there are two ways only of attaining it if one of those ways is by elevating the moral and intellectual character of the people, and if the other way is by inflicting pain, who can doubt which way every government ought to take? It seems to me that no proposition can be more strange than this - that the State ought to have power to punish and is bound to punish its subjects for not knowing their duty, but at the same time is to take no step to let them know what their duty is.

301. Evils of apprenticing the Children of Paupers

(Report of the Reverend H. Mosely, Inspector, to the Committee of Council on Education for England. In a Report on Kneeler Hall Training School, 1851) Kneeler Hall Training School, twelve miles from London, was established in 1846 to train teachers for service in workhouse and penal schools, and was under the direct control of the Committee of Council on Education. The Report of the Poor-Law Board for 1850 showed that there were, on January 1, 1851, 43,138 children in the workhouses of England and Wales, and 838 teachers em