It provides, in short, that a teaching which would not otherwise be given, but is of great public importance, should be supplied or supported.

Secondly, it is of great importance to the pupil. Individuals have different capacities, different impulses, different degrees of activity or diligence. The possessor of these faculties, under certain moral conditions, is of greater service to society than another would be in whom these characteristics are defective or wanting. Now if the progress of such persons could be secured by any process of natural selection, if the higher intellectual powers and qualities were as certain of making their way as bodily powers and, lower intellectual gifts can, there would be no need for any artificial selection by examination or certificate and for the artificial stimulants of rewards and aids. But it will probably be a long time before society can dispense with these assistances, and meanwhile its business is to make such use of the forces as are at its disposal, as will enable it to select and promote the greatest diligence and capacity, wherever it may be placed by birth or fortune.

These statements however as to the depressing effect of endowments on the wages of unendowed teachers, and of similar endowments on the remuneration of unassisted pupils, do not refer to general education. If the whole community were taught at the public charge, no one could suffer exceptionally or gain exceptionally; but all could gain, in so far as the instruction given increased the powers of labour by diminishing the amount of muscular or nervous excrtion, and so enhanced the enjoyments of society. An educated people works less and earns more than one which is untaught can. The reason

is obvious, if the reader will recall the definition of education given above-that, namely, which makes it to consist in the cultivation of the reflective faculties. Men in whom these faculties are developed see the end before them and the means to its achievement with greater clearness, and combine both ends and means with greater dexterity and swiftness, than uninstructed people can. To take one of the simplest and most familiar instances: a recruit who knows how to read and write can learn his drill in half the time in which a totally ignorant person can. Now it is said that it costs, on an average, £100 to teach each man to be a soldier. The sum may be exaggerated, but this does not affect the illustration. The British army is about 250,000 men, and according to this estimate it has cost £25,000,000 to instruct it in its calling. suppose that the average duration of service is ten years, and that primary education could reduce the cost by onehalf, there is an annual outlay of £2,500,000, which could be made £1,250,000 by the use of the economy of primary education. There are other and similar economies in manufacture and trade: for example, it is computed that the adoption of a decimal system in currency, weights, and measures, would save the services of half the clerks employed on the railways of Great Britain.

If we

A high standard of general education, as it promotes efficiency in the labourer, tends also to raise the rate of wages. Men who reflect on the conditions which surround labour, do not rashly incur risks; they make labour scarce in the best way in which it can be made scarce, by forethought; they make labour cheap, in the best way in which it can be made cheap, by increasing its efficiency, and thereupon the demand for it. For cheapness and

dearness in matters of political economy do not mean low and high prices, low and high wages, but efficiency and inefficiency, capacity and incapacity. The dearest labourer is not the man who gets most for his labour, but the man who does least for his money. This is, I admit, a truism; but it is a truism which, like many other axioms, is apt to be forgotten, most of all by employers of labour.

The maintenance of labourers during nonage, during temporary incapacity for work, after the time in which they become incapable of work, and during the intervals in which they are capable but unwilling or unable to work, is provided for in this country by laws which have been in existence for nearly three hundred years. They are peculiar to England, having been lately introduced into Scotland and Ireland, and existing, even in these countries, only in a modified form. They have produced, as I shall attempt to show, special and important economical consequences-consequences which remain, although the machinery of relief accorded under what are technically called the poor-laws, has been materially modified. Practically the English poor-law is a legal, and therefore compulsory, system of insurance against the risks of certain kinds of labour.

The feeling which has led men to consider it their duty to provide for the pressing wants of their poorer fellow-creatures is not the impulse of a social law, but of a corporate sympathy. It had no place in the ethics, public or private, of ancient civilization in the West; it sprang in the first place from the national wants and the national weakness of the Jewish race, was imported into early Christianity, and has been a special characteristic

of the latter religion. It was copied by Mohammed, and it has since been endorsed by many publicists and economists, who have ignored or repudiated that theory of human obligations by which this social rule has been sanctioned. If we look on men as merely possessed of animal life, it is clearly the interest of those who are strong in any sense and can work, to eliminate those who are weak and cannot contribute to the general aggregate of products and services. All the lower animals do so; they starve or kill their weaker fellows; they are unable to exchange services, but they know how to economize resources, and are wholly merciless or indifferent to the weak and ailing. The right to live on the part of all human beings now existent, till such time as they perish by natural causes, is a maxim which has no counterpart in the physical world, has no necessary connexion with social laws. It is a modern equivalent of Jewish sympathy, confined by the Jews to their own race, but extended by Christian teaching into a duty incumbent on all such men as are brought up under a Christian code. There is no part of political economy which diverges so widely from the rules of social morality and habit, and seems to contradict them so pointedly, as is found in its interpretation of the aids given by charity or sympathy to weakness, suffering and incapacity. Undoubtedly, if we considered society as a mere machine for collecting and distributing material enjoyments, and for stimulating the means by which these enjoyments could be enlarged and economized, we should leave the weak and unprotected poor to perish, if indeed we did not arrest peremptorily such a drain on the resources of those who work and possess, on behalf of those who are destitute and incapable, by the violent

extinction of such useless lives. And, as my readers are aware, there do arise, happily under rare circumstances, occasions on which the economical view of human life necessarily overrides the moral and religious.

Here it will be desirable to give a short sketch of the history of those enactments which are known collectively and familiarly as the poor-laws. They are in effect a means for bestowing assistance on the destitute poor (in the failure of voluntary effort to meet the want) by a public charity, to which all contribute according to their income, or in some cases according to their expenditure. It is needless to say that any discrimination in interpreting the claims of such recipients must be of a very general character, and that (if a few broad lines of distinction be laid down between the measure and manner of relief in cases of infancy, sickness and old age, as contrasted with able-bodied destitution) all are equally entitled to assistance when in want.

Before the Reformation, and during the time in which the numerous monasteries were in being, the wants of such poor as were reduced to penury by great necessity were relieved through these sources of charity. Land was generally distributed, the leases of corporations were easy or beneficial, excessive population was checked by the celibacy of the monastic and clerical orders, and, according to all testimony, absolute want was on the whole unknown. The scene changed after the epoch referred to. The monastic lands were divided among the rapacious and prodigal courtiers of Henry and Edward; the lands of the bishops in a great degree shared the same fate; sheep-farming, the obvious resource of landowners without capital or enterprise, became general; and the mass.