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common in elections, but controlled and directed, without excess, in a peaceful way to a very useful purpose.'

In all this there is some mischief, and a great deal of mummery, The numbered tickets cannot possibly produce any thing except useless trouble. Mr. Lancaster resembles Count Rumford in other points as well as in his economy; and these petty and superfluous inventions remind us of the rules for eating hasty-pudding, and the directing-posts to the water-closet. His numbered tickets and his order of merit may be classed among those inventions which Jeremy Taylor so happily calls new-nothings. The prize tickets are objectionable on other grounds: they are unnecessary, because the master must always know when it is proper to bestow rewards; and they are mischievous, because thus constantly to hold out the stimulus of gain is inconsistent with any system of sound morality, to say nothing of the severer principles of Quakerism; for the whole spirit of Mr. Lancaster's, institutions is in direct opposition to the philosophy of the sect whereof he professes himself to be a member. The Churchman as well as the Quaker, the Christian of every denomination, and the philosophers of every age will tell him that boys should be taught to do their duty because it is their dutyfor its own sake, not for what they are to get by doing it. A well disposed boy finds sufficient inducements to exertion in his sense of its necessity, in the esteem of the master, the good opinion of his fellows, the delight of his parents, and the approbation of his own heart. Reward, when it is thought proper, should come to him as reward, not be presented to him as motive. Train up a child in the way he should go,' said Solomon, and when he is old he will not depart from it.' It is seldom that he departs from the way in which he has been trained, be that way evil or good; and if he is trained by the principle of gross self-interest, there is a danger that gross self-interest will become the ruling motive of his life. Mr. Lancaster's plan of rewards is founded upon the system of those base-minded sophists who make selfishness the spring of all our actions; it reduces that system to practice, it establishes it as a principle of education, and as far as its influence extends, goes to verify it by the deterioration of feeling which it must necessarily produce.

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When Mr. Lancaster banished the cyphering book for the sake of economy, he looked merely to the price of paper, and thought of nothing beyond. The advantages of the cyphering book are not confined to the repetition of the arithmetical process in the act of transcribing, nor to the lesson in writing, for which it serves. Boys delight in looking back upon their work when it is thus embodied, and seeing it grow under their hands: if this feeling be fostered till it becomes a habit, what can be more beneficial to themselves and

to

to society? They endeavour also to do that neatly which is to be preserved; the cyphering book is ornamented in a manner which is never attempted on the slate, not only because the materials do not admit of the same nicety of execution, but because no unnecessary care will ever be bestowed upon what is so soon to be obliterated: thus also the foundation is laid for a habit of essential importance to the individual and the community-the habit of doing their work neatly. And it should not be forgotten that the pleasure of finishing a book and carrying it home, becomes a motive of hope as powerful as any of Mr. Lancaster's prizes, while all its tendency is to good, and to good alone. This is not all which might be said. It was in the cyphering book that the master used to display his power of penmanship in all the varieties of ornamental writing, an art which we should be sorry to see lost. Even the flourishes, which Mr. Tomkins, the great professor of that art, regards with the same sort of contempt that the regular critic feels for an acrostic, are not without beauty; and we remember with pleasure the peus, angels, and eagles which were the admiration of our boyhood. For the sake of these head and tail pieces, the book wherein they had been flourished' was frequently preserved; to the son it became a point of comparison, and an object of blameless emulation; to the father it brought back the remembrance of his youth; and though the Arabians tell us that the remembrance of youth is a sigh,' it brings with it something more profitable than regret.

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Mr. Lancaster is an economist of every thing except of stimulants, and of these the wildest theorist in education never made so prodigal a use. This is apparent in his system of rewards; it is still more apparent in his system of punishments.

When the master observes a boy loitering or misspending his time, he writes upon a card, I have seen this boy idle, or talking, &c. &c.' gives it to the defaulter and orders him to present it at the head of the school. On a repeated or frequent offence, the lad to whom he presents the card has liberty (it is Mr. Lancaster's own expression) to put a wooden log round his neck weighing from four to six pounds. This instrument of punishment is so ingeniously contrived that, while the boy sits in his proper position, it rests on his shoulders; but the least motion displaces it, and it then becomes a dead weight upon the neck. If this is unavailing, it is common to fasten the legs of offenders together with wooden shackles, one or more according to the offence: the shackle is a piece of wood, from six inches to a foot long, tied to each leg; with these fetters the boy is ordered to walk round and round the school room. Sometimes the arms are fettered instead of the legs, the left hand tied behind the back, or wooden shackles fastened behind from elbow to elbow. Any single kind

of

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of punishment, continued constantly in use,' says Mr. Lancaster, becomes familiar and loses its effect: nothing but variety can con tinue the power of novelty.' Proceeding upon this principle, he has exerted all the power of his inventive talent in devising new and ingenious punishments. Sometimes the legs are tied together. Occasionally boys are put in a sack, or in a basket hoisted to the roof of the school, in the sight of all the other boys who smile at the 'birds in the cage.' This, he tells us, is one of the most terrible punishments which can be inflicted on boys of sense and abilities. Frequent offenders are yoked together by a piece of wood that fastens round all their necks; they are then made to parade the school, walking backwards; being obliged to pay very great attention to their footsteps, for fear of running against any object that might cause the yoke to hurt their necks, or to keep from falling down. Four or six can be yoked together in this way.' Sometimes an offender is tied to the desk in such a manner that he cannot free himself, and thus left in the school-room after school hours. A truant has a label fastened round his neck, and is then tied up to a post. If he repeats the crime, he is sometimes tied up in a blanket, and left to sleep at night on the floor in the school-house.' The advantages of these modes of correction are,' says Mr. Lancaster, that they can be inflicted so as to give much uneasiness to the delinquents without disturbing the mind or temper of the master.' This however would be but a poor invention for Mr. Lancaster,—it would only be bringing him to the same state of tranquillity with the Dutch boor at the Cape, who when he sees his slave flogged, determines the length of punishment by the number of pipes which he smokes the while, and looks on without feeling his mind disturbed, or smoking the faster. He therefore contrives to make punishment a matter of diversion and laughter for the spectators; having heard perhaps of the good effects which result from making an auto-da-fe a raree-show for the people, and the beneficial consequences arising to an English mob from regarding an execution as a holiday, which, in their own expressive language, they call hang-fair. When a boy gets into a singing tone in reading, he is hung round with matches, ballads, or dying speeches, and marched round the school with some boys before him, crying matches, last dying speech, &c. exactly imitating the dismal tones with which such things are hawked about the streets in London.' 'I believe,' says this great inventor of punishments, many boys behave rudely to Jews, more on account of the manner in which they cry "old clothes," than because they are Jews.' Having observed therefore the good which contempt produces in this instance, he resolves as the best way to cure a boy of the habit of reading with a singing tone,-to

exhibit

exhibit him as an object of contempt to his comrades! It produ ces excellent effects, he tells us: It is sure to turn the laugh of the whole school upon the delinquent,-it provokes risibility, in spite of every endeavour to check it, in all but the offender.' When a boy is disobedient to his parents, profane in his language, has committed any offence against morality, or is remarkable for slovenliness, it is usual for him to be dressed up with labels describing his offence, and a tin or paper crown upon his head. In that manner he walks round the school, two boys preceding him, and proclaiming his fault.' When a boy comes to school with dirty face or hands, and it seems to be more the effect of habit than of accident, a girl is appointed to wash his face in the sight of the whole school. This usually creates much diversion, especially when (as previously directed) she gives his cheeks a few gentle strokes of correction with her hand.' If a girl offend in the same manner, the same process takes place, her face being washed and slapped by a boy. Sometimes she is led round the school, a boy going before and proclaiming her fault, and sometimes the girl is made cryer to proclaim the slovenliness of a boy. Punishments like these we are told, are preferable to others more severe and in common practice. These punishments,' says an advocate and partizan, Mr. Lancaster has devised with a thorough knowledge of the nature of children, derived as much from long experience, as from just and even philosophical reasoning.'

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That a writer who himself sits in the seat of the scorner should approve a system of which scorn is the foundation, is perfectly consistent. With that writer we have a heavier account to settle, and therefore we will not stop to indict him for aiding and abetting Mr. Lancaster in these mischievous and abominable practices. If such a system be derived from philosophical reasoning,' alas for philosophy! if it be founded upon a knowledge of the nature of boys, alas for poor human nature! Preferable to severer punishments'?-in what English school, we ask, has any punishment been heard of half so severe as that of tying a boy up in a blanket, and leaving him to pass the night upon the floor in the schoolhouse? What if he should be seized with a fit in such circumstances, or a fit of terror, which is as perilous in its effects as disease; and which under such circumstances is so likely? Severer punishments! bodily pain is nothing to the sting of shame, nothing to the burning anguish produced by the sense of insult, inhumanity and injustice. However objectionable the rod may be, (and we should be among the first to advise its total disuse,) it becomes a wise and humane engine of punishment when compared with the yokes, and shackles, the cords and fetters and cages of Mr. Lancaster. Under the rod the sufferer is at least encouraged to fortitude by his school

fellows,

fellows, and is commiserated by them; but the natural consequence of a system which exposes him to scorn and outrage instead of sympathy, is, that it exasperates him against those by whom he feels himself injured as well as insulted; (for his offence is not against all his fellows;) and this generates a resentful and malicious disposition, or it hardens him, and renders him insensible to shame, the more likely and the more lamentable result. Such indeed is the peculiar absurdity of Mr. Lancaster's practice, that as the best boys are always most alive to shame, it renders punishment more severe precisely in proportion to the good qualities of the offender. It would be superfluous to point out all the follies, or rather all the abominations of a system which represents it as an indulgence for one boy to have the liberty' of acting as executioner to another, and putting the log round his neck; which trains up its pupils to find matter for mockery and laughter, in the shame and humiliation of a comrade, making his pain their pleasure, and which, by calling in the girls to smack the boy's faces, is so admirably adapted to encourage the decency, reserve, and modesty, of the female character! When Mr. Coleridge in a lecture at the Royal Institution, upon the New System of Education, came to this part of the subject, he read Mr. Lancaster's account of these precious inventions verbatim from his own book, and throwing the book down with a mixture of contempt and indignation, exclaimed, No boy who has been subject to punishments like these will stand in fear of Newgate, or feel any horror at the thought of a slave ship!'

Of these inventions the whole and sole merit is exclusively Mr. Lancaster's. Dr. Bell's system has as little to do with yokes and shackles, as it has with prize tickets, orders of merit, and plated chains. In Mr. Lancaster's school, the boy who takes place of another, leads the vanquished to his inferior station by the hair of his head. His partizans no doubt will tell us that this amiable practice also is founded upon a thorough knowledge of the nature of boys, and derived from just and philosophical reasoning,'just from the same philosophy as his system of punishments; and it would be insulting the common sense of every reader who possesses common feeling, were we needlessly to point out how certainly such a practice must create and foster in the boys the same spirit of coarse and vulgar insolence in which it has been conceived. This also is Mr. Lancaster's peculiar invention; his claim to it is undisputed; the merit of teaching boys to inflict pain and insult upon each other, and of employing scorn and mockery as principles of education, is wholly and solely his own. Of these moral poisons which Mr. Lancaster's desperate quackery has introduced into the system, Dr. Bell speaks only once, and that incidentally,

A boy,' he says, of eight or nine years of age (I speak not, as in

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