allowed. In other words, where 100 school-seats have been provided, only 59 children have been found to occupy them, not from lack of children, but from the difficulty of getting their parents to send them to school.

3. The third direction in which the present system breaks down, is in the imperfect provision for a sufficient education and training of the children who are sent to the inspected schools. The examination is annual, has 6 standards or degrees of acquirement to test, and the examiner has no means of enforcing in any case that a child shall continue at school until he has passed the 6th or highest standard, which is in fact nearly as little education as any child ought to possess before leaving school finally; consequently any number of the children so educated may never get beyond the first or second standard. Moreover, the examinations are not sufficiently framed to test the thinking faculties, and the moral consciousness of the children, as indeed it would be difficult to do at the age when they leave school.

Mr. Chadwick points out the desirability of half-time schools as an aid to the health and brightness of children, and therefore to their learning faculties. He states his experience of the dulness and feebleness begotten of slow, tiring, over-mental work and under-bodily work, in

* Vide "National Elementary Education."

a close vitiated atmosphere. In this the writer has little doubt he is perfectly right, and that after a child has attained twelve years of age half his time might with the advantages referred to be given up to some child-labour suited to his capabilities, with the second advantage that by a skilful adaptation of those capacities, the labour of children would go far to pay for their education and maintenance. This will be further alluded to when we come to speak of self-supporting schools. It is very satisfactory to read Mr. Chadwick's evidence of the estimation in which these half-time scholars are held by employers of labour.

The extensive and authoritative evidence presented, leaves us in no doubt that the machinery employed by society for the education and training of the children of the poor is lamentably defective, and excepting that of the district and separate schools, which present considerable improvements, it is not only defective but mischievous. The training of a workhouse has been shown to be more favourable to the production of cringing servility, masking brutality and dishonesty, than of manliness and virtue of debasement and proclivity to crime rather than to a healthy ambition. The education is of the most crude and mechanical kind, better fitted to reinforce vice than honest labour.

The State machinery for promoting education, though liberal in spirit, and to a great extent well

adapted to accomplish its object, is practically of little avail, for it neither reaches a third of the children requiring it, nor does it efficiently educate, much less train, those it does reach. The causes of its failure have been seen to be chiefly the absence of any power to compel the ignorant and unfeeling parents of poor children to send them to the schools and obtain for them the benefits provided; in this respect reminding us of the difficulties attending the introduction of vaccination, which though affording immunity from a loathsome and dangerous disease, and being a remedy perfectly innocent in its nature, painless in its application, and offered gratuitously to every poor person, is still neglected by them, and would be constantly unemployed but for the compulsory law respecting it, thus not only injuring their children but inflicting on society the continuance of a danger which might otherwise be destroyed.

A second chief cause of failure is distinguished in the difficulty of launching schools, and obtaining for them the amount of support necessary to qualify them for obtaining the Government aid, especially in the most neglected, because the poorest and most remote districts.

CHAPTER IV.

Scheme for the General Education and Training

of Children.

66

Perge modo et, quâ te ducit via, dirige gressum."

THE inferences naturally deducible from the foregoing statements are :

1. That teaching and training children for the duties and responsibilities of life constitutes a work of the highest and most responsible character to parents, to society, and to the State.

2. That the amount of pauperism and crime in the country is exceedingly great, and that it indicates a very insufficient performance of the work referred to.

3. That the public means now in operation for the education of the poor are inadequate to reach the requirements; chiefly for the reason that the very poor, the ignorant, or the selfish

parents of children cannot or will not send their children to the schools provided; but also because the number of schools and the staff of teachers are insufficient.

The Morning Post, in a recent article, writes:"It is terrible enough to know that thousands of wretched children, the offspring of parents who hate education with the bitter hatred of ignorance, and who hate virtue with the bitter hatred of vice, should be sent out daily into the streets to beg and thieve, and grow up in such unspeakable degradation of mind and body, as no Swift can picture in his satire, and no Dante in his scorn; but it is, in some senses, more terrible to know that in this great city-the centre of intelligence, of wisdom, of humanity, of wealth-other thousands of little ones, whose parents would be willing, and even thankful to see them fitly educated for that station of life to which it has pleased God to call them, should be left to suffer all the shame, and even the additional poverty, of the illiterate working man, for want, not of the desire to learn, but of the school in which to be taught."

It follows that the great desiderata are:

1. A law compelling parents and society to fulfil the important work devolving on them of educating and training the children committed to their care.

2. A scheme by which the expenses neces