principle of the Bible and nothing but the Bible as the authoritative groundwork of our religion, and the use of the Bible as the one schoolbook, the reading-book, the parsing-book, the spelling-book, &c." He further quotes the reports of the clerical inspectors, Moseley and Noel, as bearing upon his more than doubt "whether this perpetual, even if not indiscriminate use of the Scriptures as a school-book, accomplishes its religious purpose." And (at p. 406) after proposing to leave "the higher and more peculiar mysteries" to be taught " at shorter but more hallowed times," the Reviewer thus beautifully explains his idea of the "religiousness" of a secular school:

"At the same time, what an ample field does this less frequent, it may be, but far more forcible mode of religious teaching leave for the cultivation of what we mean by religiousness! The sense of the eternal presence and providence of God, the supremacy of conscience, the feeling of responsibility, the odiousness of theft, of gluttony, of lying, of meanness, tyranny, cruelty, malevolence, selfishness, the greatness and amiability of truth, generosity, kindliness, may perpetually, throughout every course of education, be suggested, implied, instilled into the affections, implanted in the depths of the open and yielding heart. These things the teacher may communicate, respectively and in detail, as the result of every lesson, as the ordinary and familiar topics of every day. Such revelations as these are the religion of childhood,—they are the preparation, the groundwork for the great and amazing truths of the gospel. These, and such as these, the common property of all born in a Christian land, the elementary Christian teacher may surely, without offence to any one, detail to his pupils, as Mr. Noel says, 'in a thousand particulars." "Would that we could induce all reasoning and earnest Christians to consider, whether this religiousness, as well as that which may be taught out of history, sacred and profane; out of geography, where the disposition of the parts of the world for the promotion of industry, commerce, mutual advantage, might be incidentally shewn; out of natural history, that living illustration of the Divine wisdom; out of every elementary science, whether this is not the more likely course, under the Divine blessing, to awaken the mind to an appreciation of the blessings which flow from the great truths of the Christian revelation; whether, rather than the dry, hard, monotonous inculcation of these truths, this gradual expansion of the religious intellect, this quiet and unobserved training of the religious affections, this awakening the desire of more definite knowledge, to be supplied at its proper time, this gentle stimulation of the innate and holy curiosity of the human mind as to spiritual and invisible things, will not lead to the more deep and lasting implantation of the vital articles of our religion in the minds of the people."-P. 407.

We think it will be admitted by all, except the mere bigots for creeds (who are fewer and fewer every day), that the functions of a secular school thus conducted would have a far more truly religious character than those in which "the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible," is the avowed maxim. Truly, "such revelations as these are the religion of childhood," adapted to its "innate and holy curiosity," and fitting it, in due time, for a manly at once and reverential use of the Scriptures. As these views become more generally admitted, (as the persuasiveness of their advocacy, joined to their intrinsic value, promises,) it will be found unnecessary to complicate the arrangements of State schools even to the extent proposed by Dr. Hook as a solution of the sectarian difficulty. He proposes that the State should undertake the secular education alone, but that it should also see that religious (doctrinal) instruction be duly given, by requiring every child

to bring on Monday morning a certificate of attendance at some Sundayschool or other the day before, and also by setting apart the afternoons of Wednesdays and Fridays for religious instruction in two class-rooms, in the one of which the clergy should meet the children of Church people, and in the other Dissenting ministers should meet the children of Dissenters. Now, as Dissent is not one, but many, Dr. H. ought, on his own principles, to provide a separate class-room for every sect; nay, we are not by any means sure that the clergy would not require two rooms at least, in order to provide against religious dissension. But such a multiplication of equal religious facilities for all sects and parties, is evidently out of question; while, short of it, the sectarian difficulty would not be solved;-another great practical argument, we think, in favour of the Quarterly Reviewer's proposal to be content, on behalf of State education, with religiousness such as no party can object to, and leave what each calls religion more peculiarly, to the direct agencies of religious denominations at other times and places.

Having vindicated the right, if not the duty, of the State to educate, limiting its function as schoolmaster to the secular and moral training of children, we go on to another branch of the question, namely, the need of State interference. Though the right be granted, it does not necessarily follow that it must be wise or desirable to exercise it, if the voluntary agency of individuals can be proved adequate to the task. Those who deny the right of the State, are especially bound to shew the sufficiency of voluntaryism for the work. And this Mr. Baines has endeavoured, by most industrious and patient statistics, to prove. We think his attempt an utter failure, and shall give our reasons for thinking so.

In the first place, it is not to be assumed that the amount of education thus far prevalent is all attributable to the "voluntary principle." Voluntaryism has claim to the chief merit, but not to the whole. It has been both aided by Government help and stimulated by fear of Government interference. Mr. Swaine (p. 12) rightly reminds Mr. Baines, that "to serve his argument, the whole of the school provision referred to in Lord Kerry's returns and Dr. Hook's presumed additions, should have been made without Government aid. So far, however, is this from being the fact, that £395,000 of the amount expended, it seems, arose from Parliamentary grants, besides a further sum, not specified, by a Queen's letter. These amounts must be deducted, and their results set in abatement of the proof of the sufficiency of voluntary effort." For many years past, we believe scarcely one out of the many schools built in connection with the National Society or the British and Foreign School Society has been raised solely by voluntary subscriptions. The annual Parliamentary grant, varying from £10,000 to £70,000, has been applied in aid of local effort, by giving one-third or one-half, or other proportion, as the case might be, on condition of the rest being contributed from private sources. On the average, about one-third of the money spent in building day-schools for the poor has been Parliamentary money.

And Government stimulus has been still more effective, perhaps, than Government help, in urging on the exertions of the voluntary principle. On each occasion on which Government has done or attempted any thing in the way of active interference, a new and un

wonted zeal has seemed from that time to pervade the voluntary system. In 1839, the Educational Committee of the Privy Council was formed, not without a good deal of High-Church jealousy being felt and expressed as to its ultimate purpose. Immediately afterwardswe do not say that precedence and sequence are cause and effect-yet immediately afterwards, the National Society by a splended effort (and an effort it was, such as cannot be often repeated) raised £151,985 for educational purposes. Yet, vast as this sum appears, it is little when referred to the scale of a nation's wants. If funded at 5 per cent., for the annual support of schools, instead of being laid out in building them, it would have given an addition of 8s. 4d. per year to the schoolmaster's salary in each parish; and where there are two, three or twenty schools in a parish, it would have yielded a proportionate fractional part of 8s. 4d. annually to each master.

In the spring of 1843, Sir James Graham proposed his Factories' Education Bill, which, being founded on the principle of religious ascendancy, was opposed by the Dissenters throughout the kingdom and defeated. Immediately on this victory, the leading bodies of Dissenters felt that they had incurred a new responsibility, in rejecting a State measure, to provide adequate educational means from voluntary sources. The Wesleyans pledged themselves to raise £200,000 in the course of ten years, and the Independents, £80,000 or £100,000. And these munificent sums are now in course of payment and outlay for new school-houses. But in these noble efforts there is no provision made for the annual support of the schools now in course of erection. And this effort, ensuing upon the withdrawal of Sir James Graham's objectionable measure, was confessedly the effect of suggestion from the State. So that voluntaryism itself can do great things only under high pressure.

At this moment the same fact is manifested. The declaration of Lord J. Russell's Government in favour of national education on a comprehensive scale appears (if uniform sequence proves cause and effect) to have decided the British and Foreign School Society to institute four new normal and model schools in various districts of England. And these schools will be built in great part out of Parliamentary money. The voluntaryism of the British and Foreign School Society is excited to build normal schools with Government funds (together with private ones) by the apprehension that Government may soon undertake to do that much-neglected work itself.

We say, then, in no invidious tone, but as the record of simple fact, that voluntaryism has not hitherto worked unaided nor unstimulated by that State agency which some of its ultra-advocates now desire altogether to repudiate. And, with this important qualification, we go on to inquire, whether enough has been done and is doing, even thus, for the education of the people, without additional or different help from Government. We decidedly think not. We think the State is imperatively called upon to do much more, and in some respects to adopt new modes of action.

The voluntary principle is of fluctuating and unreliable force. It can make great efforts on great occasions; but the continual, equable, though smaller effort, year by year, is the greater difficulty. It is easier to build a school-room once for all, than to maintain its annual expenses,

as experience continually shews. Then, the voluntary principle is chiefly effective within narrow limits. It may bring the wealthy and educated classes of a moderate-sized town and neighbourhood into joint action on behalf of the poor and ignorant of the same district; but it does not proportionately provide for the educational needs of those districts (which our territorial division of labour renders increasingly numerous) in which the poor and ignorant hold more than the average proportion to the wealthy and educated classes. There wants an equalizing power which may fertilize the barren regions-whether the Spitalfields of great towns or the poorer agricultural districts of the counties -from the superfluous resources of the more favoured regions. There is not, we believe, at the present time, a single voluntary organization, unless it be Wesleyan Methodism, that has any pretensions to this ubiquity of equalized action. None of our educational societies can claim any thing approaching to it. And the same insufficiency of voluntary societies is experienced in the want of adequate provision for the training of masters. A small local organization may suffice to build a school and even provide for its annual costs; but to provide a master implies co-operation with some hundreds of other schools, on something like a national scale, for the payment of charges annually necessary for the whole, but only falling palpably upon each when a new master or mistress is to be provided. In these cases it is often necessary to send a young man or woman to a training-school for six months. In fact, the inadequate supply of teachers is now, and always has been, the weakest point of the voluntary system (so called), aided though it has been by large State donations to the normal schools of the National and the British and Foreign School Societies. The greatest educational want at this time is in the item of teachers.

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Statistics have been very diligently wielded, and ably too, with a view to shew the sufficiency or insufficiency of the present educational vision for England and Wales. (The Scotch and Irish schools are, by common consent, left out of view at present, as having been respectively put on such a footing of express legal provision as was thought satisfactory by former Legislatures). We do not propose to deal at present with minute statistics. We would not disparage that science, or art, whichever it be called: it is a very useful one in many cases; but we find it very little reliable in the case before us. Though professedly one of the exact sciences, it is sadly inexact here. It deals, indeed, with numbers; but the reasonings applied to those numbers, and even the data upon which they are assumed, may or may not be correct. There is a vast deal of guess-work unavoidably at the basis. Supposing this, assuming that, such and such figures come out. But another statistician doubts this, and denies that; and the figures are invalidated. And even when the arithmetical data are agreed upon, it is curious to see how variously clever men will reason upon them. In the course of this great education question, a most singular dispute has arisen as to the conclusions to be drawn from certain given premises, shewing how inexact and fallible the statisticians are, though dealing with an exact, a demonstrative (as being a mathematical) science. It is instructive to record the dispute. Dr. Hook had appealed to "one simple fact," by way of shewing the inadequacy of the present annual outlay on schools to the educational wants of the country. That "fact" was, that the

largest Parliamentary grant, if employed in building new school-rooms, would provide accommodation for only 93,750 scholars, and that this number represents "only one-fourth part of the annual permanent increase of the population, which proceeds at the rate of nearly 365,000 in the year." (P. 9.) Mr. Baines took the Dr. up sharply for a doublyblundering statistician; firstly, for having cited the annual increase 365,000, which is that of the whole United Kingdom, in an argument which has reference simply to England and Wales; and, secondly, for implying (as his words above quoted do imply, if they are not idle words) that a permanent annual addition to the school accommodation of the country was required equal to the annual addition to its population. Whereas, Mr. Baines argued, if one-tenth of the population were previously assumed to be at school, the same proportion, namely, onetenth of the annual increase, is all that requires to be provided with additional accommodation. (The proportion, indeed, Mr. B. shews, is somewhat less than this, as the annual increment is not entirely through excess of births, but partly through diminution of deaths, that is, an increased duration of life.) It seemed to Mr. Baines and to many of his readers that the case was so plain as only to want pointing out. The only difficulty seemed to be in imagining, that Dr. Hook could have been such a blunderer as to suppose that all the additional population of every year were to go to school from the day of their birth to that of their death. Yet his use of the figures, in the connection in which he had appealed to them, obviously meant this, if it meant any thing. We ourselves felt that Dr. H. was a poor statistician, and that the strength of his pamphlet did not lie in his figures of arithmetic. We named the odd blunder he had made, in two or three private circles, and were surprised beyond measure to find one clever and clear-headed man after another hesitating to say that Dr. Hook was wrong, and some arguing that the increment of the population was all in the item of young children, and so forth; though most persons with whom we conversed saw clearly that the proportion of children of school-age to the increased population will, of course, be the same as ever (whether one-tenth or any other proportion), so long as the average of human life throughout the country remains the same. But, to our surprise, the Westminster Reviewer, in a note which turns the tables of scornful contempt upon Mr. Baines, and, without condescending to argue the point, insists that Dr. Hook's view is perfectly correct and Mr. Baines's "stark naught." The Reviewer's words are these:

"Mr. Baines, in his third letter to Lord John Russell, thinks he replies to the above statement by shewing that the increase of population referred to includes the whole of the United Kingdom; which rather strengthens than weakens the case; for, neither in Ireland nor Scotland could private subscriptions be collected to an extent sufficient to build 625 school-houses, with the otherwise inadequate grant of £75,000. Mr. Baines then proceeds to commit the extraordinary error of supposing that the annual increase of 201,457 in the population of England and Wales is an increase alike in the number of the old, the middleaged and the young, which, he says, must be divided by 8, to give the number of children requiring instruction,-reducing it, therefore, to 25,182. It is almost a waste of time to meet such assertions, for it is a self-evident proposition, not requiring a moment's reflection, that, when an increase of population cannot be traced to immigration, it must arise from an excess of births over deaths, and that the whole increase must be in the numbers of the juvenile part of the popu