Education and social movements, 1700-1850

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EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

/I

3> .

EDUCATION & SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS 1700-1850

BY

A. E. DOBBS

(Formerly Fellow of Kin^s College ^
Cambridge)

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS

I9I9

TO

ALBERT MANSBRIDGE

FmST GENEBAL SECRETABY 09 THE WOBEEBS*
BDITOATIONAIi ASSOCIATION

PREFACE

The chapters contained in this volume were intended
to form part of a history of English popular education
in modern times, with special reference to movements
of democratic origin or tendency, the significance of
which has received new emphasis in recent years
through the rise of the Workers' Educational Associa-
tion. They were completed before the outbreak of
the war, when I was compelled by a breakdown in
health and other circiunstances to lay aside the task,
having done Httle more than set in order my materials
for the remaining and, as I hoped, more important
sections. In preparing this part of the work for pubh-
cation I have thought it best to make few alterations,
adding little in the way of fresh matter beyond what
was required in order to define more clearly the position
reached at the close of the period with which it deals.
In a subsequent volume I hope to complete my original
design, by continuing the narrative down to the present
day.

Though the title may suggest a broader field of
inquiry than is commonly associated with the subject
of education, the matters discussed in certain passages,
especially in the first and third chapters, may be thought
more appropriate to a work on economics. Yet there
is truth in the paradoxical statement of a modern
writer, that progress in Enghsh education has owed less

viii PEEFACE

to the zeal of its advocates than to changes in the
structure of social life which have often no apparent
connection with educational movements. The ideal of
universal elementary instruction is at least as old as
the Eeformation, but the first organised effort to
provide schools for the poor of England came at the
close of the seventeenth century, when the rehgious
conscience awoke to the problems of social degradation
and urban poverty ; and the movement which led to
the modern system of elementary schools commenced
a hundred years later, when society was in the throes
of the Industrial Eevolution. The sequence of events
points clearly to an economic factor underlying the
growth of educational demands ; and though it is
possible to press the analysis too far in assigning
motives to the pioneers of popular education, it is
both legitimate and necessary to dwell on economic
and social tendencies which suppUed a practical argu-
ment for 'instructing the masses.' From this stand-
point one is tempted to define the elementary school
as a speciaHsed instrument of training and instruction
necessitated by industrial developments which, dis-
solving the older forms of social life, opened access
to a more complex existence along a path beset with
difficulties and requiring a higher degree of mental
equipment than had sufficed in earher times.

There are other points of connection between
educational and social history. If social changes have
given a sanction and impetus to the demand for different
forms of instruction, the lines on which their organisa-
tion develops are profoundly afiected by social tradition.
The clue to certain phases of educational controversy
must be sought in religious and political divisions which
are older than the modem school organisation, and
in varieties of social outlook and experience which

PREFACE ix

may be illustrated in some measure by a comparative
study of different areas. If some parts of the country
have lent themselves more readily than others to
democratic experiments, an examination of their past
history may throw light on the influences which have
made them responsive. The element of education
which consists in social experience has an historical
interest, not only as illustrating the mental growth
of the people in a bygone age when school-attendance
was the privilege of a minority, but as shaping the
material with which subsequent movements have to
deal.

In discussing so wide a theme it is difficult to avoid
digressions and an appearance of dogmatism with
regard to issues which are often obscure. My hope
is that the main drift of the argument is lucid, and
that its conclusions are expressed with a caution not
unworthy of the eminent authorities to whose labours
I am indebted.

The work was commenced at the suggestion of my
friend Mr. Albert Mansbridge, to whom I am privileged
to dedicate this volume as a small acknowledgment
of great obligations. I am also deeply indebted to
Mr. R. H. Tawney, who has read these pages with
great care in manuscript and m proof, offering much
helpful criticism and many valuable suggestions. To
others who have assisted me with advice and informa-
tion, bearing principally on the chapters which remain
to be completed, I hope before long to have an oppor-
tunity of expressing my gratitude.

November 15, 1918.

CONTENTS

PART I
The Eighteenth Century

CHAPTER I

Thb Social Environment on the Eve of thh
Industeial Revolution

PAQB

1688-1760: economic development and change in social ideals —
Mental cleavage between the ' educated ' and the ' uneducated '
classes — Consciousness of social evil ; its bearing on the educa-
tion problem — Varieties of social culture in different areas ;
connection between ' progress ' and degeneracy ; dangers aris-
ing from increased plenty coupled with economic displacement . 3

The Heritage of the Rural Peasantry : Pre-eminence ascribed to
the ' agricultural life ' in eighteenth- century literature — The
peasant's outlook ; continuity of rural custom — Statement of
an educational test to be applied in studying social evolution
— Educational tendency of medieval institutions ; peasant
prosperity and culture in the fifteenth century ; contrast with
eighteenth-century phase of rural prosperity ; intervening
changes in the social environment ; dissolvent forces acting on
rural society ; national movements and reforms affecting the
peasantry ; absence of a ' riu-al pohcy ' — Normal type of social
formation in rural districts, paternal government ; exceptional
qua si- democratic communities ; their social and ethical char-
acteristics ; potential nucleus of a new rural civilisation . . 15

The Growth of Industrialism ; Manufactures, Towns and Mining Settle-
ments : Comparison between the ' agricultural life ' and the
' condition of manufactin-ers ' — ^Moral and mental effects of
quaUty of occupation — ^Urban influences ; new towns and old
cities ; intellectual side of urban civilisation — The mining
population ; Methodist influence ...... 39

Regional Survey : Historic Factors in the Social Evolution of Different
Areas : Alien elements in the population — ^Local pecuharities,

xii CONTENTS

social, ethical and economic ; racial, geographical and other
influences ; local variations modified by centralising political and
economic forces — Attempt to explain social variations in different
areas as denoting differences in ' degree of development ' ;
e.g. the North reproducing characteristics which appeared
in the South at an earMer period ; hmitations to this hypothesis —
Circumftances permanently differentiating local characteristics
and traditions ; traces of earher customs and institutions per-
sisting after growth of national law — Historic division between
' Anglo-Saxon * and ' Anglo-Danish ' territories ; Domesday in-
quest, relatively ' free ' condition of the Danelaw ; survival of
' independency ' in the North, its bearing on the social character
of the North before the Industrial Revolution ... 48

North and West : The Northern character, illustrations from the
Lake District ; superiority of popular education in the North ;
the Industrial Revolution as an expression of character — The
West country, compared with the North ; mental condition
of the Welsh related to their history ; the Welsh revival - 61

CHAPTER n

Schools and Literature

Schools : Order of development in the educational system — Changes
at the Reformation — Grammar schools, open to the poor ;
difficulty of maintaining the ' free grammar school ' ; failure
to establish a graduated scheme of schools — Elementary
parochial instruction ; private adventure schools — Administra-
tive defects — Charity schools ; ' associated philanthropy,' and
voluntary organisation — Early examples of State intervention . 80

Literature : Eighteenth -century cheap hterature — Transition from
medieval to modern forms of popular entertainment and culture
— Chap-books — The newspaper press ..... 97

CHAPTER m

The Eba of Revolutions

Educational related to sociul ideals — Medieval theory of class-
relations and its educational corollary — Tudor paternal govern-
ment— Decay of Tudor ideals ; effect on eighteenth -century
views of popular education — Contrast with modern ideals —
Transition following the decay of paternalism ; new tendencies
heralding the labour democracy ; comparison of fourteenth
and eighteenth-century trade combinations, etc. . . . 103

The Religious Bevival : Comparison with movements in the medieval
Church — Methodism, its intellectual influence ; connection with
the political awakening . . . . . . .117

CONTENTS xiii

PAQB

Political Unrest : Public meetings and propaganda — Extent of the

political awakening 121

Tlie Industrial Revolution t General tendencies — Social philosophy
in defence of economic changes — Criticism from an ethical and
educational standpoint — Educational problems, and intellectual
influences, connected with the revolution . . . .126

Remedial measures — The ' social conscience ' — Popular instruction

movements and higher adult education .... 135

PAKT n
The First Half op the Nineteenth Century

CHAPTER IV

Elementaby Education

Historic causes for the delay of State intervention — ^Influence of
the Reformation — The Commonwealth — Voluntary effort, and
hostility to education, in the eighteenth century — Character-
istics of the education movement at the commencement of the
nineteenth century ; Bell and Lancaster .... 145

Oeneral Lines of Development : Day schools — Education and industrial

training — Rescue work — Sunday schools — Evening classes . 151

Success and Failure : Evidence of periodical inquiries examined —

Examples of progress ........ 157

Sources of Improvement : Work of the Societies — Work of individuals
— Employers — Robert Owen at New Lanark — Continental in-
fluences— Combe and secular education .... 161

CHAPTER V

The Mechanics' iNSnrtrrES and Hioheb Edtjcation

Stimulus of the Industrial Revolution — Popular lectures — Mutual
Improvement Societies — Mechanics' Institutes and Schools of
Design 170

The Mechanics' Institute Movement : Early enthusiasm and its
decUne — Administrative difficulties, etc. — Defective arrange-
ment of studies — Extent of the demand — Finance . . .172

Attempts at Reconstruction : Federation of Mechanics' Institutes —
' differential grading ' ; the Lyceums — General defects — The
new spirit — Working Men's Colleges and Clubs . . . 179

xiv CONTENTS

CHAPTER VI

LiBBAEIES AND LlTEBATUBB

PAGE

Literature and self-education — Scarcity of Public Libraries ; gro-wth
of private and institutional libraries — The book-supply ; book-
stalls ; Tract Societies and publishing firms ; Charles Knight
and the ' diffusion of useful knowledge ' ; failure of attempt to
create an instructive literature for the people ; working-class
readers and students — The newspaper press ; news-rooms and
poUtical propaganda ; the Stamp Duty ; the Chaitist press and
after — Composition ; Samuel Bamford and Thomas Cooper . 185

CHAPTER Vn

' Education by Collision '

John Stuart Mill's defence of democracy from an educational stand-
point ; influence of poUtical discussion ; danger lest numerical
strength prevail against intelligence — Intelligence required (a) to
win political rights, (b) to render them effective — Advance of
democracy accompanied by evolution of political consciousness —
Illustration from nineteenth -century history .... 206

1816 to 1846 : Characteristics of the period as regards the aim of
working-class movements ; contrast with the period which
followed ; yet the former is a preparation for the latter —
Political state of the industrial classes in 1816 ; London handi-
crafts, and textile industries ; the rise of democracy in the
North ; the Hampden Clubs — The democratic ideal (a) poUtical,
(6) social — Political agitation ; limits to its educational in-
fluence ; Chartism — Social agitation ; Robert Owen — The point
at issue between Owen and the Chartists ; Lovett on education
and moral force — The Working Men's Association; its educa-
tional programme . . . . . . . . .'IP

CHAPTER VIII

The Social Outlook

Social Conditions, 1850 : Agriculture — Mines — Manufactures, 1790-
1860 ; later evidence of the Booth sm-vey and the Poor Law
Commission (1909) — Growth of casual labour — Problems of
adolescence — Social aspect of the education problem . . 228

Position of educational movements, 1850 — The new phase of adult

education .......... 240

Modern criticisms of organised education considered in the light
of earlier history, with special reference to adult education —
Fluctuations in the demand for knowledge — Recent progress . 244

Index 253

PART I

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

THE SOCIAIi ENVIRONMENT ON THE EVE OF THE
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

' For it seems to be the ruling maxim of this age and nation that, if
our trade and wealth are but increased, we are powerful and happy and
secure ; and in estimating the real strength of the Kingdom, the sole
question for many years hath been " What commerce and riches the
nation is possessed of ? " a question which an Ancient Lawgiver would
have laughed at ' — Browne, Estimate oj the Manners and Principles 0/ the
Times (1757/8).

A CENTURY of uninterrupted material progress separates
the Restoration of Charles the Second from the age of
the Industrial Revolution. The latter half of this period
is a time of optimism and internal repose, spanning
the interval between great constitutional conflicts and
the modern order of social discontents. Its main
achievement consists in a steady course of commercial
expansion, unaccompanied by any radical change in
the social structure or the distribution of wealth. It
stands as a type of even prosperity and contentment
on the eve of vast revolutions, unprecedented sufferings,
and unbounded hopes. Yet it is often in such intervals
of tranquil growth that national character is sub-
jected to the most critical tests, and that the frontier
is passed which separates one stage of civilisation
from another. There are no large alterations in the
structure of society or the ideals of government ;
but there is a profound change in the relative strength
of forces which had long been in conflict, and the

4 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

tendencies which assert their supremacy in different
spheres mark the initial stages of a period of transition.
In studying the course of economic change, the
crisis of 1688, which is noticed by eighteenth-century
writers as a commercial no less than a political landmark,
affords in many ways a more convenient starting-point
than the date generally assigned for the commencement
of the Industrial Revolution. To this earher period
belong one of the most critical phases in the decline
of the yeomanry, and the beginnings of a systematic
policy of enclosure by Act of Parliament ; while in
industry some of the problems which were to arise in
connection with the factory system cast their shadow
back over the intervening years. ^ On the one side,
there was an advance of the new agriculture slowly dis-
solving the older forms of rural life ; on the other, the
approach of modern industrialism — a growth of initiative
and exploitation, a marked extension of industry in
the Midlands and the North, and, in certain districts, a
steady movement of population from the country to the
town. Not less significant are the modifications which
arose almost imperceptibly in the trend of economic
thought. The growth of capitalism from the beginning
of the eighteenth century was supported, especially in
the promotion of agriculture, by a zeal for developing
the natioral resources on scientific lines. In the fiscal
policy of the age there was something more than an
adoption of new methods for attaining ends already
recognised. Over and above the aim of providing
employment, there was that of augmenting the sum
of national wealth. The mere force of commercial ex-
pansion, stimulated by the conquest of foreign markets,
was altering the conditions on which national power

* Johnson, Disappearance of tJie SmaU Landowner, 135 sqg. ; Webb,
History of Trade Unionism, 26 sqq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 5

depended ; and social ideals underwent a corresponding
transformation. In the sixteenth century the strength
of the nation consisted in its capacity for breeding men ;
in the eighteenth, it was measured more generally by
the advance of commerce and the production of wealth.
In the one case the test of prosperity was a population
maintained in undisturbed enjoyment of a decent
livehhood ; in the other, it was an * increase of plenty,'
the variety of goods circulating in the market. The
position is reviewed by Arthur Young in the argu-
ment of his ' Political Arithmetic,' which turns on the
distinction between agriculture as a means of sub-
sistence and agriculture as a trade. His contention
that the same division of land which was in one state
of society a pohtical excellence becomes in another a
political evil — comparing the position of small farmers
imder the Roman Republic, when a peasantry subsisting
on the soil rendered tribute by military service, with
the position of the same class in an age of manufactures
and increased taxation— goes to the root of those
differences of social outlook which separated his own
generation from the age of Elizabeth. The race of
small proprietors are part of a system which has lost
its justification from a national standpoint ; they
consume the * earth's produce ' ; they add nothing to
the * national wealth.' The point to be emphasised
is that the conception of a progressive division and
redistribution of labour, which underHes the argument,
is a conception of social progress. The process which
increases the sum of national wealth involves also
a growing interchange of commodities, and opens the
door to a continuous rise in the standard of living.*

This change of outlook shows one side of the ration-
alistic movement which asserted its supremacy over

* Young, Political Arithmetic, 71, 73 etpasstm.

6 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

European thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The turning point in modern agrarian history,
when Parhament began for the first time to assume
a decisive attitude on the question of enclosure,^ came
at a moment of profound interest in the growth of the
Enghsh intellect, when the mental separation between
the educated and uneducated classes was approaching a
climax. Among the many signs of disillusion and revolt
which occur in the middle decades of the seventeenth
century, few have a wider significance than the change
which took place almost within a single generation in
the attitude of the higher ranks to popular beliefs in
witchcraft and the supernatural. The same period,
also, introduced a phase of social refinement in which
the art of the skilled composer lost touch with the
music of native growth. Old superstitions and tra-
ditional forms of culture and amusement, which had
united the sympathies of all classes, were destined
gradually, like the husbandry of the open-field, to assume
the character of survivals which the enlightened and
the busy world had left behind. The development
of the press during the early years of the eighteenth
century, and the multiplication of treatises on subjects
of scientific and general interest, mark the beginnings
of a compensatory process by which the fruits
of study and criticism were slowly diffused.^ New
standards of comfort found their complement in a new
phase of public enlightenment ; and both alike pointed
forward to a type of civilisation which was to have its
centre in the towns.

The chief landmarks of the period are not un-

* JohriBon, op. cit., 85 ; mid-seventeenth century.

* Buckle, Civilisation in England {World's Classics), vol. i. ch. vii. ;
Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 125-7 ; Chappell, Old English Popular Music,
ii. p. vi.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 7

connected with the history of education. The endow-
ment of non-classical schools dates in large measure
from the Restoration. The Charity School movement
followed the Revolution of 1688. The remainder of the
period is filled with sporadic efforts to diffuse instruction
and to rescue the young. Viewed from the standpoint
of later experience, the growth of philanthropy has a
significance outweighing its intentions and its immediate
results. It was from rescue-work that later schemes
of national education took their rise. Meanwhile it
was recognised, first in practice and then in theory,
that the problems of progress are problems of education.
Two conflicting emotions are covered by the decent
veil of eighteenth-century optimism — the enthusiasm of
progress, and a growing consciousness of evil which
is characteristic of modern thought. The * better
living of every class,' the decent clothing which was
itself a ' sign of good feeding,' the general rise of wages,
the cheapness of provisions, and the diffusion among the
masses of minor comforts which had been a luxury of
the rich, were e\ddences of material welfare constantly
adduced during the early half of the century.^ But
the writers who are most confident of progress are
ahve to impressions of another sort — the disease and
profligacy of ' commercial cities,' the demoralised state
of large parts of the country-side,^ and the effects of
a mania for gin-drinking which spread through the
manufacturing towns during the first years of George
the Second, changing the * very nature of the people '
and threatening the * very race ' itself.^ The evil in
certain forms was closely related to the general growth

^ Young, Political Arithmetic ; De Saussure, A Foreign View of England
(engl. trans. 1902), 220, etc. ; Lecky, History of England, vi. 204.

* Cf. Webb, English Local Oovernment, i. 69. Marshall, Sural Economy
of West of England, i. 107 ; Midland Counties, i. 131.

» Lecky, i. 479 sq. ; Works of Berkeley (edited by Fraser), iv. 332.

8 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

of prosperity. Different authorities draw a connection
between intemperance and increased earnings, between
pauperism and the circulation of wealth. Adam Smith,
penetrating more deeply and looking back over a longer
range of experience, traced a permanent process of
moral decay to the influences of an increasing division
of labour. On this analysis he founded a plea for
organised instruction. The argument in the * Wealth
of Nations ' touches only one aspect of a complex
question ; but it is sufficient to suggest that, the
more closely the connection between civilisation and
degeneracy is examined, the more light will be thrown
on the nature and origin of educational problems.

One of the attractions of the period for the student
of sociology arises from the numerous grades of culture
and economic development which are brought simul-
taneously within the range of inspection. A phrase
which has been used of India in recent times, may be
applied without undue licence to England on the eve
of the Industrial Revolution. ' All the centuries are
gathered into one.' From the Northern border, which
on the Union of the English and Scottish crowns
retained traces of tribal society and of some of
the earliest methods of tillage,^ to the South-Eastern
counties, a home of commerce and settled agriculture
in days earlier than the Roman Conquest ^ and still
in the eighteenth century the garden of England ;
from Devon and Cornwall, a land of small enclosures
but with remnants of the more primitive forms of

^ Slater, English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields,
259. In 1606 a troublesome ' sept of the Grames iinder their chief '
was transported from Cumberland to Rosconuuon : Seebohm, English
Village Community, 219.

* Seebohm, 246 sq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 9

husbandry,^ to the workshops of Birmingliam and the
extending farm-lands of the Midlands and the East ;
from the degraded savagery of a lost tribe discovered
squatting at the sources of the Tyne,'^ to the broken
civihsation of the * Mud City * and Seven Dials ; from
the decayed nature-worship of Somerset and Devon,
to the scientific associations of Huguenot weavers
in Spitalfields ^ ; here a district swept forward on
the tide of commercial prosperity, another cherishing
traditions of an ancient glory that has passed away,
another more wisely husbanding its strength and, Hke
Hythlodaye in the * Utopia," * lefte behynde ' for its
* mynde sake ' — the ground traversed offers a wide
range of material, illustrating many phases of progress,
survival and decline, which have been observed by
ethnologists in tracing the ascent from barbarism to
the higher levels of civilised Hfe.

Any attempt at comparing different areas raises
a number of initial difficulties. To what extent, for
instance, are the contrasts which they exhibit to be
explained by essential differences of history, race, and
environment ? To what extent may the characteristics
of the more backward and of the more advanced parts
of the country be taken to illustrate successive stages
of social evolution ? Similar questions arise, when an
attempt is made to assign to particular types of occupa-
tion or social settlement their place in the scale of an
advancing civilisation. Certainly, at this period, one
of the most potent causes of social variation was the
delay with which new ideas and impulses were communi-
cated to the more distant provinces. Defoe's remark

^ Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, 580. {Cf.
Seebohm, 412 ad fin.).

* Lockhart, Life of Scott, ix. 168 (the reference is probably to some
archaic form of the sword dance).

* Smiles, Huguenots in England and Ireland, 337.

10 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

that the country south of the Trent was the * richest
and most populous ' part of the kingdom, acquires a
deeper interest when it is found that the North at this
time, in many aspects of its social and economic life,
presented a picture of conditions which had passed
away elsewhere at an earlier period. In the same
way, some basis on which to found comparisons between
the ' agricultural ' and the ' manutacturing life,' or
between town and country, may be gained by following
the slow evolution of specialised industry and the
intermittent process by which villages grew into popu-
lous towns, loosening by degrees their connection with
rural pursuits and developing at once new problems
and new forms of practical and mental activity.
Following a series of lines drawn from the more remote
pastoral districts of the North and West and converging
towards the industrial towns of the interior, we pass
gradually within a zone of accelerated progress, in
which mind and character react with increasing rapidity
to the injfluences of a changing environment and the
growth of human desires is revealed in new standards
of refinement and comfort. We pass also within the
area of social problems, economic helplessness, and
moral relapse. The central districts, including the
metropolis, presented some of the clearest indications
of the lines on which English civilisation was destined
to advance ; and these, too, supplied material to the
critic of moral abuses, and the more obvious examples
of exploitation and distress. Though on a broad view
of history, social, moral and intellectual energies * are
seen to progress together, . . . they are far from ad-
vancing with equal steps," either as regards a particular
class in society or the community as a whole. As
manufacturers were, as a class, more exposed to certain
demoralising influences than the agricultural peasantry,

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 11

as the town life of the period in some phases of its
growth resembled a degenerate form of rural civilisation,
so we shall find writers recurring to distant parts of the
country for examples not only of the primitive virtues,
but also of a standard of home life which would seem
to have dechned among the poor in the more progressive
areas. ^

The tendency which these conditions illustrate is
one familiar in educational history. The process which
extends social opportunity is continually weakening
the forms of discipline handed down from an earlier
age, and at the same time, in so far as it intensifies
competition or opens new resources, continually in-
creasing the need for mental equipment. This may
be illustrated by comparing the effects of social change
on the less progressive sections of society with the
problems which arise from the contact of advanced and
backward races. In either case the final result may be
the displacement of a rude manner of life by something
higher and more durable ; but the same class of in-
fluences which have led to the decay of inferior races
in the presence of a higher civilisation, have produced
periods of physical and moral decline to which the
weaker sections of a civiHsed people are exposed in the
face of changes opening new avenues of culture and
increasing the general wealth. In either case the more
general causes of decline are economic. They consist
partly in the introduction of new articles of consump-
tion and conditions of livelihood which demand a higher
degree of knowledge and self-control than the people

^ It is not merely in the North that a superior economy is ascribed
to the poor. Eden couples Wales with the North of England and Scotland
as affording an example of skilfid management, especially in cooking, in
the homes of the poor {State of the Poor, i. 497). Marshall, advancing
from Devon into Cornwall, is agreeably surprised at the social aspect
of the country (Rural Economy of the West of England, ii. 16).

12 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

possess ; partly in privation and oppression, involving
a sudden disturbance in their habits of life and some-
times a wholesale removal into uncongenial surround-
ings, where the arts with which they are familiar are
practised with difficulty and they are exposed to new
forms of disease and temptation which they are
unable to resist.

The analogy cannot be pressed ; but it is useful in
helping to connect a number of scattered lines of evidence
which bear on this phase of social transition. Import-
ant changes occurred in the diet of the poorer classes
from the commencement of the eighteenth century,
which deserve much closer attention than they have
hitherto received. The * better living ' of the people,
says Arthur Young, consists in their ' consuming more
food and of a better sort ; eating wheat-bread instead
of barley, oats and rye — and drinking prodigiously a
greater quantity of beer.' At the same time there
was an increased consumption of meat and vegetables,
balanced by a large expenditure on tea, sugar, and
spirits, and in certain districts, it would seem, by a
growing scarcity of milk and fuel. The change does
not present itself as an unmixed advantage, when we
read of the superior health and energy of the Yorkshire
labourers who earned phenomenal wages, drank moder-
ately, and kept to the simpler fare of an earlier genera-
tion.^ Young himself has an interesting comment
which might have tempered his enthusiasm. The * in-
crease of national wealth and the superior ease of the
poor ' had led to an increased consumption of ' super-
fluities ' which absorbed an immoderate part of their
income, breeding wasteful habits which had already
proved disastrous in a season of distress. This applied
especially to manufacturers ; ' as to husbandry, they

^ Marshall, Rural Economy of Yorkshire (1788), i. 259.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 18

indulge in all these expenses and yet live well.' * Mean-
while a Swedish traveller had observed kindred symp-
toms in agricultural districts bordering on the Midlands.
It was not unusual, in the parts which he visited, for
country-folk to spend the entire day at the village ale-
house. There was little intoxication ; but * it is not
to be wondered at, if many labourers and others, however
large the daily wages or profits they can make, can for
all that scarcely collect more than what goes from hand
to mouth.' This * custom ' he attributed partly to
' the abundance of money in this country and the ease
with which a man could in any case have his food if
only he was somewhat industrious.'* It is a peculiar
example of the * lazy-diligence ' which Defoe lamented
as a characteristic of these years of comparative ease
and prosperity ; and it is an element to be considered
in judging the criticisms passed by Eden, in the lean
years which followed, on the domestic economy of the
poor in the South of England.^ Quite apart from the
physiological effects of a new diet,* it is seen that an
increased command of resources does not necessitate
an improvement in the standard of living. Ease of

' Young, Political Arithmetic, 76.

* Kalm, Visit to England, 1748 (trans, Joseph Lucas, 1892), 333.
Young {Northern Tour, in. 248 sq.) notices a similar practice among the
manufacturing classes of Lano^shi^e in times of prosperity (1770).

'Eden, State of the Poor (1797), i. 496 etc. ; his general contention is
that the domestic management of the poor in the South, as compared
with the North, is expensive, wasteful, and relatively unproductive.
Hammond {Village Labourer, 123 sqq. et passim) points out that the
resources of the Southern poor had been steadily decreasing. All I wish
to suggest, is that the trial of acut« distress was preceded by the trial of
prosperity ; it is this sequence that gives the period its unity from an
educational standpoint.

* Cf. an address by Dr. Leonard Hill, Economics Section of British
Association, 1913 {Times, Sept. 16). It is a question whether 'wheat
bread ' was more nourishing than ' barley, oats and rye.' Much wovild
depend on the way in which different articles of diet were combined.
If a ' good diet is a necessary part of a good education ' (James Mill), it
now seems that diet itself is a subject for instruction.

14 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

living is useless or pernicious where there is no cor-
responding moral advancement, no extension of the
interests which give to life a purpose and an ideal.
But the very changes which increased wealth and
brought goods to market, were removing familiar land-
marks and casting inexperienced men adrift. In the
districts which suffered most under the trial of pros-
perity, agrarian conditions were changing, and little
portions of land were being united into large. ^ Here,

* The injury done by the enclosure movement to native instincts,
e.g. to the sense of ownership, if it has been denounced somewhat indis-
criminately by modern critics, was too little considered by supporters
of the change who enlarged on the benefits of regular employment with
the prospect of increased wages. Where the social condition of the poor
was lowest and the boon offered might appear greatest in proportion,
it was less certain that they would stand the test of a more arduous com-
petition than that they would suffer moral and nervous reactions from
the upbreak of a system which had moulded their lives.

Arthur Young describes an archaic form of settlement in the Isle of
Axholme. ' The inhabitants are collected in villages and hamlets ; and
almost every house you see, except very poor cottages on the borders
of the common, is inhabited by a farmer, the proprietor of his farm,
of from four or five, or even fewer, to 20, 40, and more acres, scattered
about the open fields, and cultivated with all the minutiae of care and
anxiety, by the hands of the family, which are found abroad. . . . They
are very poor respecting money, but very happy respecting their mode
of existence. Contrivance, mutual assistance, by barter and hire, enable
them to manage these little farms. ... A man will keep a pair of horses
that has but 3 or 4 acres by means of vast commons and working for
hire. . . . Though I have said they are happy, yet I should note that
it was remarked to me, that the little proprietors work like negroes, and
do not live so well as the inhabitants of the poor-house ; but all is made
amends for by possessing land' (quoted Slater, op. cit., 53 -^q.). 'The
enclosure of these commons,' he adds, ' will lessen their numbers and
vastly increase the quantity of products at market.' It might (for enclosure
was resisted) have produced further results. Assuming that for those
remaining on the land as labourers an opportunity of increased earnings
had made up for the resources lost through enclosure and consolidation,
it might (1) have destroyed the sense of ownership which is admitted in
this case to have been the fundamental incentive to thrift and exertion ;

(2) have weakened their sense of fellowship and co-operation for social
purposes (c/. Denson, Peasant's Voice to Landowners (1819), 17-21) ;

(3) by rapidly increasing ' wealth ' and producing easy conditions among
a people whose standard of living was low, have developed the careless
mode of living ' from hand to mouth ' noticed by Kalm. We might
arrive perhaps within measurable distance of those Midland labourers
whose wages fell short of the Yorkshire rate by about one half — ' but a

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 15

too, arable was being converted into pasture, and popu-
lation was drifting towards the towns.

(1) The Heritage of the Rural Peasantry

The comparisons between town and country, be-
tween the * agricultural life * and the * condition of
manufacturers,' which occur in the social writings of
the period, presuppose generally a degree of economic
differentiation which was not reahsed in practice. At
the same time, while emphasising the moral effects of a
division of labour in the manufacturing industries, they
ignore corresponding changes which affected agriculture,
slowly modifying the social environment and trans-
forming the mediaeval peasant into the labourer of
modern times. Nevertheless they illustrate a crisis in the
general course of social evolution, and incidentally mark
the connection between two stages of mental growth —
the stage during which education springs naturally
from the experiences of daily life, and the stage in which
a speciaUsed system of industry demands a special
instrument of training and instruction. If in many
districts on the eve of the Industrial Revolution it was
becoming natural to associate manufactures with urban
surroundings and to regard the industries of the town
as a refuge for families displaced from agricultural

want of exertion, and an extravagance in keep, especially in &eer, more
than coimterbalance the disparity in wages ' (Marshall, Rural Economy
of the Midland Counties (1790), i. 131, an area which had siifFered from
some of the least social forms of enclosure, see Slater, op. cit., c. x.).

The Axholme settlements, it may be admitted, present some abnormal
features and, from a moral standpoint, a favourable example of the open-
field system. The worst elements in the labour class at the close of the
century cannot be dismissed as a product of recent displacements. One
of the argmnents for enclosure was found in the existence, under the old
system, of a large cottar class who were kept alive in a precarious con-
dition by access to the commons, and whose habits were not above
reproach. The question is how far their demoralisation may be explained
^8 a result of eviction and enclosure in other parishes at an earlier period.

16 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

employment,^ it was still reasonable to measure the
welfare of urban communities by the standards of
country life. Agriculture remained the predominant,
and on the whole the most satisfactory, form of occupa-
tion ; rural society, in the interval between the decay
of mediaeval municipalities and the urban civiKsation
of a coming age, presented the least disturbed and most
organic type of social settlement. In studying different
phases of rural organisation, we travel back gradually
to the origins of human culture ; following the path
of modern industrialism, we discover new processes
of education and new types of intell-gence.

The school had been, for the most part, an occasional
and somewhat irrelevant factor in rural life ; sometimes
mainly an instrument of selection, gathering recruits
for wider spheres of activity and starting them on the
road to preferment. But, although missionary effort
had done much to emphasise the need of a school
system, its absence would not necessarily entail a state
of mental inertia.'' In those parishes which afford
the most complete examples of a social hierarchy, and
where agrarian change had not deprived the peasantry
of rights on the soil, the life of a labourer might be itself
more instructive and intelligible than that of his counter-
part, the urban artisan. His work at home and in
the field afforded a more varied range of experience, in

1 Young, Political Arithmetic, 71.

* Cobbett's argument that a skilled labourer could not be considered
an uneducated man, explains some part of the prejudice against schools
in the rural districts. Cunningham, Works of Robert Burns, 3, remarks —
* The peasantry of Scotland turn their cottages into schools ; and when a
father takes his arm-chair by the evening fire, he seldom neglects to com-
municate to his children whatever knowledge he possesses himself. Nor
is this knowledge very limited ; it extends, generally, to the history of
Europe, and to the literature of the island ; but more particularly to the
divinity, the poetry, and what may be called the traditionary history of
Scotland.' It would not be difficult to find parallel instances across the
Border, as may appear in the course of our inquiry ; and some form of
oral tradition, of more or less educational value, was probably general.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 17

which the relation of means to ends was easily grasped.
He saw the nature and meaning of his industry, often
the whole of the processes and their connection with
social and domestic needs. The open-field system,
with its facilities for the hire or purchase of land,
secured for the thrifty a means of investment and a
prospect in life. To his rights of commonage he might
add a share in the arable or a plot to occupy his leisure
hours and to afford a subsidiary means of subsistence.
His wife span for domestic uses, and trained her children
in the household arts. This form of education seems
to have been realised, in an exceptional degree, in those
self-contained communities where the soil was widely
distributed among peasant holders and all articles of
common necessity and convenience were supplied by
the joint labour of the family ; but considerable rem-
nants of the old scheme of production had survived
the influence of a widening market in all parts of the
kingdom. And not only was the supply of daily needs a
labour which conveyed its own lesson, inspired interests
and exercised habits of organisation and self-discipline ;
but the intimate relations subsisting between the various
functions of a village group, the natural correspondence
between the parts of a fabric which was the result
of age-long growth, rendered its life in some measure
an intelligible whole. The appearance of a self-acting
community, developing its own discipline, culture, and
outlook on the world, was preserved in the adnunistra-
tion of open-field husbandry, and more generally in
the round of common amusements and the whole body
of rustic traditions and beliefs.

The Church which stood as the symbol of a wider
outlook and a higher ideal, and whose discipUne of
prayer and precept came nearest to a scheme of
national education, exercised the main part of her

18 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

influence as an institution entwined in the structure
of social life, acting less as an intellectual force than
through her appeal to corporate feeling and the
associations which accumulate round an established
usage. Eighteenth-century worship is, in fact, in its
natural state, a reflex of the prevailing system of hus-
bandry. There is, in both, the same agreeable sloven-
liness of method, the same acceptance of custom, the
same underlying corporate sense, the same hierarchy
of personages and minor officials ; the Church singers
occupying a customary holding in the chancel, so firmly
established by right of inheritance that in many places,
like the yeomanry whom they resembled, they with-
stood the zeal of reforming incumbents and survived
far into the next century. The interest of these pheno-
mena increases when they are studied more closely in
relation to different types of environment. Not only
do we find insulated peasant communities presenting
examples of an archaic organisation, side by side with
parishes in which a high order of capitalistic manage-
ment has swept away the last traces of communal
custom ; but throughout the country different strata
of civihsation lie exposed on the sm-face in every de-
partment of hfe. Rural amusement includes ancient
spontaneous forms of rejoicing, bearing in many cases
the marks of a ritual origin and belonging to an order
of folk-culture which may have proceeded ultimately
from the common worship of a primitive village group.
An equal antiquity has been ascribed to those assem-
blies of the township which survived here and there,
unimpaired by the decay of the manorial system,
administering a complex body of agrarian custom and
exercising rudimentary judicial functions^ which find

1 ' These ancient sources of the law of villages are still pretty generally
kept open ; even in manors where neither copyhold nor free-rent tenants

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 19

their counterpart among Eastern communities at the
present day.

It has been necessary to venture on this analysis
in order to form some conception of the general problem
which a survey of rural conditions presents to the
student of educational history. When it is realised
that early ideas and customs, which have no intelligible
meaning or oppose obstacles to improvement in the
age in which they survive, may originally have been
shrewd attempts to explain the mysteries of existence
or to meet a present need/ it is natural to inquire in
what sense subsequent progress has been a continuous
process of expansion towards a higher culture and a
fuller life. The issue does not in practice present
itself in so simple a form. A conclusion suggested by
the study of primitive races — that * civilisation is a
plant much oftener propagated than developed/ that
progress is effected more often * by foreign than by
native action ' * — would seem to apply with equal
force to the history of local groups within a civilised
society. The history of mankind may show a continu-
ous stream of evolution connecting the lowest with the
highest ranges of culture ; but there are limits to the
advance of a small and self-centred community drawing
mainly on its native stock of ideas. Improvement

remain. . . . The cleansing of rivulets and common sewers (etc., etc.)
. . . are matters which frequently require the interposition of a jury ;
who, in places where they are still impanelled, are considered not only
as judges of the general welfare of the manor, but are frequently called
in as arbiters of private difierences ' — Marshall, Rural Economy oj York-
shire, i. 28 sq. (1788), c/. id. Midland Counties, i. 15 (1790). The last clause
is significant; c/. Maine, Village Communities, 71, on the adjustment of
civil disputes by the elders of an Indian village ; c/. also his remark {Early
Law arid Custom, 170), that ancient Teutonic courts might be properly
described as Courts of Arbitration, being unarmed with the power of
inflicting penalties.

1 Cf. Tylor, Primitive Cvlture, i. 284 ; ii. 324, 405 ; Seebohm, English
Village Community, 16.

"^ Tylor, i. 48.

20 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

beyond a certain stage will depend increasingly on new
combinations, and on the pressure of forces which have
been generated in wider fields of social enterprise. This
may be seen by studying the growth of rural communi-
ties in England which down to the eighteenth century
pursued a solitary course, and the culture which was a
product of rural tradition. Country life is strewn with
the remains of successive elements of culture which
answered at one time a serious educational purpose,
but whose range of growth is set within definite limits.
In the same way, a long course of economic reorganisa-
tion may proceed with little apparent stimulus from
without ; a land of wastes and open-fields may be
parcelled out into small enclosures ; but there comes a
stage at which the outlook narrows and progress draws
to a standstill.^ It is partly for these reasons that the
life of isolated rural areas is sometimes found relapsing
towards a state of savagery. The influence which
corrects these tendencies by promoting wider combina-
tions is in the nature of the case external, and in some
sense foreign, to the individual groups which it raises
to a higher level. It proceeds from the growth of a
central authority sufficiently elevated to ei^orce obedi-
ence, and from the economic and intellectual forces
which its action brings into play. In the conflict which
arises between native and foreign elements, according
to the Spanish proverb, ' the more there is of the
more, the less there is of the less. ' The rise of a central
power exercising discipline over local groups entails
the restriction of their sphere of independence and,
sooner or later, the disintegration of their corporate
life. Larger political and economic combinations dis-
solve the framework of custom in smaller imits which

1 Cf. Marshall, Rural Economy of Yorkahire, i. 52-6, 255; West of
England, i. 25 sq., 104 sqq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 21

they link together and absorb. As the intellectual
horizon expands, earlier forms of culture reach the
limits of their natural growth and undergo a decline
both in quality and significance. That which had once
a serious purpose and marked an advance in thought
or art, tends to degenerate in tone or to survive
mainly as a source of harmless amusement.^ As the
higher civilisation advances, the lower begms to recede
and dissolve.

It does not follow that the gain will be evenly
distributed. The process which forms a nation tends
to replace the vertical division between self-centred
communities by a horizontal cleavage between class
and class. It may happen that a change which brings
civilisation to one part of society will bring ruin to
another. There is a definite connection, at different
periods, between freedom and pauperism ; and the
principle applies as much to mental as to materia]
progress. It is unlikely that the concerns of a large
pohtical unit will occupy the same place in the conscious-
ness of the masses as those of the local group whose
corporate hfe is falHng into decay ; or that the decHne
of a lower culture will be readily compensated by access
to a higher. Where the distance between the educated
and uneducated classes becomes great, the latter not
only reap no imjnediate benefit, but may experience an
actual loss. It is plain, however, that the forces which
assist national progress operate on the framework of
rural life in different combinations, and with different
degrees of intensity, in successive epochs ; and in so far
as they include institutions, they include agencies whose

^ Proverbs and riddles, once important factors in education (Tyler,
i. 81 sq.) ; balladry, once a serious source of history; compare the decay
in the significance of myth, legend and rustic rites, etc. Sometimes the
decay in significance is followed by a decay in quality, as in certain forms
of folk-music and dance.

22 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

work may be submitted to an educational test. The
study of rural education in some of its broader aspects
is a study of successive forms of organised discipline
following one another in a definite sequence. With
the national awakening in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the regime of feudalism ends and is replaced
gradually by the paternal rule of a governing class. The
tests which may be applied at each phase of transforma-
tion are those outlined in Mill's definition of the ideal
of government. A system of government should give
the people ' that for want of which they cannot advance,
or advance only in a lame and lopsided manner ' ; in
carrying them through one stage of progress, it should
not ' unfit them for the step next beyond ' ; and its
success in this respect will depend on the extent to
which, * in seeking the good which is needed, no damage,
or as little as possible, be done to that already
possessed.* ^

Feudalism has been represented as a connecting link
between two very different forms or conceptions of free-
dom— the freedom of early times, implying membership
of a free group, having its roots in military organisation
and in a network of provincial institutions, ultimately
of tribal origin ; and the freedom which emerged on
the ruins of status and privilege, deriving its strength
from economic achievement and from the increasing
authority of the central government and of national law. ^
As the growth of the manorial system foreshadows
in certain respects an advance in the conception of
individual ownership, so from an early period the

1 Mill, Representative Oovernment, 40. ' The one indispensable merit of
a government, in favour of which it may be forgiven almost any amount
of other demerit compatible with progress, is that its operation on the
people is favourable, or not unfavourable, to the next step which it
is necessary for them to take, in order to raise themselves to a higher
level '—36.

* VinogradofE, op. cit., 213.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 23

growing power of an aristocratic element in public
assemblies, and the surrender of territorial jurisdiction
to feudal potentates, may point forward dimly to the
monarchic rule of a landed aristocracy acting in their
magisterial capacity as organs of the central govern-
ment. But what is, at first, most striking in this
intermediate stage of organisation, is the relation which
it bears to a past order of things. The fabric of early
custom is not superseded so much as incorporated in a
new structure, and, as it were, placed under control.
The feudal courts embody fragments of an antecedent
judicial and administrative system which have been
subordinated to the authority of powerful lords. The
manorial organisation is largely a natural growth,
enshrining a traditional form of rural economy, and
leaving room for a complex body of mutual restrictions
and customary rights. A parallel may be found in the
history of the Mediaeval Church. The parish priest
whose virgate-holding lay scattered among the strips of
the villagers in the open-fields, is a type of the intimate
relations maintained between religion and custom
during the Catholic period. If feudal arrangements
show everjrwhere underlying traces of an earlier scheme
of government, still less is there any sudden break of
continuity between the forms under which the new
religion was introduced to the barbarous races of
Northern Europe and the pagan worship which it was
intended to supersede. The Village Feast is one of
many surviving examples of an attempt to consecrate
to Christian uses an ancient custom, which may yet in
its later developments preserve an element of primitive
barbarism. The ceremonial of the Holy Well, which
has retained a place in public worship in certain localities
down to 'modern times, presents yet more remarkable
instances of a cult redeemed by Christian influence and

24 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

infused gradually with a higher spiritual meaning.
As in the age of the Keformation, so in that which
followed the introduction of Christianity into England
we find in statements of ecclesiastical policy a clue to the
educational tendencies of the social system as a whole.
* Because/ wrote Gregory the Great, * they have been
used to slaughter many oxen in the sacrifice to devils,
some solemnity must be exchanged for them on this
account, as that on the day of dedication . . . they
may build themselves huts of the boughs of trees, about
those churches which have been turned to that use
from temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious
feasting . . . because he who tries to rise to the highest
place rises by degrees and steps, and not by leaps.' ^

Whatever may be said of the darker side of manorial
serfdom and its spiritual counterpart, they were at
least free from those elements of disturbance which
have rendered the discipline of freedom in many ways
more perilous than the most despotic rule — the de-
struction of inherited instincts, the spiritual conflict
between tradition and enlightenment, between custom
and progress. Judged with reference to the psycho-
logical conditions of the period, the system conforms
to a sound principle of education. New influences were
brought to bear on the peasantry, without crushing
their sense of security and of a life peculiarly their
own. Circumstances set a limit to exploitation and
to oppressive interference with their economic arrange-
ments ; while the lord's enclosure, standing side by side
with the land of the tenants, gave an example whose

^ Seebohm, 72 sq. For the Holy Well ritual at Tissington (Derbyshire)
on Holy Thursday, see Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth
Century, ii. 246 ; the wells, five in number, were decorated with flowers,
and after a service in church, a procession visited each well in turn, at
which the psalms and epistle and gospel for the day were read, the service
concluding with a hymn accompanied by a band of music ; the rest of
the day was given to rustic sports.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 25

influence became effective as manorial custom fell into
decay. A somewhat analogous instance is presented
by an important vehicle of the Church's teaching.
The Morality plays gave exercise to traditional dramatic
instincts ; and they were carried on and developed,
after the decline of ecclesiastical authority, by the
amateurs of town and gild, giving birth in turn to the
interlude and the secular drama.

Both the advantages and the limitations of this stage
of discipline are suggested by the phase of rural pros-
perity which followed at its close. The most recent
research has discovered, in the interval between the
decay of the manorial system and the agrarian changes
of the sixteenth century, all the signs of a * continuous
improvement in the condition of the peasantry ' : a ' keen
competition for the use of land,* increasing enterprise,
individualism and mobility, and a gradual process of
exchange and enclosure, in all of which the small man
played a predominant part.^ The account may be
supplemented by evidence drawn from another source.
The economic revival, which led to the formation of
a prosperous middle class among the rural peasantry,
seems to have been accompanied by a parallel advance
in culture. Balladry and folk-music felt the influence
of new literary and artistic standards, and there was a
considerable outburst of popular drama in which the
sympathies of all ranks were for a time united. The
advantage, however, in either case depended on a
peculiar balance of conflicting elements which rendered
it essentially insecure ; in the economic sphere, on a
balance between the forces of custom and competition ; ^

^ Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, 97, 114 sq.,
178, etc.

* ' In that happy balance between the forces of custom and the forces
of economic enterprise, custom is powerful, yet not so powerful that men
cannotevade it when evasion is desired; enterprise is growing, yet it

26 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

in the sphere of culture, on the mutual proximity of
popular and skilled art at a time when the former
was approaching the climax of its development and
the latter was entering on its career. The economic
position of the peasantry was too much indebted to
the safeguards of custom not to be imperilled by changes
in which they took the lead, and from which they derived
at the time no small advantage. Their culture was
too limited in its range and too dependent on con-
formity to a traditional type not to suffer indirectly
from the general progress of refinement which may at
first have suppHed new sources of inspiration. The
growing disrepute of popular verse in the presence of
a higher form of poetic achievement, and the encroach-
ments of the large farmer on his less fortunate
neighbours, were in different ways a sign that influences
which for a time enriched and elevated the poor might
work their ruin. The same causes which produced a
prosperous middle class prepared the way for the labour
problems of the sixteenth century. ^

The fifteenth century, and the early part of the
eighteenth, are known as periods of rural well-being ;
and both were followed by times of revolution and
distress. But the two phases of prosperity seem essen-
tially distinct. The former, as has been seen, includes

has not grown to such lengths as to undermine the security which the
small man finds in the estabhshed relationships and immemorial routine
of communal agricultiu-e ' — Ibid., 136. Cf. the relation at this period
between folk poetry and pohte verse, skilled and popular music (Cambridge
History of English Literature, ii. 375 sq. ; ChappeU, Old English Popular
Music, ii. preface).

^ It is possible that an element of demoralisation which runs through
subsequent stages of rural development, may be traced to the demand
which arises in all large agricultural organisations for occasional labour,
and the consequent growth, from early times, of a cottar class, occupying
a precarious position on the outskirts of village life, who were likely to
suffer morally from the loosening of manorial discipline and to have their
numbers increased by successive evictions from the ranks above them.
Cf. Vinogradoff, op. cit., 458 sqq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 27

an advance in culture ; in the latter, so far as
the poor are concerned, progress is measured in terms
of employment and material benefits. There is some-
thing more than a vision of comfort in the gardens
encircling the cottage homes which remained one of
the glories of the English country-side,^ but the old
culture of song and dance and pageantry had lost much
of its vigour, and nothing as yet had appeared to take
its place. The difference is reflected in contemporary
impressions of peasant life. The traveller in the six-
teenth century might remember the * dancing, singing
Enghsh * ; in the eighteenth, he carried away reports
of their food and clothing. A change in the quahty
of rural life was accompanied by essential modifica-
tions in its structure and organisation. In the fifteenth
century progress is almost synonymous with the growth
of peasant properties ; in the eighteenth, it is achieved
almost continuously at the expense of the small free-
holder class. Meanwhile old institutions which had
given the villagers in some degree a law of their own
and a management of their common affairs fade
imperceptibly from the landscape until their place is
forgotten and their meaning lost. No element in rural
life is completely obliterated. The country fellow in
' Sir Roger de Coverley ' discussed the parish politics on
Sunday, distinguishing himself ' as much in the Church-
yard as a citizen does upon the 'Change.' But the days
of a * bold peasantry ' were drawing to a close, and
* independency * was already passing into a term of
abuse. Addison's sketch of the vilhgers in a Wiltshire
parish is not an ungenerous conception of social con-
tentment, during the transition period, under a kindly
paternal rule ; but it misses some of that indefinable

* Young, Eastern Tour, iii. 124 sq ; Cobbett, Rural Ridee, June 24,
1822, etc.

28 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

spiritual force which is the characteristic mark of a
peasantry ; it is not a picture of peasant Hfe as it
appeared in ghmpses of Elizabethan England, and as
it still existed in more remote parts of the country. As
the century advanced, the peasant was gradually lost
in the labourer, and a low estimate of his mental
capacity became part of the accepted order of things.
No features of the age are more clearly marked than
the growing wealth of the nation and the slow growth
of educational ideas.

A particular crisis may be as much an index, as a
cause, of fundamental changes in the life of a people.
The upheaval which occurred towards the close of
the eighteenth century is seen in a wrong perspective,
unless attention is paid to the gradual course of economic
reorganisation which connects the great enclosures of
the period with the agrarian revolution of an earlier
age, and to the less di^-ect, and often unperceived,
influences of altered sriroundings which reacted on
every phase of rural life. It is this pervasive change
of environment which gives unity and significance to
the long period of transition from mediaeval to modern
methods of agriculture. At the outset, a crisis in
rural affairs is connected with movements which em-
braced the whole range of national thought and enter-
prise. A revival of learning and a change in the religious
order coincide approximately with the downfall of
feudalism which altered the relations of landlord and
tenant and enhanced the economic value of land ; with
the growth of commercial capital which led to a con-
tinuous influx of new elements into the landlord class ;
and with the progress of political reconstruction under
the Tudor monarchy, which found a counterpart in
the reorganisation of local government under Justices
of the Peace. Such combinations generally end in

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 29

some conspiracy to elevate the masses. It was no
accident that the two great phases of economic re-
organisation— the one in the sixteenth, the other in the
latter half of the eighteenth century — were attended by
movements which aimed at a * reformation of manners '
and a restatement of rehgious responsibility. Between
the commercial spirit, the magisterial instinct for order
and efficiency, and the spirit of religious reform, there was
an underlying connection both in the circumstances of
their origin and in the mental bias which they introduced.
To assume that these movements created a uniform
and sudden change in rural conditions, would involve
a misconception of the problems which they produced.
They represent rather the growth of a new social order,
acting intermittently and from without on the fabric of
rural custom, and gradually dissolving the ideas and
social forms beneath it. The old order passes, partly
as a result of encroachment and repression, partly
by a process of insensible decay. The disciplinary
powers of the manorial courts were already falling
into decrepitude when a position of supremacy was
assigned to Justices of the Peace. ^ The systematic
enclosures which later on altered the face of rural
society seem to have been preceded by a gradual decay
of the open-field system, which may be connected,
at least indirectly, with the general reactions of com-
merce on agriculture during the intervening period.^

^ Even down to the commencement of the nineteenth century, manorial
courts were characteristic organs of local government ; but many of their
powers were falling into decay in the fourteenth, and in the sixteenth
they were overshadowed by Justices of the Peace.

* ' When we read of the condition of those parishes which at the
beginning of the eighteenth century were stUl Tinenclosed, we are astonished,
not that enclosure came when it did, but that it had been delayed so
long ' — Johnson, Disappearance of the Small Landowner, 97, The argu-
ment against the manner in which enclosures were carried out, is not
assisted by neglecting evidence of the overcrowding of commons and the
precarious state of a large part of the poor who maintained themselves

30 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Similarly, while emphasis may be laid on the repression
of popular amusements which followed at different
stages in the course of religious and moral reform, it
is of more importance to observe the general tendency
of social change to dispel the atmosphere in which these
activities flourished.

Both sides of the process must be considered, if
the period is to convey a lesson of more than transitory
importance. One of the first points to arrest attention
is that developments which showed little regard for
the feelings and instincts of the peasantry, were welcomed
at the time almost without reserve by disinterested
reformers, and were attended by a rising sense of re-
sponsibility in the governing class. ^ The history of
enclosures, and of a simultaneous movement for the
reform of popular morals, ^ at the end of the eighteenth
century, affords examples of this seeming paradox ;
but the tendency is one that extends back over the
period as a whole. The argument for enclosure as a
means of elevating the poor in an age of competition
recalls unmistakably the attitude of sixteenth- century
puritans, who suppressed local drama and pageantry as
no longer edifying in * this happie time of the Gospell.' '
There is a sense in which the Reformation itself finds
a counterpart in agrarian reform.* The common aim
which underlay them both may be described as a process

by the exercise of common rights, etc. ; the growth of this class may be
explained, to some extent, by competitive influences displacing the small
landholder, and by the influx of squatters displaced by enclosure in
neighbouiring parishes, and by the general growth of population.

^ Webb, English Local Oovernment, i. 377 sq.

" Ibid., i. 356 sqq.

* The ' quiet but persistent suppression by bishop, preacher and
zealous mayor, of local plays and pageants throughout England during
the middle years of the sixteenth century ' — Cambridge History of English
Liiterature, vi. 378.

* I do not wish to suggest that any connection was claimed or admitted
to exist between the Reformation and the sixteenth-century agrarian
revolution, which was in fact denounced by many religious reformers.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 31

of simplification, sweeping aside the encumbrances of an
obsolete system, and preparing the way in the one case fcr
a more rational worship, in the other for a more efficient
use of material resources. Both too, though in varying
degrees, involved a removal of ancient landmarks and of
elements which lay near the roots of social life. Further
analysis carries us within the range of those intellectualist
fallacies which are famihar in the economic writings
of a later age. Certain essentials of progress are defined
with a latent assumption that the minds of the people
will respond to the same train of motives and ideas that
has governed the aims of the reformer ; and reform
comes to be identified with a change of system which
eliminates the source of existing abuses. It is less
clearly seen that the removal of elements which may be
turned to a wrong use may mean the loss of elements
of potential value ; that a change of system may mean
the destruction of an order of things which possessed
for the uneducated a meaning and value of its own,
and the substitution of new standards of thought and
conduct too remote from their experience to exercise
an effective influence on their lives.

Some such analysis is necessary to a full under-
standing of the demorahsation which seems in many
cases to have followed the course of the enclosure
movement, and of the religious state of the poor in
the eighteenth century. In one respect the history of
social reconstruction is a record of lost opportunities,
of a sacrifice of ethical principle in the interests of
efficiency. The old religious order had exercised social
faculties whose growth was checked with the progress
of reform ; the open-field system contained elements of
permanent social worth, which disappeared more or
less gradually in the enclosed parish ; and it may be
suggested that the faculty of self-government exercised

32 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

in a rudimentary form in the old manorial assemblies
found no legitimate expansion under the new phase
of paternal autocracy. In another respect a study
of social history shows the necessity of continually
adjusting the means of education to new social condi-
tions, if progress is to be more than a surface movement.
It may be seen, on an inquiry into the sources of im-
provement, that progress, whether religious or economic,
is as much an effect as a cause of advance in civilisation.
The new religion follows the new learning ; the new
agriculture proceeds from the influences of commerce
and a growing intercom'se of the landlord class with
the outer world. ^ It is a legitimate inference that,
as the leaders of reform have passed through a phase of
mental preparation, so the masses in their turn, if they
are to participate actively in the scheme of progress,
must be raised to a new level of intelligence. The most
direct illustrations of this principle are found in the
history of religion. Educational effort among the poor
in the eighteenth century w as awakening to the truth,
imperfectly realised at the time of the Reformation,
that, before new forms of worship or opinion can obtain
a vital hold on the minds of the people, ' some intellectual
change must first have taken place. "* Later on, when
the results of previous discipline came to be tested by
the removal of population into urban areas, there is
evidence which suggests that the strongest instances
of religious attachment among the industrial classes
were found in the Roman Church which had adhered

* We may note during the seventeenth century the influx of com-
mercial elements into the landlord class, and the necessity which impelled
the older families to increase their income ' by marriage or trade ' as
a means of maintaining their position — ,Johnson, op. cit., 77 sq. A writer
in 1667 notices a change in the outlook of the country gentry ; ' more
of them have seen the use and manners of men, and more apply them-
selves to traffic and business than ever ' — quoted Sydney, Social Life in
England, 1660-90, 158 sq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 33

to the older forms of spiritual appeal, and in denomina-
tions of recent growth where religious revival had been
accompanied by a zeal for education.^

The reforms of the period have never been sufficiently
examined in their bearing on the mental growth of
the peasantry. Belonging, as they do, in a special
sense to the history of another class, they come of a
wider range of social evolution than is covered by the
growth of rural communities, and are ultimately a product
of forces acting from without on the structure of rural
life, breaking the continuity of its traditions, and im-
posing on the masses a form of discipline more or less
disconnected with the antecedent stages of their growth.
We see here the beginnings of a process familiar in the
later history of education, and exemplified in recent
times in the manifold reactions of urban on rural life
and the application to the country of policies primarily
designed to suit the needs of the town. There is also
some indication of general causes which contribute to
the result. Defective reform seems closely related to a
defective conservatism ; the dangers of oppressive inter-
ference from without to the absence or impractica-
bihty of a gradual reconstruction from within. The

1 Cf. Kay-Shuttleworth, Social Condition of the People (1850), i. 593,
contrasting the adaptation of Roman Catholic worship to the needs of the
poor with Protestant services which he regards as too intellectual ; the
educational influences of Methodism I have discussed elsewhere. There
is a good deal in the history of this period to support Buckle's argument that
the ' religion of mankind is the eflFect of their improvement, not the cause
of it.' MandeviUe's protest that the Church service and catechising should
meet the spiritual needs of the poor ' without the assistance of reading and
writing ' {Essay on Charity and Charity Schools, 352 sq.) is an indirect
testimony to the fact that his opponents, in founding schools, had come
to realise the need of some leverage in the way of general education to
raise the labouring class to the level of religious instruction. This is
more directly suggested by an account of the weekday schools established
by Griffith Jones in Wales in the eighteenth century, with the object of
preparing the poor by reading and Bible study for the Simday worship
and catechetical instruction — Phillips, Wales, Social Condition, etc., 296 sq.

34 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

displacements which accompanied enclosure at the end of
the eighteenth centmry were the nemesis of a long period
of inaction which had suffered abuses to accumulate in a
system fraught with decay. The suppression of amuse-
ments, which formed part of the programme of moral
reform, was a reaction from the lax discipline which had
spread demoraHsation in earlier years. ^ The defects
of paternal government wiU be found to consist much
less in acts of repression than in failure to reconstruct.'

The study of education cannot be divorced from
that of the social system in which it arises. One of
the reasons which have been assigned for the growth in
Scotland of a democratic scheme of education, is that a
strong educational tradition had been estabhshed there
before society was divided by the influx of wealth. One
of the reasons for its absence in England has been traced
to the decay of the small freeholder class, commencing
at the time when sixteenth- century endowments were
affording a wider access to liberal studies. In Scotland,
again, the Keformation produced a relatively democratic
form of Church Government, from which liberal tra-
ditions derived support. In England the course of
religious, as of pohtical, reconstruction moved in a
different du-ection.

Attention has been drawn to a central fact in the
social history of the period — the growing ascendancy

^ Webb, English Local Government, i. 69, 398, 366 sq.

^ It is much easier to note the absence of a rural policy than to discuss
the extent to which remedies were available. But it is legitimate to
mention a group of proposals which bear on the issues raised in the text,
and might, if advanced earlier, have formed the nucleus of a broad con-
ception of rural reform; (1) the allotment schemes of Arthur Young
and others which aimed at retaining, after enclosure, some of the social
benefits of the open-field system ; (2) the plea for instruction, and Eden's
ideal of a higher recreation, as a means of raising the level of social life
(State of the Poor, i. 446) ; (3) a passage in Marshall's Eural Economy of
Yorkshire (1788 ; i. 28 sq.), which foreshadows a scheme of parish councils
suggested by certcdn surviving examples of the manorial court.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 35

and prestige of an order which, deriving regular powers
of jurisdiction from the Crown, gradually absorbed
the functions of earlier quasi- judicial assemblies and
exercised an increasing control over local affairs. The
ideal squire became the pivot of rural society, the ' regu-
lator of manners,' the ' settler of disputes,' the supreme
guardian of the poor, the leader of religion and social
lile, the pioneer of agrarian retorms ; as a magistrate,
he took over many of the disciplinary powers of the
manorial court, a process which finds a parallel in
the frequent substitution of close for open vestries
during the period immediately following the Reforma-
tion ; ^ and there is a further example of the same
monarchic tendency in the consolidation of landed
estates which was at once the basis and the most visible
sign of political power. It is, here, instructive to turn
to a group of communities whose social order presented
a striking contrast to the normal type; an example
of which, possessing certain features of special interest,
may be taken from Marshall's account of the township
of Pickering in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The
district is occupied by a multitude of small freeholders,
many of them holding estates which * have fallen, by
lineal descent, from the original purchasers.' * No
great man, nor scarcely an esquire, has yet been able
to get a footing in the parish ; or, if any one has, the
custom of "portioning younger sons and daughters by a
division of lands has reduced to its original atoms the
estate which may have been accumulated.' Its affairs
are administered by a jury of the township, which not
only attends to the public concerns of the community,
but acts also as arbiter in private disputes. ^ A similar

^ Webb, op. cit, i. 91, 182. Cf. Hammond, Village Labourer, 16-18.
* Marshall, Rvral Economy of Yorkshire (1788), i. 20-29 ; the italics
are mine.

36 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

social formation was observed by Arthur Young in the
Isle of Axholme. It meets us again in societies of
* statesmen ' in the Lake District, which had known
neither esquire nor pauper ' within the memory of man/
and which were found recruiting their own clergy and
sustaining their social life without the intervention of
any higher rank. The case of Pickering is peculiarly
instructive. The subdivision of the soil is here definitely
connected with a rule of succession more ancient than
that generally upheld by English Law ; and there is
external evidence suggesting a descent from one of those
settlements of small freemen which had come to occupy
the position of ' self-governing townships ' within some
of the larger manorial combinations of the feudal period.
One of the marks which distinguish these townships
is the absence of hall and demesne, indicating a re-
latively independent group of tenants, often farming
their own dues and free from the incidents of personal
servitude. In any case their dependence would be in
the main tributary ; and there is in many instances a
direct transition * from the rendering of produce to pay-
ment in money, without the intermediate stage of
labour arrangements which were the most usual and
important expression of the manorial system in other
places.' Their history illustrates the evolution of a
social unit, not only antecedent to the manor, but
capable of developing without the direct interference
of the manorial authority in its internal affairs. It
represents, as nearly as possible, the natural growth
of the village community when the causes are absent
which convert it into the manorial group. ^

1 Vinogradoff, op. cit., 395-8, 328, 322, 136. He remarks that, what
he defines as the characteristics of the ' self-governing township,' are
found especially in the case of communities of sokemen, ' that is of organi-
sations of tenants emphatically free ' (136) ; the description seems to
apply to Pickering (436, n. 1), where the course of development into a

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 37

It is difficult, in criticising these communities, to
improve on the language suggested by a comparatively
recent observation of analogous groups in British India.
It is contended ' that they secure a large amount of
comfort and happiness for the families included within
them, that their industry is generally, and that their
skill is occasionally, meritorious ' ; but * their admirers
certainly do not claim for them that they readily adopt
new crops and new modes of tillage, and it is often
admitted that they are grudging and improvident owners
of their waste land/ ^ Another and kindred defect
was their failure to deal with a problem which was, in
fact, never adequately solved by Teutonic townships —
that of preserving a balance between * landholding and
population. ' A normal result of economic progress was
the concentration of shares in the hands of a dominant
minority. Even where a more regular distribution was
secured by equal inheritance, there was a tendency for

community of freeholders was probably much the same as in the Soke
of Rothley (c/ 135-7).

To appreciate the force of these examples, one must go back to Maine's
distinction between * the tribe and the tribal chief as distinct sources of
positive institutions,' ' property in land ' having arisen ' partly from the
disentanglement of the individual rights of the kindred or tribesmen from
the collective rights of the family or tribe, and partly from the growth
and transmutation of the sovereignty of the tribal chief ' ; and to his
further generaUsation that, whereas in France the ' land-law of the people '
triumphed ultimately (at the Revolution) over the ' land-law of the nobles,'
in England the converse process has taken place — ^the ' system of the
nobles has become in all essential particulars the system of the people '
{Early History of Institutions, 120 sq., 124); In the case of Pickering there
are stiU clear traces of the ' land-law of the people,' e.g. in the custom of
gavelkind (c/, ibid., 124 sq.), while Marshall's description of the gradual
division of its common fields and meadows ' hy commission ' suggests a
final stage in the growth of several ownership (arising ' from the dis-
entanglement of the individual rights of the landred or tribesmen from
the collective rights of the family or tribe ').

* Maine, ViUage Communities, 162 sqq. Marshall suggests this Umita-
tion : it is the large landholder (whose advent leads to the transformation
of the community) who makes improvements. His account of the en-
closure of commons in Pickering seems to point especially to the neglect
of wagte-landfl by the landholders of the township {op. cit., i. 54).

38 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the group, as it lost its power of absorption, to develop
the characteristics of a close corporation. It would
seem, indeed, that many of these ' free communities *
were composed, from an early period, of aristocracies
of the conquering race and subordinate groups of cottars
or bordarii, who, as their name implies, stood in some
measure outside the commonwealth of the township.
It is possible that the picture of such a society in the
last stage of dissolution is to be found among those
derelict and anarchic types, not uncommon at the close
of the eighteenth century, where a small clique of
well-to-do farmers are discovered exercising an uncon-
trolled tyranny over a mass of poverty-stricken and
brutalised dependents. ^ But, while these societies may
illustrate by their defects the advantages of paternal
government, they suggest also an alternative to what in
England was the normal course of social evolution. Their
dissolution came of a combination of forces which are
found everywhere disintegrating the old economic order
and the social life connected with it ; but it is not un-
important that in distant parts of the country these
influences were delayed. Marshall's account of the town-
ship of Pickering — with its numerous yeomanry who
have recently dissolved the partnership of the open-field
by mutual agreement, while retaining a consistent control
of their common affairs — is the picture of a community
which comes within measurable distance of reorganisa-
tion on modern co-operative principles. In different
parts of the North at this period we seem to find the
materials which formed the basis of rural co-operation

^ Cf. Hannah More's account of Cheddar (Somerset) and adjoining
parishes {Letters to Wilberforce, in Life of H. More (anonymous) ). Maine,
op. cit., 201, has some interesting remarks on the growth of close corpora-
tions in open-field settlements in New England.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 39

in Denmark in later years, in a society similarly con-
stituted and among men of the same northern breed.
We shall discover, too, the germ of intellectual interests,
which might have found expression in something akin to
the Danish Folk- Colleges. But English energy was to
be diverted into another channel ; the idea of a new
rural civilisation was to be indefinitely postponed.

(2) The Growth of Irvdustrialism^ Manufacturing Tovms
and, Mining Settlements

A * plain country fellow ' might answer the descrip-
tion of the old satirist — as one that * manures his ground
well but lets himself lye fallow and untilled ' — and yet
fulfil that which was expected of him, keeping a good
home, living decently in health and moderate comfort,
and rearing hardy and courageous sons for the service
of their country. It was in these respects that, towards
the close of the eighteenth century, the * agricultural
life ' was held to compare most favourably with the

* condition of manufacturers.' Eden asks whether

* application to a few mechanical processes which an
improved state of manufactures usually requires ' was
not a cause of the disorderly living prevalent among
highly paid artisans ; and he proceeds to assert, as an
accepted commonplace, the superiority enjoyed by one
engaged in the * varying operations of husbandry,' ' in
domestic comfort ... in certainty of work and conse-
quent independence/ and in a life ' favourable to health,
to morals and to religion.' ^ The verdict of Adam Smith
is even more decided. * Not only the art of the farmer
. . . but many inferior branches of country labour ' are

» State of the Poor, i. 440.

40 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

more conducive to breadth of mind than * the greater
part of the mechanic trades. ' ^

In such estimates there is an element which re-
quires little corroboration. That the agricultural were
normally superior to the manufacturing classes in domes-
tic virtue and contentment, is attested by cumulative
evidence from many quarters. Nor is there any doubt
that quality of occupation was an important factor
in the difference. The tailoring trade had already sup-
plied a striking instance of the demoralising effects of
seasonal employment coupled with a degree of specialisa-
tion which degraded workmanship from an art to a
routine ; ^ and the effects of physical and mental strain
were no less apparent in ' mechanic ' industries demand-
ing a higher type of skill and intelligence. * Joseph/
writes Watt, of one of the few mechanics who gave him
satisfaction, ' has pursued his old habit of drinking in
a scandalous manner, until the very enginemen turned
him to ridicule,' . . . but ' he has done much good at
his leisure hours. . . . He has had some hard and long
jobs, and consequently merits some indulgence for his
foibles. ' ^ The emphasis which is laid on the evils of
specialisation, is partly accounted for by the transition
through which industry and social thought were pass-
ing at the period. Considering the place which crafts-
manship had occupied in English educational tradition,
it was natural to assume that an ever-growing division
of labour meant an inevitable decay of character and
intelligence. The modern view of specialisation, which
sees in it a means of economising the time and energy

^ The labourer's ' understanding . . . being accustomed to consider
a greater variety of subjects, is generally much superior to that of the
other {i.e. the town mechanic), whose whole attention ... is commonly
occupied in performing one or two very simple operations' — Wealth of
Nations, bk, i. oh. x. pt. 2.

* Webb, Trade Unionism, 26.

• Smiles, Lives of the Engineers : Boulion and Watt, 196.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 41

of the worker and thereby affording him a fuller share
of culture and social life, is based on the experience
that a process which has become purely mechanical
may be performed by machinery. To say that a par-
ticular employment had ceased to educate might mean
that human energy had been set free, which would
produce good or evil results according to the nature
of the pursuits in which it found an outlet. The poor
stocking-weavers composing the Methodist circle at
Nottingham, who showed an * uncommon gentleness
and sweetness in their temper and something of ele-
gance in their behaviour,' ^ supplied an answer to many
fatalistic assumptions ; and against the dissipation
engendered by monotonous and exacting toil must be
set examples of a higher culture which were found
chiefly among the manufecturing classes, and the habit
of reading which was characteristic of certain sedentary
employments. On the other hand, a further stage
of economic progress might redress the balance, by
placing employment on a new intellectual footing.
The darker side of industrial evolution appears in the
subordination of the worker to the machine ; but a
comparison of field-labour with the ' mechanic trades '
suggests also a contrast between two types of intelli-
gence— between the wisdom of tradition and experience,
of which husbandry and the old order of craftsmanship
illustrated different aspects, ^ and the talent shown

* Wesley, Journal, June 18, 1777.

* ' Most of the labourers employed (in the construction of the Bridge-
water Canal) were of a superior class, and some of them were " wise " or
" cunning " men, blood-stoppers, herb-doctors, and planet-rulers, such aa
are still to be found in the neighbourhood of Manchester. Their very
superstitions . . . made them thinkers and calculators. The foreman
bricklayer, for instance, as his son used afterwards to relate, always
" ruled the planets to find out the lucky days on which to commence any
importeint work," and, he added, " none of our work ever gave way." The
skilled men had their trade secrets, in which the unskilled were duly
initiated — simple matters in themselves, but not without their uses ' —
Smiles, Brindhy, 210-212.

42 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

in a combination of manual dexterity with a knowledge
of scientific principles. Side by side with the vision
of unthinking drudgery, rendered more thoughtless and
monotonous by a progressive division of labour, came an
increasing demand for intelligent workmanship. The
incompetence which baffled a generation of inventors
at an early stage of the Industrial Revolution, affords
some measure of the scope for mental expansion which
new forms of industry were destined to create.

The influence of urban surroimdings is a factor
which enters more and more into these comparisons. A
formula describing the rural districts as ' more ignorant,
contented and happy, than enlightened, industrious and
ambitious,' may be taken as the starting pomt of a
controversy which reveals, perhaps more clearly than
any other example, the differences of temperament
underlying all sectarian disputes. One writer has a
vision of ' villages abounding with health ; conmaercial
cities with disease ' and intoxication. Another con-
trasts the freedom and business energy of Birmingham
with the dreariness of his native ^'illage and the
behaviour which he witnessed on a visit to Bosworth,
where the inhabitants set ' their dogs at us in the streets,
merely because we were strangers. * ' Human figures, not
their own, are seldom seen in those inhospitable regions :
surrounded with impassable roads, no intercourse with
man to humanize the mind, no commerce to smooth their
rugged manners, they continue the boors of nature.' *
Assertions of this kind, from either side, are not hkely
to stand the test of criticism. It is not difficult, in
the eighteenth century, to discover rural slums whose
social condition seems to exaggerate the worst features
of the manufacturing town. A decayed rural civil-
isation wears an appearance more ghastly than the

^ Hutton, History of Birmingham, 63 sq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 43

chaotic beginnings of urban life. The triumph of
barbarism and a collapse of civil and religious discipline
are found alike in the crowded thoroughfare and over
the secluded country-side. But rural society is not to
be judged by its worst examples ; and, in following
the course of urban development, it is legitimate to
distinguish the case of newly developed districts,*
where towns were a sign of industrial activity and the
demand for labour kept pace with an increase in the
supply, from the purlieus of older cities where an influx
of population added to the turmoil of a community
already suffering from the evils of overcrowding and
misgovernment. Too much importance may be attached
to descriptions of the Metropolis. Then, as now, it
constituted a special problem, and from the time of
Elizabeth had been developing characteristics the
legacy of which remains to the present day.

It is necessary to bear in mind the twofold nature
of the transition through which England was passing,
and which was destined to convert a predominantly
rural and agricultural into a predominantly urban and
manufacturing community. Town life was awakening
new energies which carried special problems and dangers
in theii- train. It was evoking the humanising in-
fluences of a wider life, but a life of surpassiog difficulty
which required to be learnt. Just as the division of
labour created a mental void which was to be fiUed
by the call of wider interests, so nothing less than a
new form of social organisation was demanded by the en-

^ Smiles, Brindley, 272-4, refers to the opening-up of the Pottery
districts of Staffordshke after the^^construction of the Grand Trunk Canal.
Its effect was ' not only to employ but actually to civilise the people.'
He quotes Wesley — ' I returned to Burslem : how is the whole face of
the country changed in about twenty years ! Since which, inhabitants
have continually flowed in from every side. Hence the wilderness is
literally become a fruitful field. Houses, villages, towns, have sprung up,
and the country is not more improved than the people.'

44 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

vironment in which an increasing part of the community
were to pass their days. The interest of this phase of
urban growth lies in the impression which it conveys of
a gradual differentiation of one form of social settlement
from another, of the emerging of a new order of social
life from the ruins of the old. As manufacture and
husbandry were still in the process of dissolving partner-
ship, so the town continued to maintain a strugghng
connection with the life and habits of the country-side.
Down to the early years of the nineteenth century
the weavers of Spitalfields had gardens in the neighbour-
hood of Bethnal Green ; the artisans of Birmingham,
on the outskirts of the town.^ On the other hand,
many of the darker aspects of urban life may be explained
by the decay of institutions which, however suitable
to the needs of a rural parish, broke down rapidly under
the pressure of a growing population and unprecedented
demands, 2 and by the survival of rustic pastimes m an
atmosphere which led to their corruption and de-
basement. But this is not the sum of the difference.
That which distinguishes a growing town from an over-
grown village is a sense of building on new foundations,
the forming of new social groups, the slow awakening
of corporate consciousness, the yearning for self-realisa-
tion on a higher social and intellectual level. Already

^ Select Committee on Public Libraries, 1849, Q. 2732 ; Ltingford,
Century of Birmingham Life, ii. 283, 314, 440.

* Webb, English Local Government, i. 69-91, 207, 233-45. The
purlieus of growing cities were the special resort of the ' Trading Justices '
(328-33) ; the magistrates of Middlesex were the worst of their order.
The most notorious specimen was Joseph Merceron, who obtained an
ascendancy in Bethnal Green by tolerating dog-fighting and buUock-
hunting in the streets and allowing unlimited license in the liquor trade ;
on his fall in 1818 the Rector set up a school, which had been previously
prevented, and some measure of order was restored by the enrolment of
special constables (ibid., i. 83-7). This helps to explain the extraordinary
state of affairs described by the Rector in 1816 ; Select Committee on Edu-
cation (1816), 209, 234.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 45

the elements of a new order were crystallising into
some definite shape. Its beginnings may be traced,
partly in the gradual process of reorganisation which
here and there transformed a tumultuous vestry into
an effective instrument of popular government,^ partly
also in the sporadic growth of institutions which were
to give an intellectual background to social hfe — the
theatre, the museum, the musical society and the
debating club, and the more remarkable scientific and
naturahst associations which were formed among the
Huguenot silk- weavers of Spitalfields.^

If the growth of manufacturing communities marked
a new stage in the process of economic differentiation,
opening access, in spite of many initial disadvantages,
to a higher level of social opportunity, the mining
settlements arose under conditions which seemed to
combine the evils of town and country life without any
of their refinements — one of those products of indus-
trial development which appear like a survival of
organised savagery in the heart of a modern civihsation.
The population employed in mines and collieries
formed no inconsiderable part of the labouring classes
of Great Britain, though the assertion that they
numbered in 1756 upwards of a hundred thousand is
httle more than rhetorical guesswork.^ The pecuhar
conditions of their employment, and of an existence at
once gregarious and secluded, had set a stamp on their
character and physique which marked them off, in
general, from the rest of the conmaunity almost as a
distinct race. They had a dress, manners and speech of
their own, and were sometimes of a different stock from

» Webb, op. cU., i. 134.

« Smiles, Huguenots in England and Ireland, 336 sq. ; Sydney, England
and the English in the Eighteenth Century, i 61.

' Vindication of Natural Society, quoted Eden, op. cit., I 416.

46 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the surrounding peasantry.^ In the records of the
eighteenth century they stand as a type of ignorance,
roughness, and irregular living, and as a type of misery
and exceptional privation. They came to occupy, in
some degree, the same place in the public imagination
that was afterwards assigned to the factory operatives.
The long hours of confinement in an unhealthy atmos-
phere, the absence of supervision, the constant separa-
tion of parent and child, and the general disturbance of
family life, foreshadowed many of the problems which
were to arise in connection with the factory system ;
and it is in the mining colonies that we find some of the
earliest examples of those organised schemes of social
betterment which have developed with the growth of
large industrial establishments. ^ If we except certain
sketches of rural society, they are perhaps the only
group among the labouring class of whom any vivid
impressions are to be derived from eighteenth-century
literature, thanks to their backward condition, which
brought them under the notice of one of those simple
enthusiasts in whom sympathy has developed some of
the qualities of a great artist. Wesley was the first
to appreciate the Titanic element in their life and char-
acter— a life of colossal immoderation in weird harmony
with the wildness of nature, and yet, in a sense, essen-
tially innocent and unspoiled ; a wildness broken by
strange silences ; a boisterous humour that melted

^ Knight's Quarterly Magazine, 1823, art. ' Stafiordshire Collieries.'
^ E.g. Duke of Bridgewater's Model Village with Sunday Schools
and a scheme for controlling debt ; the Duke's colliers ' soon held a higher
character for sobriety, intelligence and good conduct than the weavers
and other workpeople of the adjacent country ' — Smiles, BrindUy, 231.
Young {.Northern Tour, ii. 288 sqq.) notices that a large proprietor at
Swinton had presented each of the colliers on his estate with an allotment,
on the condition of their cultivating the ground in their leisiuB hours.
Cf. Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, vol. i.
app. i. (1798).

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 47

suddenly in large and simple emotions when the magic
chord was touched. He had the merit of recording
those minor episodes which disclose at a glance the
individuality of a people or neighbourhood and give
the atmosphere of a dramatic scene. He tells us of the
old collier, ' not much accustomed to things of this kind/
who shouted * for mere satisfaction and joy of heart ' ;
how at a vast gathering from the lead mines about
Newcastle he noticed a row of children * under the
opposite wall, all quiet and still ' ; and of the tribute
paid by a small colliery town in Cumberland, where
* the poor people had prepared a kind of pulpit for me,
covered at the top and on both sides, and had placed
a cushion to kneel upon of the greenest tuif in the
country.'

The refining of this raw material, which forms one of
the most attractive episodes in educational history, may
be said to commence with the Methodist Revival. In
Cornwall, one of the strongholds of the movement,
there is a unique example of the change which may be
wrought in the character and outlook of a people, where
education is combined with a steady advance of economic
opportunity. The Cornish miners enjoyed a relatively
independent status owing to the custom of joint- venture
and profit-sharing peculiar to the district. This arrange-
ment made it necessary for them to reckon possibili-
ties and to acquaint themselves with the mechanism
of their trade, and developed a degree of mental
energy which came to distinguish them from the mass
of workers throughout the country.^ The system had,

^ ' In Cornwall the mines are worked strictly on the system of joint
adventure ; gangs of miners contracting with the agent, who represents
the owner of the mine, to execute a certain portion of a vein and fit the
ore for market, at the price of so much in the poimd of the sum for which
the ore is sold,' etc. — J. S. Mill, Political Economy (ed. Ashley), 765. Cf.
Warner, T(mr through Cornwall (1809), 297 sqq.

48 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

also, the disadvantages inherent in all forms of specula-
tion, and demanded a sense of responsibility and self-
restraint which did not exist at the outset. Social
history presents few phenomena more striking and well
attested than the contrast between the riotous life which
during the early years of the century plunged the whole
neighbourhood in debt and degradation, and the im-
proved state of manners and intelligence which is
discovered at its close. The change may be fairly
ascribed to two forces working together on a tempera-
ment naturally susceptible and alert. Methodism, by
its civilising influence, prepared the way for economic
improvement ; the advance of industry, producing
steadier conditions of employment, encouraged a higher
standard of living and removed obstacles to spiritual
growth. Both influences wrought through educational
channels, and combined in developing a more com-
plete type of personality. If Methodism deepened the
spiritual consciousness of the people and made them
responsible for the religious training of their children,
economic progress helped to enforce the claims of secular
knowledge. By the close of the century there were
said to be few miners in the district unacquainted ' with
the lower branches of arithmetic ' ; and, owing to the
attention paid to improvements in machinery and
technique, a good miner had generally some knowledge
of practical geometry. ^

(3) Regiotml Survey ; Historic Factors in the Social
Evolution of Differe7it Areas

A study of social Hfe in different parts of England is
continually revealing characteristics which appear to
have no immediate or necessary connection with local

^ Warner, loc. cit.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 49

surroundings and to be explained most easily by the
intrusion, of some foreign influence. It is difficult to
avoid connecting some of the customs ascribed to the
weavers of Spitalfields in the early years of the last
century with the traditions of an old Huguenot settle-
ment ; and the same stream of immigration may help
to explain certain forms of cultuie which flourished
among kindred groups in the manufacturing districts
of the North. ^ But the growth of the French quarter
in London, and the dispersion of Huguenot settlers
throughout the country, have an historical interest
far outweighiug their direct contribution to national
industry and social progress. They illustrate, in a
comparatively recent example, the effects of a long
process of conflict and assimilation which has been the
making of England, extending back beyond the period
of the Norman Conquest to those more remote ages of
colonisation when the island was a battle-ground of
races and a network of loosely organised states.

The history of this process may be read in place-
names, dialects, and monumental remains, and no less
in local diversities of character and custom. Ethical
peculiarities are attributed to different districts by a
consensus of eighteenth- century evidence, which preserve
the traces of earlier divisions of nationality and race.
The same strenuous, seK-reliant qualities, persisting
through every change of circumstance, distinguish the

^ The Spitalfields weavers, in the early half of the nineteenth century,
were classed among the poorest and most ignorant of the population ; yet
they displayed a love of birds and flowers {Committee on Public Libraries,
1849, Q. 2731 sq.), and formed libraries {ibid., Q. 2709). Smiles {Hugue-
nots in England and Ireland, 335-7) mentions the love of flowers among
examples of the cultxu'e which he ascribes to the original members of
the French colony in this district. ' Others of the immigrants,' he says,
'who settled in Manchester and Macclesfield, carried thither the same
love of flowers and botany which still continues to characterise their
descendants.'

50 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

areas to North and East which had been replenished by a
strong admixture of Germanic and Scandinavian stocks ;
while the far West, which had been the chief strong-
hold of Celtic resistance, presents an equally marked and,
in many ways, a complementary group of characteristics,
essentially the same as those ascribed to its population
in Roman times. ^ A further source of evidence has
been opened by economic research. * One is inclined
to suppose,' says a modem writer, ' that the introduction
of each new element in the population of a village —
Saxon, Angle, Dane and, in a less degree, Norman —
profoundly modified earlier customs, and that in each
part of Britain a local type of village comimunity resulted
from the blending of different racial traditions. This
hypothesis is directly suggested by the evidence of
recent economic survivals. The most familiar type of
village community is characteristic of the Midlands. . . .
It is most easily conceived as a compound of the pure
Keltic system, known in the Highlands and Ireland as
Run-rig or Rundale, and the North German system
traditional among the Angles, in which the two elements
in equal strength are very perfectly blended together.
In the South of England we find a different type . . .
in which the influence of Keltic tradition is more
strongly seen. The village community in Norfolk and
the adjoining parts of Suffolk shows some remarkable
special features . . . which appear to be easily ac-
counted for as a result of the later intrusion of Scan-
dinavian tradition. Further, throughout the West
of England, from Cumberland to Devon and Cornwall,
we find evidence that the primitive type of village

1 Cf. Warner, Walk through Wales (1797), 178-84, and T(yur through
Cornwall ( 1809), 348-59 ; also Marshall's accounts of the labouring classes
in his works on the Rural Economy oj Yorkshire, of Norfolk, and of the
West oJ England.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 51

community approximated very closely to the Keltic
Run-rig/ 1

It becomes evident, as we pmrsue this line of inquiry,
that racial influence is crossed by another group of
forces equally potent as a cause of differentiation. The
qualities and traditions which each new element in the
population imports, are modified by fusion with other
elements and by the pressure of physical surroundings.
Much, again, that has been attributed to racial habit,
may be traced more generally to geographical and
political causes which favoured in each case a particular
form of settlement. 2 This leads back to an inquiry
which has been already outHned. Must we assume, at
the outset, an essential separation between the races
predominating in different parts of the country ? Or are
alleged * differences in kind ' in reality little more than
differences * in degree of development ' ? How far,
for example, may conditions which survived in the
Celtic West be taken as characteristic of a society still
continuing in the tribal and pastoral stage, fiom which
other races have already emerged at the time of their
settlement on English soil ? The conception here
suggested postulates a normal course of evolution
through which different areas advance successively
towards a common level of civilised life, differing from
one another meanwhile in social characteristics according
to the stages which they have reached at a given period.
It may be seen, at any rate, that the groups formed
during the iaitial periods of colonisation fell continu-
ously under the sway of forces which moulded the frame-
work of national life. As the country became more
settled, the influences which or^inally separated the

^ Slater, English Peasantry and the EncUmire of Common Fields, 6 eg. ;
c/. ch. XV.

» Vinogradoff, op. cit., 263-303.

52 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

local units diminished, while the unifying forces, arising
from a wider range of political and economic develop-
ment, increased in importance. Differentiation would
come to depend less on local peculiarities of race and
environment, and more on the rate at which the new
influences travelled.

It may be admitted that this conception is most
easily illustrated by comparing large tracts of territory
which were conquered and peopled by closely allied
branches of the Teutonic race. The Norfch, down to the
time of the Industrial Revolution, is continually repro-
ducing social phenomena which are found in the South
at an earlier epoch. Its condition at the period of the
Norman Conquest betrays evidence of a more recent
influx of colonists, and it succumbed less readily than
the South to feudal organisation.^ In the sixteenth
century, when the feudal order was rapidly breaking
down under the pressure of a powerful central govern-
ment, it retained a foothold in the northern shires ; ^
their agrarian arrangements being of the rigid type
that had once prevailed in the South and East and had
there yielded to the dissolving influences of industry
and commerce.^ The same phenomenon recurs at a
later period. In descriptions of Lancashire and York-
shire on the very eve of the Industrial Revolution we
find rural communities still passing through the phase
of peasant proprietorship which had reached its zenith
in more advanced agricultural districts two centuries

^ Cf- Vinogradoff's remarks on the contrast between the ' strongly
manorialised South ' and the North with its ' heterogeneous mass of
tenures in which the small freemen still play a great part ' {op. cit., 57 sq.),
and on survivals of the ' soke ' side by side with the ' manor ' in the
North (322 etc.) ; also his general conclusion that ' the Saxon South
had gone through approximately the same stages as the Scandinavian
North, but had already arrived in the eleventh century at the goal reached
by the northern districts only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
imder the influence of the Normans ' (134, cf. 441).

* Tawney, Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, 189 sq,

» Ibid,, 57, 64r-66j

i

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 63

earlier ; ^ a system of trade and industry in wliich
economic functions are less clearly differentiated than
in the older manufacturing centres of the South and
West ; ^ and a social life which is correspondingly frugal
and self-contained. Nor, if we consider the wider re-
actions of a social order at this stage of transition, is it
fanciful to compare the spread of Methodism among
the Yorkshire peasantry with the effects of Wycliffite
tradition in the villages of the South at an earlier epoch,
or to see in the north-country grammar schools down
to the close of this period the signs of a desire for educa-
tion among the poorer classes, recalling the traditional
England of the fifteenth century when a prosperous
yeomanry had ' put their sons to school/ ^ But there is
clearly more to be said of the history of different areas
than is contained in the conception of social change
extending gradually from the centre to the circum-
ference. To illustrate successive stages of economic
evolution, it is necessary to pass continually from one
neighbourhood to another. The antecedents of the
factory system must be sought rather among the
exploited industries of the South- West than in the

^ Mr. Tawney's account of the growth of peasant prosperity between
the first decay of the manorial system and the agrarian revolution of
the sixteenth centiuy may be paralleled in many essential points by
Marshall's survey of East Yorkshire in 1782 (Rural Economy of Yorkshire) :
e.g. such incidents as the numerous small owners, the active manorial
courts dealing with the corporate interests of the community (Marshall,
i. 28 sq.), the open land-market deaUng in small estates (Marshall, i. 30 ;
c/. Tawney, 60), the protective custom of tenant right (Marshall, L 24 ;
c/. Tawney 136), the gradual re-allotment and enclosure of holdings and
the colonisation of waste lands by peasants (Marshall, i. 52 ; c/. Slater,
op. cit., 230 ; Tawney, 70, 157, 165 sq.).

* The Yorkshire woollen industry remained in the hands of small crafts-
men marketing their produce, down to the rise of the factory system,
whereas the woollen manufacture in the South- West had long been con-
ducted on a specialised system of wage labour — Webb, Trade Unionism,
28-30 ; cf. Sroiles' description of the Manchester manufacturer of the early
eighteenth century : ' part shopman, part weaver and part merchant,
worMng hard, living frugally, principally on oatmeal, and usually contriv-
ing to save a httle money ' (Smiles, Lives of the Engineers ; Brindley, 160).

» Cf. Tawney, 134.

54 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

simpler conditions which prevailed in the North down
to the latter half of the eighteenth century. Norfolk
loses its supremacy as an industrial centre only to
become a pioneer of capitalist agriculture. The South-
West, losing its manufactures, relapses into a position
of relative obscurity. Wales, with her prolonged
independence terminated abruptly by the English
conquest, has a history of her own. The same sequences
of cause and effect are very far from being repeated in
different parts of the country ; nor is there any exacb
resemblance between corresponding stages of their
growth. The mass of detail which is lost in contempla-
ting from a distance the march of civilisation becomes
aU important in an assessment of educational values.
Between two districts equally backward in outward
appearances there may be the vast difference which
separates an arrest of progress from a slow advance to
maturity.

Though it is legitimate to lay stress on the action
of centralising forces, political and economic, which
made for national unity and a common civilisation,
to assume that the areas affected by these influences
passed through the same course of social experience
is to suppose not only that physical resources were
equally distributed, but also that the materials cast
into a common mould were homogeneous or at least
uniformly plastic. It is seen, on closer inspection,
that the local units, which gradually coalesced to form
a national community, exhibited important varieties
of structure and contained the seeds of different
social formations. One group of factors, differentiating
local characteristics, must have exercised a paramount
influence from the earliest times. It would make a
considerable difference to the outlook and habits of a
community, whether the conditions of soil and situation

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 55

gave a bias towards pastoral or agricultural pursuits ;
whether they encouraged a compact or a scattered mode
of settlement ; whether there was much or little room
for expansion ; whether the ' farmer has to perform
his task in an isolated homestead ' or ' joins in a vast
agricultural undertaking where a definite place and
share are assigned to him on condition of his following
the rules and customs adopted by the community.'
Another group consists in the survival and interaction
of racial habits and ideas.

Both factors helped to determine the original form
of settlement, and, through the bias which they gave
to its subsequent expansion, exercised an important
influence on character and social habits. The gradual
process of enclosure, which is characteristic of the West
and some parts of the North from an early period, may
be connected with certain incidents arising from the
pastoral character of these districts.^ Early enclosure
is also likely to arise from some peculiarity in the
original forms of tenure or distribution of the soil.
There is an antecedent probability that one of the
main factors in the economic orgamsation of the West
must be sought in the legacy of customs derived from

^ Cf. Slater, op. cit, 159 sq. Dr. Slater refers to CJomwall and Devon
and the north-western shires as typical of those parts of the country
where the ' division of rotermixed arable and meadow land took place
early and gradually, and in subordination to the reclamation of the waste * :
the result being a ' creation of numberless small holdings and properties '
and the opening of a career to the ' enterprising and laborious.' He
adds the significant comment that some explanation of the great part
played by the men of Devon in the Elizabethan age may be found in the
stiffening influence of this discipline, in the ' reaction upon the character
of the people ' of a hard -won triumph over ' rocky soU, woodland and
moor ' (261). Substantially the same course of gradual enclosure and
colonisation of the waste land seems to have been pursued widely through
the West and North ; it appears in the North and West Ridings of York-
shire from the middle of the sixteenth century, in Durham about a himdred
years later — the movement gradually extending towards the Scottish
border as the country was pacified (226, 230, 260).

56 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Celtic tradition.^ Here it is to be observed that national
systems of law, which developed with the growth of a
central governing power, covered only a part, though
an increasing part, of the field of economic and social
relations and were themselves largely derived from
earlier local usage. In the struggle between custom
and national law, the former gradually sank into a
subordinate position ; but there remained continuous
traces of a network of provincial and local institutions
over which the central power extended its control, and
for an indefinite period what most intimately con-
cerned the mass of the population in the affairs of daily
life was not the law of the land, but the customs of the
township or manor in which their lot was cast. The
process, moreover, by which a common law was defined
in the Royal Courts, was anticipated in the systematisa-
tion of provincial usage in the pre-feudal assemblies of
the shire. In this way important varieties of custom
were established over definite areas, whose influence
may be traced in certain cases through the feudal period
and into later times. The numerous and independent
yeomanry who survived in Kent in the eighteenth
century were the product of a land law firmly rooted
before the Norman Conquest. ^

* Dr. Slater is inclined to attribute the ' priority of enclosure ' in the
West partly to Celtic influence {op. cit., 162) ; he remarks that ' fluidity
in the tenure of the soil, which is one of the characteristics of the Celtic
run-rig as compared with the Anglo-Saxon common-field system, favours
the separation of properties and holdings at the time when co-aration
ceases to be practised ' (243), also that the absence of rights of common-
age over the arable, which presented obstacles to enclosure and are absent
from open arable fields through the West and North- West, is apparently a
characteristic of run-rig (178, 265). Vinogradoff, op. cit., 267, attributes
the ' single farm and hamlet arrangement ' on the Welsh border to the
' tribal habits of the Celts, subjected to Norman sway, but still keeping
to their customs,' including the ' rearrangement and scattering of home-
steads in consequence of divisions and re-divisions among heirs.'

* ' Not only is the system of agrarian measures quite peculiar there
(Kent) . . . but, not long after the Conquest we find a whole body of

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 57

iThe historic division between the ' Anglo-Saxon '
and the ' Anglo-Danish ' halves of the kingdom is
marked by two broad varieties of law at one time in
concurrent use. The two systems, however, were nearly
allied ; and the phenomenon to be observed in this
case is not so much the continued influence of Scandi-
navian institutions in the North Eastern areas as the
persistence of ideas and elements of organisation which
may be paralleled in the condition of the South at an
earlier period.^ The North throughout its history never
loses the shadow of that older Teutonic society which
' might have resulted in something more akin to the
formation of Denmark or Norway than to that of
England as it has come to be/

It is clear that the social structure reared after the
Norman Conquest had to embrace societies at very
different stages of development. In the districts to
North and East, covering frontier territories recently
settled by hosts of warlike freemen, the new order
found materials less prepared than in the South, where
the differentiation between warriors and labourers, and
the process of rounding ofE estates under separate
landlords, had already matured. There is evidence,
in fact, in the Domesday inquest, of a transitional

customary rules in force in the county which are directly opposed to
those prevailing in the rest of England. Socially, the most important
of these is the famous rule of Gafolcund (gavelkind), succession demanding
equal division among heirs . . . and, needless to say, the enforcement
of this rule produced a very different system of holdings from that
commonly prevailing in feudalised counties. . . . With aU its accompany-
ing circumstances, it accounts probably for the startling fact recognised
by exponents of Common Law in the thirteenth century, namely that
there was no villeinage in Kent in the later legal sense, that is, no servile
population holding at the will of the lord. . . . Customs similar to gavel-
kind may be noticed in this or the other place outside Kent, but these
would be rooted in manorial usage and not in county law, whereas the
rules enumerated in the Kentish custumal may be considered, if one may
use the expression, as the Common Law of the shire ' — Vinogradoff, 92-4.
1 Vinogradoff, Introduction.

58 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

stage in the growth of the manorial system, brought
about by the extension of the lord's jurisdiction
over settlements of free tenants and others formerly
answerable to the hundred and the shire. The groups
thus formed are said to be ' under soke ' or * in the soke
of ' their lord ; the ' soke ' as a territorial division
being in the nature of a jurisdictional district added
to an estate.^ To such the manorial court is primarily
a centre of civil jurisdiction and political authority.
Economic subjection comes as an adjunct to political
dependence ; but the burden is fixed and in the nature
of a contract ; ^ nor is there much scope or necessity
for manorial interference in the internal management
of these subject communities."^ These features may be
observed, to a great extent, in all large manorial com-
binations, where the authority of the hall as an admin-
istrative centre extends over a number of scattered
settlements. It is to be noticed that ' socmen as
members of jurisdictional sokes ' have a special
prominence in the counties of the Danelaw, particularly
in Lincolnshire, but also * in Nottinghamshire, York-
shire, Norfolk, and Suffolk.' * In the North, including
the East Anglian shires, the soke survives as a distinct
institution, ' side by side with the manor and in combina-
tion with it,' 'a piece of public administration broken
off from the hundred and granted to a private lord, but
still retaining its public features ' ; in the South, it is
* almost entirely merged into the manor, while socmen
and freemen appear only exceptionally and the court of
the manor has to attend to all jurisdictional business.' ^
Corresponding differences are seen in the growth of

^ Vinogradoff, 135. » Ihid., 133 sq., 322, 436.

» Ihid., 136 ; c/. 328 sq. (with special reference to manors of the North
and East).

* Ibid., 436. « Ibid., 134, 322.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 59

the feudal military system. In the North it is based
rather on a * regular repartition of service ' between
agrarian groups than on * a selection of particular
estates ' for military obligation. In some cases the
fees have to be ' taken over ... by entire communities
of sokemen/ an arrangement which at once approxi-
mates to earlier conditions of service in the pre-
feudal levies and deprives the feudal service of its
most characteristic feature, a 'personal contract of
vassalage.'^

Now there is no d priori ground for assuming that
these distinctions, and the social contrasts which they
imply, continued without modification through the
feudal age ; still less, that the position of the socman,
or of the freeman under soke, necessarily corresponded
to that of the freeholder of later times. Political sub-
jection was a step towards economic dependence, and
the contrast between the Danelaw and other parts of
the country was continually reduced by a gradual
assimilation of the free with the servile elements on an
estate and by the fusion of the soke and the manor. ^
Nevertheless, there are features in the later history
of these districts which refer back to the contrasts sug-
gested in the Domesday record. The large proportion
of freeholders which is found on manors of Norfolk and
Suffolk in the sixteenth century has plainly some
connection with the exceptional independence which
the free tenants and socmen of this neighbourhood
had been able to assert after the Conquest ; ^ and
perhaps similar historical causes may explam the * inde-
pendency ' which characterised parts of Yorkshire at
a still later period.* The territory which, in Domes-

* VinogradofF, 57 sq. ; cf. 85 sq. * Ibid., 134 aq,
» Ihid., 105, 331 ; Tawney, op. cit., 26 sq.

* Marsliall, Bural Economy of Yorkshire, i. 257 sq.

60 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

day, is the chief centre of jurisdictional sokes, includes
areas which in the eighteenth century are occupied by
settlements of small proprietors ^ and where the demo-
cratic element in rural institutions is exceptionally
strong. 2 Another line of evidence is suggested by the
evolution of tenant-right on the northern border.
Though the general history of the North shows that
the vast majority of small landholders passed into the
position of customary tenants, it does not follow that
those who fell within this category formed a homo-
geneous class, as regards social status or security of
tenure. The border warfare had filled Cumberland
and Westmoreland and parts of the adjoining shires
with a mass of sinall occupiers, holding their land, as
was generally supposed, on the condition of providing
contingents for service against the Scots. ^ Its cessation
after the union of the English and Scottish Crowns,
gave rise to a struggle between landlord and tenant,
extending over a long period and bearing some analogy
to the social conflicts which occurred in the Danelaw
in the eleventh century. In many cases the tenants
relapsed into a rightless condition ; in others, especially
in the Lake District, they emerged as freeholders. But
the immediate issues of the struggle are of less signifi-
cance than the state of society which it exhibits and
the spirit which it evoked. Some importance must be
attached to the tradition preserved among the Cumber-
land ' statesmen ' that they had inherited their land
from pre-Norman times ; * and to the plea advanced
during the struggle, and apparently substantiated in
one case by a judicial verdict, that * though the tenants
had been undoubtedly liable to border service, it was

1 Cf. Slater, op. cit„ 53. « Ibid., 85.

^ Ferguson, History of Westmoreland, 128.

* Kitchin, Ruakin at Oxford and other Studies, 63.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 61

no part of the service of their estates, nor done by order
or direction of their lords, but was part of their general
allegiance and subjection, and done by order of the lord
warden of those parts. '^ It would seem that in these
troubled warlike regions, where the fighting farmer was
bound to the king's service and to the defence of his
homestead, the social order had perpetuated traditions
of citizenship, at once older and in a sense more demo-
cratic, than those which developed normally under feudal
influences — the immemorial heritage of a colonising
race. Nor is it merely in scattered instances that this
continuity is suggested. The North, as a whole, down
to the Industrial Revolution, retains many of the char-
acteristics of a frontier state, a land of colonists and
adventurers, with vast undeveloped resources and great
tracts of untenanted soil. What followed, marks the
concluding phase in a long process of colonisation
extending back to the dawn of history. The frontier
spirit is manifest — both for good and evil — in those
who led the way to untold labours and unmeasured
wealth.

(4) North and West

The neighbourhood of the English Lakes, extending
northwards to the border and back towards Lonsdale
and the Yorkshire moors, was a region at this time
comparatively unknown ; a land peopled in the main
by descendants of a powerful Norse colony with rem-
nants of an earlier Celtic stock ; little affected by the
stream of immigration which had followed the growth
of commerce aroimd its borders ; and yet, by reason
of its seclusioiii, possessing a peculiar interest as a store-
house of racial energies, of materials of which the

1 Ferguson, 136.

62 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Northern character was formed. ^ Nowhere, in the
districts reached by the Scandinavian inroads, had there
been precisely the same combination of circumstances
strengthening the individuality of the early settlers and
the social habits in which it found expression. They
came, it would seem, to a land much resembling their
original home in climate and physical characteristics :
from the mountains of the Hardanger to the desolate
fells and hill- sides of Cumberland, from the Norwegian
fjord to the English dale. They were born of a good
fighting stock and settled in a territory which lay
exposed for centuries to the dangers of attack. A
vigorous climate ; a hard life rewarded by simple plenty
for all ; the secluded dale nestling in the shelter of the
mountains ; the challenge of a common danger from
without, with its continuous lesson in self-reliance and
hardy comradeship — these influences go far to explain
the type of character, at once so limited and so complete,
which survived in the Cumberland ' statesmen ' of the
eighteenth century. The social order harmonised with
these rude, wholesome surroundings. There were numer-
ous parishes where wealth and destitution were alike
unknown ; and where the place of an upper class was
filled by the * priest ' and the schoolmaster — the former
being little removed in social position from his flock,
the son of a ' statesman,' living a statesman's life, till-
ing his glebe, knitting his stockings, and in addition
writing his parishioners' letters and instructing their
children from within the chancel rails. There were,
here, few of those characteristic amenities which ex-
cited the wonder of continental visitors in the home

^ CJ. Robert Ferguson, Northmen in Cumberland and Westmoreland ;
Dialect of Cumberland. Eichard Ferguson, History of Westmoreland.
Collingwood, Scandinavian Britain. Kitchin, Buskin at Oxford and other
Studies (ch. ii. The Statesmen of West Cumberland). Hutchinson, History
of Cumberland. Jollie, Sketch of Cumberland Manners and Customs.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 63

counties, from which foreign impressions of England
were chiefly derived. The hard, penurious life of the
small proprietors has been compared to that of the
French peasantry ; ^ the dress and diet of all ranks,
from the farmer to the humblest labourer or artificer,
betrayed few of the external marks of refinement ;
and an exaggerated routine was relieved by an elaborate
observance of feast-days and rustic traditions, less akin
to the measured rejoicings of the South than to the
custom of other lands, where mediaeval influences
had never relaxed their hold. And yet the life of these
border districts had advantages in the breeding of men,
a continuity of purpose not lightly to be exchanged
for the hazard of speedier progress, smoother manners,
and greater ease of living. The same impression of
maturmg strength is conveyed in a report sent home
by a court emissary in the reign of Elizabeth, and in an
account of the rural parts of Northumberland returned
by a royal commission three centuries later. * These
people,* wrote Burleigh's informant, * situate among
wild mountains and savage fells, are generally affected
to religion, quiet and industrious, equall to Hallyfax in
this, excelling them in civility and temper of lyfe, as
well as in abstaining from drink as from other excesses.'
Their history during the intervening period might be
used to illustrate, by force of contrast, precisely those
respects in which the experience of the poorer classes
was defective in other parts of the country. They were
left to plan their own lives, unaided and unrepressed ;
they enjoyed a plenteous supply of material for the
household arts ; and they were untouched by that rapid
change from comparative ease to acute privation which

^ Kitchin, 66. Eden, op. cit., i. p. vii, notices the wearing of ' clogs '
instead of shoes ; the contrary practice in the South of England being a
point on which foreign observers insisted as a sign of English prosperity.

64 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

was one of the main causes of demoralisation among
the poor in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
The reason is, partly that the influences of social
change were slow to penetrate the extreme North, partly
that the course of economic development, in its effect
on the resources of the labourer and the relation between
eSort and opportunity, was essentially different in a
remote pastoral country and in the well-populated arable
districts of the Midlands and the South. The advantage
possessed by the northern peasantry in an abundant
supply of milk and fuel became increasingly important
as the century advanced ; and it is a fact of no less
significance that, while in the Midlands arable land was
being converted rapidly to pasture, the general effect
of enclosure in the North and West was to extend the
area for tillage and with it the means of constant
employment.^ Left to themselves, with ' difficulties to
overcome and freedom to overcome them,' their advance,
if slow, was certain and continuous, proportionate to
an increase of skill and exertion. There was neither
the slackening influence of premature prosperity, nor
the sudden disturbance which was a normal resulfc of
economic progress where the system of husbandry was
rapidly changed.

The memorials of life in these remote districts may,
at first, remind one of those speculations on a natural
state of society which engaged the philosophers of the
period. On the one side is a vision of endless drudgery
and mean contentment ; on the other, an almost
idyllic peace, approaching as near to the essentials of
happiness as the conditions of human fife permit. The
next impression is perhaps that of an exuberant medley
of traditions, a genial confusion of ill-assorted types

» Slater, 104 sq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 65

blending together on the distant landscape. Much
is heard of the * sameness of disposition ' engendered
by ancient pedigree and long sojourning on the same
plot of ground ; of generous, soHd, peaceful quahties, re-
lieved on occasion by bursts of extravagance and pavage
force ; of a liking for pugilism and athletic exercise ;
of a football match played annually at Workington with
goals a mile apart and no rules ; much, again, of the
romance of a mountain country, and of an occasional
respect for learning that is not infrequently the guerdon
of solitude and the heritage of long descent. And
over all there is a glow of sunset, the mystery of a
departing age — the ancient merriment of Christmas
and Twelfth Night ; the lilt of the minstrel's song ;
some quiet gathering at the Holy Well, seeking the
spirit of * temperance, cleanliness, simpUcity and love ' ;
and the solemn sound of the mourners following in
long procession over hill and dale, as one of the brother-
hood is borne to his last resting-place, with a sad melody
of psalms and dirges wafted on the northern breeze.

To those who viewed their life at close quarters and
in its quieter moods, the picture might unfold a clearer
meaning, an underlying consistency of aim. Eden was
drawing mainly on his knowledge of this neighbourhood,
when he maintained that the poorer classes in the less
developed regions of the North and West made up for
an apparent backwardness in outlook and material
achievement by a superior capacity for organisation
and an intelligent thrift in the management of simple
resources. The life of the Cumberland peasantry, as
he saw it, was more concentrated and self-dependent
than that of their countrymen in the South. Despite
its rude exterior it was essentially richer and more of
an art. Its roots lay in an intense attachment of the
family to the soil, which rendered the home a centre

66 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

of absorbing interests — and here, again, we may find a
closer parallel in the attitude and ideals of the French
peasantry than in the prevailing traditions of the Mid-
lands and the South. The cottage hearth is an altar on
which the fire burns without ceasing, day and night, a
symbol of the unity and permanence of family life, of the
wisdom handed down through many generations, of the
pride which educates and keeps the afiections pure.
Housekeeping is carried on in the patriarchal fashion,
with much simple skill in ' culinary preparations,' and at
a great saving of expense ; everything nearly, in the way
of dress, being a home product, except hats and clogs
for outdoor wear.^ Under these conditions men might
drudge to any extent without serious damage or loss
of temper, partly because thrift was practised as an
art, partly because the affections extended natmally
beyond the homestead. The intense sentiment which
united the members of a domestic circle overflowed
in reunions of friends and relatives in joy or sorrow
and at festive seasons of the year. The same natural
co-operation that rendered the home self-sufficient
appeared at christenings and at the marriage feast, when
the neighbours, high and low, brought contributions in
kind to a revelry which was not disgraced by ' drunken-
ness and riot,' nor was it costly, ' as is, alas, so commonly
the case in more favoured regions.' ^ Thus family life
expands easily into that of the larger family ; and in
the interests which spring from well-ordered affections
there is a guiding influence which will lead on to higher
purposes, however slow the ascent. To those who dwell

^ Eden, i. p. \ii sq., 496, 525, 542, 554. He refers to the superior skill
in cookery of the peasantry of the North, Scotland and Wales : the cheap-
ness of fuel and the use of barley in making soups being among the reasons
* why the culinary preparations of the Northern peasant are so much
diversified and his table so often supplied with hot dishes.'

* Ibid., i. 598 sq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 67

with fondness on the small beginnings from which move-
ments arise, there is some significance in an account of
the homely gatherings of countrywomen in the valley
of Dent — of the company engaging in a knitting contest
with much talk and laughter, till one is asked to read
and gives them page on page of Robinson Crusoe or
the Pilgrim's Progress, after which they fall to dis-
cussing what they have heard or resume ' the interesting
threads of local gossip/

It has been observed that the eighteenth century,
a period during which the right of the poorer classes
to education was seldom mentioned, was remarkable
for the number of poor men who rose to high positions
in Church and State and in the world of letters. Though
examples may be drawn from all parts of the country,
there is a mass of evidence ascribing to the northern
counties, especially as they approach the Scottish border,
a special pre-eminence, and revealing traces of a wide-
spread belief in education, even in learning for its own
sake, that had no parallel in the South. In Cumberland
and Westmoreland at the close of the century there were
few iUiterates; and the superiority of the northern
peasant in general knowledge was a common observation
in diaries of travel. The writers allude, more precisely, to
the ' superior arithmetical and literary knowledge ' to be
remarked * in the middling and lower classes,* among
whom were men tolerably acquainted with the classics
and ' more than tolerable mathematicians.* At a much
later date, well on into the second half of the nineteenth
century, a government report refers to men of humble
station who spoke with pride of their recollection of
classical authors. Probably no single explanation is
sufficient to account for a phenomenon so striking and so
well attested. Special influences may be adduced in par-
ticular cases : an element of Presbyterian tradition on

68 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the Northumberland border, in Westmoreland a multi-
plicity of endowed schools. But undoubtedly the more
general causes which gave freedom and stimulus to the
native genius must be sought in the social environment :
in the absence of conditions which elsewhere erected
commercial standards, raised the cost of education, and
discountenanced the poor, and in the survival of a
social order led by the yeoman class — the class that
had given to mediaeval universities their democratic
character, and whose presence had once supplied the
most effective link between the peasantry and the
means of higher education. One way in which this
influence reacted on educational opportunity was re-
marked as specially characteristic of the Lake District.
The practice of recruiting the clergy from yeoman families
made it necessary that the village school should combine,
in some measure, the function of an academy with
that of a place of elementary instruction for the poor ;
among whom, in turn, some ' love of Greek and Latin '
was found to diffuse itself after the disorderly fashion
of that time and place. ^

^ Schools Inquiry Commission, 1868, ix. 903 sq. On the state of educa-
tion, see Clarke, Survey of the Lakes of Cumberland, Westmoreland and
Lancashire (1787), p. xxiii. 'Few possess more native genius [than the
inhabitants of this district] : among the most unpolished of them are . . .
men who are tolerable proficients of the classics and who are more than
tolerable mathematicians ; even among the poor artificers, such as tailors
and shoemakers, may be found some tolerable poets ' — ibid., 36. ' Much
more general knowledge may be foimd [in Cimiberland] than is to be met
with among people of their class in the southern counties ' — Houseman's
Tour (1797), Monthly Review, iv. 448. ' In different parts of my tour, I
frequently heard of north-coimtry curates and excisemen, and in London
the compting houses are much supplied with country lads from Cumber-
land and Westmoreland, who exchange the plow and flail for the pen and
prove as expert with the one as the other. Whether it be owing to the
keen and pure air of these counties, which sharpens the genius of their
inhabitants, or the ease and small expense with which education is acquired
there, or to what other cause we ought to attribute the superior arith-
metical and literary knowledge, etc., observable in the middling and
lower classes in the North, I shall not attempt to determine ; however, the
fact, in my opinion, is indisputable ' — ibid., v. 108. The Schools Inquiry

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 69

A time of change was approaching. Broad dis-
tinctions were drawn, among the Cumbeiland peasantry,
between the dwellers on the central plains, the shep-
herds who passed a peaceful, secluded existence in
the mountainous districts, and the rough borderers of
the far North. Manufacturing centres at Kendal and
Carlisle opened new sources of employment to the
surrounding hamlets. Agriculture made a gradual,
steady progress ; the use of broadcloth in place of
homespun, for Sunday wear, being one of the innovations

Commission (I.e.) notices that men * in the humbler walks of life ' might
still be met with, who spoke ' with pride of their recollection of Homer
and Virgil ' ; cf. the account given by Moritz [Travels in England in 1782,
Eng. ed. 1886, 149) of his meeting with a saddler from Matlock who
conversed of Homer, Horace and Virgil, with quotations, ' pronotmcing
the words and laying his emphasis with as much propriety as I could
possibly have expected, had he been educated at Cambridge or at Oxford,'
and who had, moreover, the good taste to pay the reckoning at the inn
where they halted ' to drink and talk, . . . because, as he said, he had
brought me thither.'

Heath, English Peasantry (1871), 85-7, refers to the Presbyterian
influence on education in Northumberland : in another passage, he cites
the case of a Cheviot shepherd, father of eleven children, who * twenty
years ago ' hired a schoolmaster at his own expense. ' After a year or two,
he took his master and two other shepherds into partnership .• . . the
schoolmaster moves about from house to house among his four employers,
receiving board and lodging during the fourteen days for each scholar. . . .
In the winter time the parents will send the bigger boys into lodgings at
Wooler, that they may have further advantages in the way of education.
In the school belonging to the English Presbyterians, the master speaks
of having two sons of shepherds, one learning Latin, the other French
and Euclid ' — ibid., 214. The practice, here noticed, of supplying the
schoolmaster with board and lodging is probably of some antiquity. It
was the recognised method of supporting and rewarding the school-
master in the hedge schools of Kerry, a county where, seventy years
ago, according to Hall's accoimt, it was ' by no means rare to find among
the humblest of the peasants, who have no prospect but that of eidsting
by daily labour, men who can converse fluently in Latin and have a good
knowledge of Greek,' and where a century earlier ' classical reading *
was said to extend ' even to a fault among the lower and poorer kind in
this country ' — Hall, Ireland, i. 258-68. The same authority tells how
a wild mountain tribe, being unable to induce a schoolmaster to venture
among them, waited for the next moonless night and proceeded to capture
one. A safer parallel to the state of education in the Lake District may
be found in a description of two wayside schools in Antrim, one elementary
and the other classical, given in Porter's Life of Dr. Cooke, 3 eqq.

70 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

which marked the growing wealth and changing manners
of the farming class. ^ And with progress came the
familiar signs of disintegration. The quieb, self-contained
life of the country-side became slowly entangled in the
traffic of the great world bej'^ond its borders, losing in
the process much of its native strength and compactness,
and ere long falling a victim to the giant forces which
it had nourished. The general result was everywhere
much the same. The crisis following the Napoleonic
wars, which brought final ruin to the yeomanry of the
South after a period of inflated prosperity, swept away
the old race of Cumberland * statesmen.' But at such
times of transition the result by itself is often a matter
relatively insignificant and even ambiguous. Social
dissolution may be the climax of a long decay, of a
series of displacements cutting the ground beneath
a population for the most part passively resistant to
change. Or it may be, in the main, a sign of energy
breaking from within, of a people advancing to meet the
destinies which await them. It is the latter simile
that seems to describe the progress of the North at
this critical epoch. A aeries of inventions added
enormously to the productive power of certain districts,
which became the centre of new economic and social
formations ; and the movement as a whole in its con-
structive aspects was an expression of the character
which had been slowly maturing. The peculiar com-
bination of shrewd conservatism with a stubborn spirit
of adventure, which has enabled the manufacturing
districts to take the lead in so many directions during
the past century, had already revealed itself in
parts of the North which were least affected by the
stimulus of economic change. There is, at first sight,
nothing so inconsistent with the quiet life of the northern

* Eden, i. 654 sq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 71

dalesmen as the country lad who worked his way to
the University at Edinburgh/ or the continuous stream
of emigrants who filled the counting-houses in London
or found a career in the Church and the lower ranks
of the public service. Yet there is nothing, in reality,
so characteristic of the stock from which they sprang.
The spirit of Viking ancestors was ever stirring in this
northern race, breaking forth with the same deliberate
strength that drove the routine of daily life. A steady
concentration on the task nearest to hand generated
a surplus energy, which found a vent, as opportunity
offered, in low extravagance or in the conquest of the
world. It is the same t3rpe of manhood that drudges
contentedly on a northern homestead, that drinks with
stolid zest on festive occasions, and that effects revolu-
tions in the social system. A people so constituted are
normally slow to change their course, little affected by
impulse, but ever seeking an outlet for the energy
which has been accumulated in plodding forward on
the beaten track. A change of objective is the fruit
of no sudden emotion, but of the steady pressure of
stored force bursting deliberately into new fields of action
as the horizon expands. Such, too, is the impression
conveyed by the manufacturing districts on the eve
of the Industrial Revolution. It is a land whose
people have advanced slowly, accumulating the strength
and traditions of many centuries, and now at length as in
the fresh vigour of manhood entering on a new career ;
a land of old loyalties and new adventures, the past
and the future blending into one. MarshalFs survey
of rural Yorkshire, Defoe's passages on the woollen
industry, and an account of the manufacturers about
Manchester before the days of the power-loom, all

1 Kitchin, 89 sq.

72 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

convey the same record of thrift, energy, and personal
independence which had no parallel in other parts of
England. They leave also another impression — that
industry in these parts was still passing through a
phase of development in which the man of small means
was able to hold his own, gradually emancipating
himself from the shackles of custom without falling
a prey to commercial oppressions. Change in the
industrial order comes at a moment when older forms
of industry exert their greatest stimulus on character ;
the factory system rises against a background of old
traditions, whose strength had departed long since in
commercial centres of earlier growth.^ It is the
same with mental progress. The culture and wisdom
of earlier days maintained a vigorous existence side
by side with the first-fruits of science and speculation
which were to lay the groundwork of a new social
life. In the Yorkshire dales there were wizards who
detected crime ; the minstrel who was no ' scholard '
but a man of native wit, a welcome guest in tavern
and hall ; and poor men who had taught themselves
mathematics and gave their leisure to mechanical
inventions. The country round Manchester was still
famous for its skilled labourers of the old school,
* cunning ' men who were also herb doctors and would

* The character of the change, as an outburst of latent enterprise,
is seen in the rise of the early Lancashire manufacturers who ' for the
most part . . . started nearly equal in point of worldly circumstances,
men originally of the smallest means often coming to the front — work-
men, weavers, mechanics, pedlars, farmers or labourers — in the course
of time rearing immense manufacturing concerns by sheer force of in-
dustry, energy, and personal abiUty ' (Smiles, Indiistrial Biography, 317).
Holt (1795) attributes the decrease of yeomanry in the County of
Lancaster not to misfortime, but to the attraction of a new career in
business ; he adds that the farmers who are ' mostly spnmg from the
industrious labourers place their children in the manufactxu-ing line '
(quoted by Johnson, op. cit., 141, who remarks, p. 146, that for the small
owner to sell out in good times and take to trade was abnormal).

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 78

* rule the planets ' before engaging on any important
task ; and a disreputable company of boggarts and
clap-clans haunted the way at nightfall to the quiet
hamlet where a circle of Methodists were studying the

* Age of Reason ' and the * Rights of Man/

Marshall commences his study of rural conditions
with his native county of Yorkshire, and concludes with
Devon and the adjoining neighbourhood. In York-
shire he notices the ' spirit of improvement which has
lately diffused itself among all ranks ' ; there is no
district 'where industry and economy are more con-
spicuous, or where a personal independency is so
strongly rooted among men in middle life." In Devon
these progressive qualities are lacking ; nowhere ' of
late years ' has the ' spirit of improvement . . .
slumbered more composedly.' There can be no doubt
as to the acuteness of the conclusion to which his
inquiry leads. He has travelled from a country
which is entering on a new career, to one from which
an old supremacy has departed ; from the land of
the future to the land with a great past. This de-
scription applies very generally to the Western districts.
Devon in its mighty days had been the cradle of national
enterprise ; Wales and Cornwall had long preserved
in their language and traditions the remains of an old
Celtic civilisation ; and to this day the West country
is a repository of folk-lore and the peasant culture of
a bygone age. But the distinction between North
and West towards the close of the eighteenth century
is not summed up in any simple antithesis of progress
and decline. If Devon showed signs of an exhaustion
of energy, Cornwall and Wales were awakening under
the influence of a spiritual revival which in the history
of the latter is a landmark of equal importance with

74 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the economic revolution in the manufacturing districts.
Between the Celtic West and a large area of the North
there were, in fact, sufficient points of resemblance
and analogy to render their differences peculiarly
instructive. Both shared in the characteristics of a
remote rural life. Both had the same types of super-
stition and ritual, the same vein of poetry and romance.
In both, the peasantry were characterised by a native
intelligence which was often contrasted with the torpor
of the labouring class elsewhere. Both were power-
fully influenced by the Methodist movement. In both
a strong sense of local patriotism was combined with
conservative instincts and a respect for the past ;
and both Wales and the North in later times have
supplied striking examples of the democratic spirit.
Many of the contrasts revealed in their later history
point back to a fundamental difference in the changes
which passed over them at this critical epoch. If the
North has been described as entering on a phase of
accelerated expansion after a long period of quiet
growth, Wales may be said to awaken from the sleep
of centuries after an age of arrested development.
The Industrial Revolution commenced a new stage in a
career of progress ; the Welsh revival was nothing less
'' than the re-birth of a race, destined to recover the
threads of its history and to consecrate to a higher
purpose qualities which had for long lain dormant and
unperceived.

Of the Welsh people it is pre-eminently true that
the strength and weakness of the race may be read
in their culture and educational achievements. A
great wave of enthusiasm passed over the community
during the Methodist revival, and again in the de-
velopment of intermediate and higher education a
century later. For some time the instruction of the

THE SOCIAL ENVIEONMENT 75

people was carried on mainly by their own efforts in
the peculiarly democratic system of Smiday Schools con-
nected with their chapels. Their literature consisted
chiefly of religious periodicals, to which the peasantry
were almost the sole contributors.^ Later on, they sub-
scribed large sums towards the College at Aberystwyth,^
and many had been accustomed to save money for such
opportunities of higher instruction as came within their
reach. It was not uncommon for the younger genera-
tion to leave farm and quarry for a year's additional
schooling during early manhood ; and it is remarkable
that self-sacrifice in these matters was shown rather
by the children than by their parents.^ The character-
istic which requires explanation is a want of proportion
between enthusiasm and the range of mental achieve-
ment. In eighteenth-century writers, the intelligence
of the Northern peasantry is proved by the extent of
their general knowledge ; the intelligence of the Welsh
is seen in contrast to their state of culture. At a later
period, evidence of an * exceptional desire ' for educa-
tion has to be reconciled with the confinement of
their intellectual outlook. Thought and feeling flowed
with abnormal energy within certain channels. In the
eighteenth century, men in the prime of life would
learn to read and write, in order to obtain copies of
their native songs ; * their descendants composed essays

^ Rhys and Jones, The Welsh People (3rd ed.), 534.

* Committee on IntermedicUe and Higher Education in Wales, 1880 ;
Report, p. 89.

' Ibid., pp. 20, 27 ; Evidence, Q. 3620 sq. Schools Inquiry Commission,
1868, viii. 6.

* I am indebted to Mr. David Thomas of Tal-y-Sam, near Caernarvon,
for some notes on education in that neighbourhood, which he procured
for me from Mr. W. G. WilUams, one of the excellent band of school-
masters who are also antiquarians and take an interest in the history of
their native places. The following is an extract. Before the spread of
Methodism ' into these parts, the bards occupied a respectable position
in the esteem of the rural population, and these bards not only produced

76 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

and poems for the local Eisteddfods.^ The religious
revival revealed a delight in language and in discussion
among the common people, which recalls the atmosphere
of ancient Greek democracies. The humblest cottagers
became connoisseurs of pulpit eloquence, and debated
abstruse points in theology.

Such intensity is not generally consistent with
breadth of outlook. The Welsh peasantry were pre-
served from the baser literature which circulated among

songs (of varying excellence) for the people, but also instructed many of
the younger men in the rules of poetry and in the simpler but more useful
prts of reading and writing. The cobbler's workshop, the village smithy
and the weaver's hut became the rendezvous of men eager to overcome
the difficulties of the arts of reading and writing. As these men were
mainly of the labouring class and consequently of poor circumstances,
it is highly probable that they never received any schooling beyond that
obtained from the village poetaster and rhymester. ... I learned from
two old workmen who had cultured their minds to a greater degree than
most of their fellows, that the tavern connected with the parish church in
many places (Ty'n Ham — church-house) was nightly patronised by two
classes of men — those that came for drinking purposes and those that
gathered thither to meet the village sage who led them along the fields
of mental culture with which he was acquainted. Most of the young
men seem to have been filled with a desire to possess copies of the songs
of their own days as well as those of former times. Tragic occurrences
and awkward events were readily rendered into songs and satires by the
poetasters ; love -songs were in common and in high favour ; carols were
popular especially in the " Plygain " (Christmas meetings, held some time
after 3 a.m.). All kinds of songs were transcribed into convenient manu*
script books, and the desire to obtain a copy seems to have been the chief
inducement for young men to endeavour to master the art of writing.
The segregation of men in bams and stable-lofts during the long and
inclement winter evenings seems also to have been the means of the
further dissemination of knowledge, and it was not uncommon for the
farmer's son who bad received some town education to become the tutor
among his father's employes.'

I take this opportunity of recalling the courtesy with which I was
received by those whose acquaintance I made during a short stay at
Caernarvon. I regret that a change in the plan of my book has pre-
vented me from making more use of the help received from these and
other Welsh friends. After collecting materials for a study of Welsh
education, I came to the conclusion that the subject requires separate
treatment and had better be left to those who are more competent to do
it justice.

1 Schools Inquiry Commission, I.e. — ' It is quite usual for servants
and labourers to compose essays and poems for the various eisteddfods.'
Cf. Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools, 439 sq.

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 77

the English masses ; but there were large numbers
whose reading was confined to the publications of
their religious sect. The native literature was rich in
poetry and sectarian metaphysics; it remained de-
ficient in all branches of secular knowledge.* In the
North a different state of things was observed. There,
the native intellect showed a distinct bias towards
mathematical and scientific studies \^ the pursuit of know-
ledge, never far divorced from a practical outlook on
life, became subordinated gradually to industrial and
political ends. There could be no clearer indication
of the differences of ideal and impulse which separated
the two peoples at this stage of their evolution. In
the North the supremacy of a scientific practical spirit
was connected with a type of conservatism which easily
discarded its impedimenta and answered the call of pro-
gress. Among the Welsh an abnormal growth of the
imaginative and poetic faculties was bound up with a
pronounced attachment to the past, a conservatism
which never yielded its possessions or acknowledged
defeat. That which constituted their strength was also
their weakness, rendering them the more liable to
sudden reactions and the slower to attain harmony in
the expansion of thought and character.

To ascribe the difference to racial influences is to/
say at once too much and too little. The essential
fact in the history of the Welsh at this stage of transi-
tion is a reawakening, under peculiar circumstances, of
energies which had been submerged at an earlier period.

^ Wdsh Education Commission, 1846, pt. iii., pp. 59 sqq., and App. F.
and H. Southall, Wales and her Langnage, 96. Committee on Intermediate
Education, 1880, QQ. 6247 sqq., showing a considerable progress.

* I do not overlook the strong romantic element in the Northern
character ; but, so far as I can judge from the evidence at my disposal,
it was in mathematical and scientific studies (including nature study)
that the Northern intellect excelled.

78 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

From the thirteenth to the eighteenth century the intel-
lectual condition of Wales is the fate of a people who,
having reached a degree of mental culture in advance of
their social organisation, became subject to a different
race at a much higher level of political development.
Welsh society at the time of the English Conquest
retained in all essentials its old tribal structure, although
the germs of a broader national life may be seen in the
literary and religious movements which were inspired
by the struggle for independence. It is useless to
imagine the transformation which might have occurred,
had independence been prolonged under a native aristo-
cracy. The immediate effect of the Conquest was a
profound discouragement, from which the people were
slow to recover. The growth of native culture was
arrested. The masses were shut off from English civili-
sation by barriers of language and geography ; and their
isolation was intensified by the inevitable apostasy of
their natural leaders and by a poHcy of repression.
These conditions remained after the revival in the
eighteenth century, and explain the narrowness of
its intellectual results. Meanwhile it is not suggested
that the Conquest was without positive moral effect.
Political and social reorganisation quashed disorder and
prepared the way for a new outlook and a sense of
purpose. But the imagination of the people was little
affected by the changes of this intervening period.
They remained, as it were, passive under an operation ;
and, when consciousness returned, they had a memory
of far-off things. Nor, again, was the awakening so
sudden and unprepared as is sometimes suggested by
historians who accept the language of revivalists ; for,
from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, there was
a succession of educational and religious movements
gradually drawing into closer sympathy with the spirit

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 79

and needs of the masses. It was sudden as an explosion
is sudden, though the train has been carefully laid ;
and, when it came, it showed how little had been lost
or learned during a long period of quiescence.

The Welsh Revival has been accurately described
as a Renaissance ; for it was a modified reassertion
of native instincts which had lain dormant since the
days of tribal independence. Much, indeed, of the old
culture had remained throughout. In the eighteenth
century, verse-making was still in certain localities a
cardinal part of education ; reading and writing were
ancillary arts. In the village bard may be seen the
descendant of a race of schoolmasters, probably as old
as the Druidic order. ^ The religious movement, which
discredited this ancient frivolity, was as truly a native
product and had its roots in the past. Methodism,
both in its austerity and in the services which it rendered
to the national language, followed in the path of the
monastic revival of the twelfth century. The taste
which it developed for oratory and discussion recalls the
literary awakening of the same period. ^ Its sectarian
animosities are venerable as a relic of tribal warfare.
Tribal instinct may be discerned also in the faciUty with
which the population crystallised, as by some natural
impulse, into self-governing groups. The religious con-
gregation became a compact social unit, the centre
from which a new intellectual life gradually extended.^

^ V. supra, p. 75, n, 4.

* Lloyd, History of Wales, ii. 529 sqq., 595 sqq.

' Cf. account of Welsh Sunday Schools in Phillips, Wales, the Language,
Social Condition, etc. (1849), 55 sq. The growth of the Eisteddfod, with
its national gathering and tributary local meetings, expresses most clearly
the old conception of Welsh nationaUty — a spiritual federation of tribal
groups. Whatever the defects of this movement, there can be no doubt
as to its spontaneity, its wide influence, and its democratic character.
The local meetings are a source of education, whose value and possibiUties
of extension are probably only realised by those who have an inner
knowledge of Welsh life. Cf. Sadler, I.e.

CHAPTER II

SCHOOLS AND LITERATURE

(1) Schools

We are concerned with the early growth of educational
institutions only in so far as it illustrates the lines
on which an educational system gradually developed.
In this connection the rise of the older Universities
stands out unquestionably as the most conspicuous
event in the Middle Ages ; the growth, or reorganisation,
of Grammar Schools as the achievement of the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. Later on, we trace
the beginnings of an organised movement which offered
elementary education to the masses. But even if we
disregard a number of simultaneous developments which
are excluded in this general survey, the paradox which
asserts that the fabric of national education has been
constructed at intervals from the top storey downwards
remains, as an historical statement, only partially true.
Time was when the University of Oxford might be
described as the ' chief Charity School of the poor and
the chief Grammar School in England, as well as the
great place of education for students of theology, of
law and of medicine.'^ The process of differentiation

^ Oxford Commission, 1852, Report, p. 19 : the reference is to the reign
of Henry III. For an account of the pre-Reformation schools and founda-
tions (including Grammar Schools), see Foster Watson, English Orammar
Schools (1908) ; Leach, English Schools of the Reformation ; also a memor-
andum on the history of Endowed Schools by the same author, printed
by the Secondary Education Commission (1895), v, 57 aqq.

80

SCHOOLS AND LITERATURE 81

and exclusion which gradually established her modern
social characteristics, raised the age of admission, and
marked out for her the province of higher studies, had
only commenced, when the basis of a secondary system
was being laid afresh in the endowed foundations of the
sixteenth century. Similarly it was not until the king-
dom had been covered from end to end with elementary
schools, that the Grammar Schools came to be regarded
exclusively as centres of secondary education.

It has been claimed that the * ecclesiastical organi-
sation of the Middle Ages . . . established a school
system both on the secondary and elementary planes of
a far more extensive kind than historians have ordinarily
supposed.' How far, it may be asked, did the disendow-
ment of the old rehgion in the sixteenth century displace
opportunities of instruction, for which no sufficient
substitute was afterwards provided ? How far, again,
did the social effects of the Reformation, and the
economic forces which accompanied it, tend to institute
class-barriers in the higher branches of the educational
system ? ^ Of conscious change in policy there is little

^ Huber makes the extreme statement that the Reformation inflicted
on both Universities ' only injury both outward and inward ' ; c/. MulUnger,
History of Cambridge University, 101-4 (abridged edition). The dis-
ruption of the monastic orders and various changes in the position of
Church and Clergy led to an immediate falling off of the poorer students ;
a tendency which was increased by the economic decline of the yeomanry
and the growth of commerce under Elizabeth. What effect this social
transformation had on the standard of scholarship and the intellectual
atmosphere of the Universities in the sixteenth century, is not immediately
clear ; but even if we discount the continual complaints made — during
the latter half of the century — of the growth of luxury and the vagaries
of royal patronage, it is probable that something was lost through the
influx of a new class of students who had on the whole less incentive to
laborious study than their predecessors, at a time when the initial oppor-
tunities of rich and poor students were not so dissimilar as at the present
day. See Brodrick, University of Oxford, 82 sqq. ; Mullinger, op. cit,
93-104 ; Maxwell Lyte, University of Oxford.

One pretext for the dissolution of the monasteries being their neglect
of education, Henry VIII appears to have founded the meagre sum of ten
Grammar Schools out of the proceeds of this transaction. The majority

82 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

evidence. The ostensible aim of reform in the educa-
tional, as in the economic, sphere was to secure greater
efficiency in the application of traditional methods and
ideas. The reorganised Grammar School, connected with
the universities and developing an accepted form of
liberal culture, found its complement in the apprentice-
ship system and the catechetical teaching of the national
Church. The parish remained a centre of spiritual dis-
cipline for the people at large, and its organisation was
not complete without a school of some description.

The Grammar Schools, according to a Commission
of Inquiry which reported in 1868, had been intended
* as a means of bringing a higher culture within the
reach of all, and raising from among the poorest, as well
as the richest, those who should thereby be able to serve
in larger measure the Church and Commonwealth ' * —
a conclusion which is borne out in the main by an
analysis of the trust-deeds appended to the report.
The object of the Manchester endowment (1515) was
to bring up boys, without restriction, in good learning
and manners, especially in the ' liberal science and art
of Grammar as the ground and foundation of all other
liberal arts and sciences." Elsewhere Grammar is
variously defined to include a study of the ' learned
languages,' ' Latin,' or ' Greek and Latin,' to which
' Hebrew ' is occasionally added. In some cases candi-
dates were to be refused admission until they could
read and write English or read Latin ; or there was
a specific arrangement for elementary instruction in
addition to, and in preparation for, the teaching of
Grammar. There appears, also, to be little reason to

of the older Grammar Schools, being attached to Collegiate Churches,
Chantries and Gilds, were dissolved under the Chantries Act in the
next reign. Leach, Memorandum, Secondary Edtication Commission
(1895), V. 72.

^ Schools Inquiry Commission, i. 120 (1868).

SCHOOLS AND LITERATURE 83

doubt that from a social standpoint the aim of these
fomidations was on the whole as comprehensive as the
report of the commissioners would lead us to suppose.
Generally, where instruction was not gratuitous through-
out the school, some arrangement was made, by means
of a graduated scale of admission fees and quarterages
and a system of maintenance, to bring the benefits of
the institution within reach of the poorest. It is true
that the term ' poor/ as employed in connection with
educational trusts of this and later periods, does not
necessarily carry the same significance that it has
acquired in more recent times ; but, as a rule, the object
of Grammar School endowments was defined in terms
sufficiently broad to comprehend all ranks of society,
and in certain instances the possibility of admitting
scholars from the labouring class was definitely raised.*
The verdict of history is contained in a sentence of
the report referring to a process which had been for
some time at work. * A free Grammar School is an
anachronism. If the school be free, it is filled with a
class of children who do not learn grammar ; and

^ Cf. Cranmer's reply to the Commissioners in 1541 who proposed to
confine the Canterbury Grammar School to the sons and yoimger brothers
of gentry on the ground that the sons of husbandmen, for instance, were
not called to learning, that their labour was needed, and that ' aU sorts of
men may not go to school ' — ' I grant much of your meaning herein as
needful in a commonwealth : but yet utterly to exclude the ploughman's
son, and the poor man's son from the benefits of learning ... is as much
to say, as that Almighty God should not be at liberty to bestow Hia great
gifts of grace upon any person, nor nowhere else, but as we and other
men shall appoint them to be employed, according to our fancy and not
according to His most Godly WUl and pleasure, who giveth His gifts both
of learning, and other perfections in all sciences, unto aU kinds and states
of people indifferently . . . wherefore, if the gentleman's son be apt to
learning, let him be admitted ; if not apt, let the poor man's child that
is apt, enter his room ' — Strype, Cranmer, i. 127. The scale of admission
fees at Llanrwst is of interest in this connection — ' 1, every knight sonne,
2^. 6d. ; 2, every doctor or esq. sonne, 2«. ; 3, every gentl. or minister
Sonne of 50 li. p. annum, \s. ; 4, every yeomane sonne of 20 li. p. annum
and rich tenants, 9d. ; 5, poorer and meaner men's sonne to pay Qd. ;
6, but poore indeed, gratis.*

84 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

if the classics are sedulously taught, the schools soon
cease to be free ' or sufficiently inexpensive to remain
within reach of other than well-to-do parents. Here
and there might be found an establishment, relatively
well endowed, which had been able to afford free educa-
tion and at the same time, having a satisfactory local
connection, to maintain a reasonable standard of scholar-
ship ; ^ but in most cases the only way in which a
school could be made to render effective service or
even to continue in operation, was by minimising one
or other of the objects which the founder had in view.
In the great majority of endowed schools which re-
mained open to the ' lower section of the middle class
and the upper section of the artisans,* the classics were
taught, if at all, to a very small proportion of the
scholars ; and although in this way some tradition
of culture had been kept alive where it would otherwise
have been obliterated, the arrangement entailed a
conflict of interest between two separate groups of
scholars, both of which in an under-staffed school were
unlikely to receive adequate attention.

The fate of a school would depend, to a great extent,
on the situation in which it was founded, and on the

* Thus the Commissioners in 1867 found the Manchester Grammar
School giving free instruction, and sending about eight scholars to the
Universities per annum ; classics preponderate ; entrance by competition
owing to the number of applicants ; third boy in the school the son of
an artisan. It is noted that a reform had been initiated in 1849 under a
scheme ordering (1) the teaching of modern languages, arts and sciences ;
(2) the provision of necessary apparatus and increase of the teaching
staff ; (3) purchase of books, provision of new premiums. University
Exhibitions, etc. The position of the school at the close of the eighteenth
century may be estimated to some extent from the narrative of Samuel
Bamford, who on first entering began with speUing and rose to be ' first
scholar in the first Bible class ' and might have proceeded to Latin with
the chance of eventually reaching the University, had not his father re-
moved him — Bamford, Early Days,Q8 sqq. (new ed., 1893). On the founda-
tion of the school in 1515 it had been laid down that the master should
every year appoint one of his ' scoUers ' to teach the infants ' their ABC
primer and forthe till they begin Grammar.'

SCHOOLS AND LITERATURE 85

financial provision made for its upkeep. In the course
of time the cost of a classical education increased, gener-
ally ' in far greater ratio than the value of property '
with which the endowment was connected ; nor was
there any guarantee, especially where the school did
not constitute the sole charge on the property, that the
trustees would be disposed to pay * in the double pro-
portion of the depreciation of the value of money and
the increase of that of the funds. * It often happened that
schools which were founded by the Government after
the dissolution of the Chantries received their endow-
ment in the form of a fixed annuity, which became
sooner or later inadequate to the purpose. Under
these circumstances there was a plain inducement to
charge fees or to admit a certain number of stipendiary
pupils ; the free scholars and those unable to pay more
than a nominal sum being gradually excluded or placed
in an unfavourable position as recipients of charity.*
On the other hand, where the regulations prohibiting
fees or limiting the scale of payments were scrupulously
observed, difficulty might be experienced in securing the

^ With the change of social ideas and of class relations, the same kind
of stigma would come to be attached to free scholars entering the Grammar
School on a poverty qualification that is foimd in the case of servitor-
ships at the University, and especially so where the scale of payments
for fee-paying scholars was raised. Thus the Commissioners foimd
twelve foundation scholars at the Bromsgrove Grammar School, the
sons of artisans and small tradesmen, wearing a special dress and despised
by the rest of the school, who were the sons of well-to-do parents paying
a high fee ; and there was an intermittent feud between the two classes.
Similarly at the Alton Grammar School, boarders and free boys played
at different ends of a small playgroimd, with severe penalties for trans-
gressing the line of division. Apart, moreover, from the difficulty which
arose, in such cases, of admitting the poor free scholars and the well-to-
do fee-paying scholars on the same footing, there had been growing up
distinctions in education corresponding to distinctions in social life. It
is not surprising, for instance, that Edward Cave, the son of a local shoe-
maker, found himself out of his element at the Rugby Grammar School
in the early part of the eighteenth century — Knight, Shadows of Old
Booksellers, 172.

86 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

services of a master competent to teach the classics.*
Up to a certain point, these considerations are sufficient
to explain the tendency of the G-rammar Schools to
develop, on the one hand, into secondary schools for
the rich, and, on the other, into elementary schools
for the poorer classes ; but administrative difficulties
might have been diminished, if a more far-sighted
policy had been conceived at the outset. As often
happens in the history of popular education, a
relatively advanced system of instruction had been
established without adequate attention being paid to
the preliminary stages, the substructure on which its
efficiency depended.^ This neglect, which may have
been unimportant so long as the desire for education
could be generally taken as evidence of more than
average ability, became a source of serious inconvenience
as soon as the demand for elementary instruction in
the vernacular began to develop out of all proportion
to the demand for ' grammar ' and the higher branches
of learning. It meant that in many schools, which made
provision for the poorer classes and where the teach-
ing of subjects other than grammar was not actually
prohibited in the trust deeds, there was a tendency for
elementary instruction to predominate, to the exclusion
of everything else. It is possible that an opportunity
for constructing a continuous system of instruction,
which might have anticipated some of the work done

^ See generally, Schooh Inquiry Commission, ix. 152 sq. ; Memorandum
by Mr. A. F. Leach, Secondary Education Commission (1895), v. 73 ; M.N.
(Marchamont Needham), A Discourse on Schools and Schoolmasters, 1663 ;
Letter to Henry Brougham (1818), 9, 23.

* To underestimate the difficulties of the ascent to higher education
may be described as the besetting sin of pioneers in popular education,
of which the nineteenth century affords numerous examples : c/. the
history of the Mechanics' Institutes, of Welsh University Colleges before
the Welsh Intermediate Education Act, and the difficulty experienced
in persuading public opinion that a sound secondary education is a
necessary preparation for the higher branches of technical instruction.

SCHOOLS AND LITEKATUEE 87

during the past fifty years, was suffered to pass.
Had elementary and secondary education been more
liberally provided as distinct grades — after the manner
of Archbishop Harsnett who established at Chigwell
in 1629 * two large and fair schoolhouses/ an English
and a Latin school, side by side — it would have been
easier to regulate the * rush on the Grammar Schools,* by
selecting those who had passed through the elementary
departments ; while the coexistence of two separate,
yet connected, grades of school would have kept alive
the idea of a continuous course.^

^ Comenius in his Didactica Magna {circa 1630) sketches a scheme of
State education including (1) Public Vernacular Schools (ages 6-12),
(2) Gymnasia or Latin Schools (12-18), in every city for those who
qualify from the Vernacular School; (3) Academies (18-24). The
Vernacular Schools ' contain the whole school population up to the
age of twelve, without respect to rank, wealth or sex. The Vernacular
School is the common school ; all there pass through the common
minimum curriculum , . . out of which aU advanced studies spring.
Class distinctions must not be encouraged, and at the early ase of
six it is impossible to say whether a particular boy is better fitted
for manual labour or for a learned profession ' (Adamson, Pioneers of
Modem Ediicalion, 62).

Comenius attracted the notice of the English Parliament and was
apparently invited to join a proposed Commission for the reform of the
existing system, 1641 (De Montmorency, State Intervention in English
Education, 100). Attention is thus drawn to the general movement
for extending and reorganising education, of which traces are found
during the CromweUian period ; and it is possible to regard the Puritan
movement as the common ancestor of educational systems which sub-
sequently developed in the American Colonies, and of certain forms of
educational propaganda in England during recent years in which the
democratic features of American Education are cited with approval (c/.
R. E. Hughes, The Democratic Ideal in Education). Throughout this
period, the idea of equalising opportunity and discriminating between
different kinds of talent seems to have occupied the minds of reformers.
Thus Harthb's proposal for the education of pauper children in London
(1650) compares advantageously with later Charity School schemes in
discriminating the ' quick-witted,' who after the common groimding are
to be made ' scholars, or accomptants, or what they delight in,' from the
common sort who are to be apprenticed (Adamson, op. cit.. Ill sq.).
Again Hoole, in his New Discovery (1660), seems to anticipate the modem
Higher Elementary School ; his ' Petty School ' teaching children (5-8)
to read English in preparation for the Grammar School, ' is also a place
" wherein children for whom the Latin tongue is thought to be urmecessary,
are to be employed after they can read English." Instead of dismissing

88 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

As Latin gradually lost its position as the language
of learning, a reaction commenced — which had been
foreshadowed by Mulcaster — in favour of education in
the vernacular; and, connected with it, we trace the
growth of a demand for universal instruction. From
the commencement of the seventeenth century, and in
a few foundations even at an earher date, there is
evidence of a dehberate efiort to develop elementary
education, adapting it to the requirements of a class
who had no prospect of proceeding to grammar.^
After the Restoration it became more common to
endow a distinct class of schools for elementary
instruction only, Latin beiag admitted in some cases
as a possible extra.

It may be submitted, with some justification, that
the founders of Grammar Schools relied in many cases
on the possibility of the demand for elementary or
preparatory training being met by tuition at the hands
of the clergy, or through various unendowed agencies
which must have existed in one form or another
from a very early period. Elementary Schools were

such as " incapable of learning," the Petty School is to give them still
more practice in reading English, and to add writing and arithmetic.
. . . While the other children are to learn the accidence, these Latin-less
youngsters are to "be benefited in reading orthodox catechisms and other
books that may instruct them in the duties of a Christian, . . . and ever
afterwards in other deUghtful books of EngUsh History, as the History of
Queen Elizabeth, or poetry, as Herbert's Poems, Quarles'' Emblems ; and
by this means they will gain such a habit and deUght ia reading as to
make it their chief recreation when hberty is afforded them. And their
acquaintance with good books wUl (with God's blessing) be a means to
sweeten their (otherwise) sour natures, that they may live comfortably
towards themselves, and amiably converse with other persons." ' There
was to be one such school in every town and large village, apparently no
fees, and classes not to exceed 40 (ibid., 162 sq.).

'^ See Encychpcedia Britannica (11th ed.), 958. ' We have here a
great number of poor people in our parish who are not able to keep their
children at grammar. But we are desirous to have them taught the
principles of the Christian ReUgion and to write, read and cast accounts,
and so to put them forth to prentice ' — Foster Watson, op. cit., 150 (re
St. Olave's Southwark, 1561).

SCHOOLS AND LITERATXJEE 89

established from time to time in connection with the
parochial organisation, being instituted or at any rate
super\ised by the clergy and carrying on a practice
common in the Middle Ages, when the parish clerk,
* often a beneficed cleric,' held the position of school-
master.^ Moreover a growing demand had encouraged
the development of private enterprise in teaching as
a commercial speculation. ^ In some cases the parish
clerk would, on his own initiative, open a road-side
establishment and undertake to ground the children
of the village in spelling, reading, ciphering, and pot-
hooks for a small payment ; or a tradesman who
had come to grief would try his hand at teaching and
travel from place to place in search of pupils, old and
young. But the type of * adventure school ' with which
tradition has rendered us most familiar was held under
the auspices of the village dame.

Of the character of these institutions it is difficult
to speak in general terms. That a satisfactory standard
was often reached, may be reasonably assumed, especi-
ally in parish schools falling under the first category,
where the clergy interested in their welfare were men
of sympathy and intelligence.^ The merits of the
private adventure schools varied probably to a greater
extent, according to the nature of the local demand

* Foster Watson, op. cit., 153.

Private adventure schools in the sixteenth century, ihid., 156 sq.

The ' religious societies,' which developed during the last quarter of
the seventeenth century, helped to awaken opinion and activity among
the clergy and others, before the work of promoting Charity Schools was
taken up by the S.P.C.K. — Holman, English National Education, 28 sq. ;
cf. the case of five village schools founded by Archdeacon Sharp, Rector
of Rothbury, Northumberland, in the next century — ' In a long course of
years there were very few to be found in the parish who could not write,
if not retain also some knowledge of figures ; and no people could be
more remarkable for industrious exertion in humble labour, and at the
same time for modesty and good behaviour, than the parishioners of
Rothbury in general '—Overton and Relton, English Churchy 1714-1800,
274.

90 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

and the personality of tte individual who assumed the
functions of teacher. * A dark room, a dame, a horn-
book and a good birchen rod ' — a congested troop of
infants droning in an oppressive atmosphere — a stray-
hen scouring for scraps on the threshold — and the mis-
tress attending intermittently to her domestic affairs :
such, in the main, is the prose version of the celebrated
stanzas of Shenstone popularised by Royal Commis-
sioners in a later and more fastidious age. But it is
conceivable that during the period of their ascendancy,
and in the rude surroundings which gave them birth,
the dame-schools answered a definite, though humble,
purpose ; and in the urban districts, where a superior
demand existed, there were many instances of excep-
tional success. Thomas Cooper at least had reason to
recall with gratitude the memory of an * expert and
laborious teacher of the art of spelling and reading,'
whose * knitting too (for she taught girls as weU as
boys) was the wonder of the town.' The confession
elicited from the dames at a later date — ' it's little
they pays us, and it's little we teaches them ' — is the
perennial murmur of protectionists in the declining
years of an industry whose profits and whose fame are
gone.

Discontinuity, lack of organisation, and the absence
of a rehable system of management are defects com-
mon to the various forms of experiment which have
been reviewed. Even in Endowed Schools, resting on
a permanent basis and with a scheme of government
prescribed in the trust deeds, the administrative
machinery was often signally defective. The state of
the law and other circumstances were such as to render
the trustees practically irresponsible and, at the same
time, to restrict their power of carrying out necessary
reforms and exercising an effective control over the

SCHOOLS AND LITERATUEE 91

masters whom they appointed. Thus it happened
that innumerable abuses, both serious and amusing,
made their way into the schools, in addition to defects
which an able management would have found it difficult
to remedy.^ To the latter half of the seventeenth
century belong the beginnings of a far-reaching change.
New fields were opened to educational enterprise, and
the time had arrived when the efforts of individual ^
benefactors began to yield place to organised move-
ments dependent on public support and subject pro-
portionately to the control of public opinion.

It is customary to contrast the foundations of the
sixteenth century with the Charity Schools for the
poor which sprang into existence a hundred years later.
The essence of the contrast is not to be found in a
difference of curriculum. There might be little difference
between the subjects taught in a decayed Grammar
School and the curriculum of a Charity School, and yet
a prodigious change in tone, associations, and social
outlook. While mention of the poor in connection
with the older foundations might refer generally to
those who were not rich enough to obtain advantages
elsewhere, the * poor ' of the Charity Schools are a
distinct social class. The aim of the Grammar Schools
was selective : to work beneath social distinctions and
to open access to the higher walks of life. The aim ^
of the Charity Schools was disciplinary : to rescue the
masses and to ensure their obedience.

Yet it may be said that the indiscriminate censure
passed on the system by modern critics has had an un-
fortunate result in diverting attention from experiments

^ At a village Grammar School in Yorkshire, almost within living
memory, there was a holiday whenever the master desired to go fishing,
and the school prizes were ' tossed for ' at the end of term amid universal
merriments-Speight, Craven and N. W. Yc/rks. Highlands, 197 sq.

92 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

in industrial training and in the development of
relations between the school and practical life, and also
from an important advance in methods of organisation.
An attempt has been made, with very plausible reason-
ing, to establish a connection between simultaneous
movements in philanthropy and commerce which occur
during the latter half of the seventeenth, and the earlier
decades of the eighteenth, century.^ It may be shown, at
any rate, that the spirit of association developed in both
spheres during this period ; and that, about the same
time that the possibilities of joint-stock began to create
a sensation in business circles, the idea of organising the
superfluous wealth of the community for philanthropic
purposes, by methods analogous in many respects to
those which obtained in commerce, took shape in a
number of suggestive experiments. Thus an adminis-
trative system was called into being which has formed
in the main the basis of voluntary organisation ever
since. A movement in * associated philanthropy '
would generally originate among a group of active
supporters prepared in varpng degrees to render
personal service. Sooner or later it would be found
advisable to appoint a permanent committee to direct
operations at headquarters. And at the same time
there would be an attempt to elicit financial support
from the general public, who might acquire in many
cases certain rights of control and a position some-
what analogous to that of shareholders in a business
concern.

This form of organisation, which dealt more or
less effectively with the financial difficulty and marked
at the time a distinct advance towards effective and
responsible management, was adopted, first, in the
foundation of large boarding institutions in the Metro-

^ Kirkman Gray, History of English Philanthropy, ch. iv., v.

SCHOOLS AND LITERATUKE 93

polia for the rescue and upbringing of children actually
destitute of the means of subsistence, and secondly,
in the development of societies for the spread of educa-
tion and religious knowledge among the poor in different
parts of the kingdom. It was in the latter case, where
organisation extended over a wide area, that the possi-
bilities of * associated philanthropy ' were most apparent.
The services which may be performed by an intelligent
central body with funds at their disposal — by stimu-
lating and assisting local initiative, by forming a point
of connection between institutions at work in different
areas, and by undertaking in the interests of the move-
ment as a whole the direct performance of certain func-
tions which require organisation on a large scale carried
out in the light of a wide experience — are now so gener-
ally admitted that it seems almost pedantic to inquire
when the idea was first introduced. Yet in this connec-
tion the part played by the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge in the formation of Charity
Schools is of special interest, and demands at least a
passing nctice. The Society undertook to defend and
popularise the principles of the movement. It aided
in the establishment of schools throughout the kingdom,
and periodically issued instructions and advice as to
their management and the art of teaching. It appointed
an inspector to visit schools in the Metropolitan area.
By a resolution passed in 1703 it condemned classes
in excess of fifty scholars ; and there were a series of
proposals with regard to the training of teachers, which
prove the trustees of the Society to have been at least
a hundred years in advance of their time.^ We may

^ A minute of 1710 refers to the ' expediency of establishing a Grammar
School, to which boys of great talent and merit should be transferred
from the Charity Schools that they might be prepared for situations as
masters.' In 1723 Dr. Waterland, preaching before the Society, announced

94 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

note, also--to illustrate tlie tendency of educational
organisations to develop beyond their original sphere-
that the formation of night classes for adults in
connection with the day schools ia recommended in
some of the earlier minutes.

The Canons of 1604 had placed the control of educa-
tion in the hands of the Church. No schoolmaster
was to teach in ' public school or private house ' unless
approved by the ordinary as a man of learning, apt for
the office and of sound doctrine.^ "When the Puritans
gained the ascendancy, the one thing certain was that
this settlement would be undermined. The confiscation
of Church property placed a fund at the disposal of
Parliament, and it had been resolved in 1641 that it
should be devoted to the ' advancement of learning
and piety.' It soon transpired that reform would
mean something more than a change of patronage, and
in the ensuing years drastic proposals made their appear-
ance. Milton's tractate, advocating a new model of
secondary and higher education, was published in 1644.
Petty followed in 1649 with his plan for elementary
trade schools. Others approached the legislature, recog-
nising the State for the first time as the official
agent of education. Comenius, who came to England
in 1641, was the advocate of a graduated scheme
of public instruction based on a universal system
of vernacular schools. Six years later, in a treatise
addressed to Parliament, Hartlib made the far-reaching
proposal that the * magistrate should see schools opened,

that the trustees thought of founding a superior school for training school-
masters and mistresses. Unhappily nothing came of these proposals ;
but apparently prospective teachers were enabled to visit the best managed
MetropoUtan schools (the principle of the model school). Phillips, Wales,
Social Condition, etc. (1849), 266 sq.

» Canons 77-79 ; Cardwell, SynodcUia, i. 291.

SCHOOLS AND LITERATURE 95

provided with teachers, endowed with maintenance,
regulated with constitutions, and . . . have instructors
and overseers to the observance of good order in this
business.' ^

There is evidence that the subject interested the
legislature or certain of its membeis, and some import-
ant measures were passed- Under the Propagation Act
of 1649 commissioners were appointed who laid the
basis of a general school system in Wales. ^ This was
followed by a measure allocating a portion of the Crown
revenues to the payment of approved schoolmasters
and preachers. In the same year there was a proposal
to found a University at Durham, by diverting part
of the cathedral property. Lastly in 1653 ParUament
appointed a Committee for the Advancement of Learn-

1 Considerations tending to the Happy Accomplishment of England's
Reformation in Church and State : Humbly presented to the Piety and
Wisdome of the High and Honorable Court of Parliament. See Adamson,
Pioneers of Modem EdvxMtion, 1600-1700, 108.

^ They were authorised to provide for the ' keeping of schools ' with
' fitting yearly maintenance ' and the ' education of children in piety
and good literature ' ; the funds to be provided by a charge on ' ecclesi-
astical livings in the hands of Parliament,' and the yearly stipend not to
exceed forty poxmds (c/. Adamson, 98 sq.). Mr. Shankland describes the
measure as ' in the broadest sense an Education Act for Wales ' — ' Under
this Act the Commissioners [1650-1653] provided the thirteen counties
of Wales with a weU-organised system of schools, staffed with the best-
equipped schoolmasters that they could command. The Trustees [under
a separate Act of 1649 for the maintenance of ' Preaching Ministers or
Schoolmasters or others in England and Wales, settled or confirmed by
Ordinance or Order of ParUament '] maintained and perfected the system
from 1653 to 1660. Free schools were established in every market town
of any importance throughout Wales, and in many other towns and villages
convenient to the children. In most of the great towns two able, learned,
and University men were appointed to prepare children for the Universities
if desired. A sixth of the tithes of Wales was devoted to the maintenance
of these schools ; . . their curricula provided for the teaching of reading,
writing and ciphering, and in the large towns they prepared for the
Universities. . . . The question of a Welsh University College was also
mooted by the Puritans. . . . The Restoration nearly paralysed the
whole organisation, many of the schoolmasters were deprived for non-
conformity, but a number remained at their work ' — Sir John Philipps
and the Charity School Movement in Wales, by the Rev. Thomas Shankland
{Transactions of the Hon. Society of Cymmrodorion, 1904-5, 132 sqq.).

96 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

ing, which included men in the first rank of public
life.^ Yet the total achievement was small, the subject
of education being continually postponed under the
pressure of more urgent business and overwhelmed by
poHtical issues. Eeform meant in the first instance
the removal of hostile elements, and part of the work
was founded on spoliation. The Welsh Act, which
achieved the most solid results, was an undisguised
political move. The wider schemes, involving a com-
plete change in method and organisation, had not
time to mature before political reaction intervened,
sweeping away a fabric of good intentions partially
carried out.

The century following the Restoration is important,
however, for the assertion of administrative principles
V which underhe the growth of State interference within
the past eighty years : the principle of rate-maintenance
and local public control, the principle of grants-in-aid,
and the principle involved in the extension of public
control over voluntary institutions. The State recog-
nised a direct responsibihty for education in connection
with the Poor Law. There was an Act passed in 1662
' for the better Reliefe of the Poore of this Kingdom,'
in consequence of which the Common Council of London,
some years later, decided to give a number of poor
children the benefits of an elementary and industrial
education ; and this was followed, after a long inter-
val, by a private Bill of 1769 enabling the parochial
poor of London to be educated out of the rates.
The Workhouse Act of 1723 and numerous private
Bills of the period contained provisions to the
same intent. The principle of grants-in-aid was recog-
nised in the case of the Foundling Hospital, which

^ Adamson, of. cit., 103«

SCHOOLS AND LITERATURE 97

received at one time substantial assistance from the
national exchequer. Meanwhile, in 1716, the Commons
had passed a drastic measure for the reform of close
vestries in the Metropolitan area, which would have had
the effect of transferring to an elective body the * sole
right of appointing masters and mistresses of any
voluntary Charity School that might be carried on
within its parish, and of selecting the children to be
admitted to such schools.' Against this the 'trustees
of the Charity Schools, in which nearly 5000 poor
children were being educated and clothed, represented
forcibly that these schools were not maintained by the
parishes, but were "chiefly supported by voluntary
subscriptions," and that the greater part of the sub-
scribers contributed because they thereby secured the
right of appointing schoolmasters and nominating the
children to be admitted. To hand these powers over
to an elective body would certainly check the flow of
subscriptions, and would, in fact, " tend to discourage,
if not totally dissolve, the said schools." ' * ^

(2) Literature

There was in the eighteenth century no general and
organised system of popular education, but there were a
variety of schools to which different classes in the com-
munity might obtain access. Similarly, there was no sys-
tematic supply of cheap literature, but a certain amount
of printed matter lay within reach of the poorest.
The interval between the close of the seventeenth cen-
tury and the accession of George the Third witnessed
a considerable extension of the book trade. Printers
and booksellers, a class formerly almost unknown out-
side the Metropolis, began to set up in the provincial

* Webb, English Local Oovemment, i. 255 sq.

98 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

towns/ and fed a subordinate army of hawkers and
travellers who canvassed the neighbourhood far and
wide. Number-men, or itinerant booksellers, passed
from village to village, leaving samples, and erected
their stalls wherever a suitable market could be found.
Pedlars and fortune-tellers carried odd volumes in their
packs to remote parts of the kingdom. Old women,
vending sweetmeats, kept a corner of their boards for the
Illustrated Bible, the Pilgrim's Progress, and an assort-
ment of chap-books. 2 The proprietor of the Sherborne
Mercury^ established in 1736, had relays of messengers
travelling on horseback to Penzance and branching
o£E the main road into the surrounding country, who
dehvered his journal and took orders for books. ^ From
these and similar sources, by begging and borrowing,
by saving pence and cajoling shopkeepers, or by loiter-
ing over a bookstall, such of the poorer classes as had
a taste for reading might with good fortune find the
material of which they were in quest, and often managed
to scrape together the nucleus of an incongruous hbrary.*
Except, however, in cases where a generous patron
placed himself at their service, the choice and
acquisition of good literature were matters of some
difficulty. There is a sad story of Samuel Drew —
a Cornish shoemaker of some repute — journeying one
day to a bookshop at Truro and demanding ' Plato on
the Soul." Standard works of the best authors might
be obtained in London readily enough and at a cheap

^ Buckle, Civilisation in England, L ch. vii. n. 395. In 1693 the Act
of 1662 restricting the number of master-printers was repealed ; see
W. H. Allnutt, Notes on Printers and Printing in the Provincial Toums
of England and Wales (read before the Library Association of the United
Kingdom, 1878).

* Knight, Memories of a Working Man (by a tailor), 20.
a Life of Samuel Drew (by his son), 40 sq.

* Knight, Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties^ i 88 sqq., iL 92.
Wallas, Life of Place, 17.

SCHOOLS AND LITERATURE 99

rate. * At stalls and in the streets/ say a "^a traveller
of the period, * you every now and then meet with a
sort of antiquarians, who sell single or odd volumes ;
sometimes, perhaps, of Shakespeare etc., so low as
a penny ; nay, even sometimes for a halfpenny a piece.
Of one of these itinerant antiquarians I bought the two
volumes of the " Vicar of Wakefield "" for sixpence.' i
In the provinces — even in the larger towns — there was
a great scarcity of first-rate literature, a disproportion-
ate amount of space being occupied by tales of magic
and adventure, lives of highwaymen, ephemeral histories,
love stories, valentines, prophetic almanacks, * godly and
other patters,' slip-songs, children's books, and anti-
quated treatises on various subjects sold in numbers,
four sheets for a penny. ^

It is clear that, while the student laboured at a
disadvantage, there existed in some sense a literature
for the masses, whose history bears on the transition from
mediaeval to modern methods of instruction and enter-

J,i Moritz, Travels in England in 1782 (English ed. 1886), 35 sq. Stephen
Duck (1700-1766), an agricultural labourer of parts, commissioned a
friend visiting London to bring him books ; he received a selection of
ancient and modem poets and Seneca's Morals — Knight, Pursuit of
Knowledge under Difficulties, iii. 84 ; cf. Smiles, Industrial Biography,
237 sq.

* ' Shopkeepers and travellers may at all times be supplied on liie
most reasonable terms, with all kinds of Histories, Grodly and other Patters,
sHp-songs, carols, etc., etc., at J. Turner's, Printer ' (Coventry advertise-
ment)— Kjiight, Shadows of the Old Booksellers, 239. The Sheffield press
issued (1736-1745) 'all sorts of new songs and penny histories,' a 'new
historical catechism by W. L.,' and ballads such as 'The Golden Bull,
or the Crafty Princess, in four parts ' — Leader, Reminiscences of Old
Sheffield, 107.

Lackington in his tours (1787 and 1790) found that the bookshops in
large towns between Edinburgh and London, with the possible exception
of Leeds and York, contained very few first-rate books and a deal of
trash. Knight, ib., 294 sq. Samuel Bamford's account of books read
during his schooldays gives an excellent idea of the Mterature obtainable
ia Manchester and the neighbourhood, about 1800. Bamford, Early
Days, 87, 102 ; see also KJoight, The Old Printer and the Modern Press,
and Passages in a Working Life, L 226 sq. ; Thomas Cooper, Autobiography.

100 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

tainment. The oral teaching of the Church continued,
but waa supplemented by the dissemination of Bibles,
and of religious tracts which date back to the close of
the seventeenth century. Elements of the miracle
play survived in rustic drama and puppet-shows ;
but the modern counterpart of religious drama, once a
mighty instrument of spiritual instruction, might be
found perhaps in such works as the Pilgrim's Progress,
which occupied the window-ledge in many a religious
household. Songs and ballads and romances were
still preserved among the peasantry by oral tradition ;
but, since the sixteenth century, the practice of
recording old English song had increased, and new
compositions were commonly issued in the form of
broadsheets.^ It is during the Tudor period that we
find the first traces of a form of criticism which cheap
literature has aroused at many stages of its development.
Mary issued a Koyal injunction against * books, ballads,
rhymes and treatises ... set out by printers and
stationers of an evil desire for lucre and covetous of
vile gain ' ; and the rapid multiplication of ballads
and * lewd * songs in succeeding years was repeatedly
denounced in much the same terms as the inferior
products of the cheap press at the present day.^ It is
doubtful, however, whether this form of literature in
its earlier phases can be seriously compared with the
type of pasquinade which came in with the growth of
large towns, and the demoralisation of popular taste,
in the eighteenth century.

^ Ballads often adorned tl.e walls of cottages and inns, along with
King Charles' Golden Rules, and religious and patriotic prints. ' The
prints and pictures which I have seen at these inns are, I think, almost
always prints of the royal family ... or else I have found a map of
London and not seldom the portrait of the King of Prussia. . . . You
also sometimes see some of the droll prints of Hogarth ' — Moritz, op.
cit., 144.

^ Chappell, Old English Popular Music, i: 64 sqq.

SCHOOLS AND LITERATURE 101

The chap-book, which appears to have been the
chief reading-book of the masses, drew its material
from every available source. These publications were
sold up and down the country at a farthing or a half-
penny each, and consisted of sheets folded into sixteen
or twenty-four pages, adorned with rough woodcuts and
covering a wide range of subject-matter, from episodes
in sacred and profane history to the lives of devils,
highwaymen, and clowns. Tradition tells of one
Stephen Knowles, a miner dwelling at Grassington
somewhere in the earlier half of last century, a collector
of chap-books, who believed what he read. ' It is not
likely,' he argued, * that anyone would go to the expense
of printing lies.' Baron Munchausen was a special
favourite and a sore point. Once a weather-beaten
seaman from Greenwich, who had come north on a
visit, ventured to approach the matter in a spirit of
criticism ; but Stephen was equal to the occasion.

* A fool,* he said, * comprehendeth not the profound
sayings of the wise, and it ill becometh an ignorant tar
and out-pensioner of Greenwich Hospital to ridicule the
surprisLQg and truthful narrative of a German Peer ! ' ^

A very different kind of importance attaches to
the periodical literature which had been spreading, in
the form of newspapers and magazines, with increas-
ing velocity since the last years of William the Third.

* Not many years ago,' wrote Br. Johnson in 1758, ' the
nation was content with one gazette ; but now we have
not only in the Metropolis papers every morning and

^ Dixon, Chronicles of the Craven Dales, 425 sqq. See generally. Life
ofHoJcroft, i. 135 ; Crabbe, Parish Register, pt. i ; Bowles, Days Departed ;
Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century, iL 141 sq. ; id.,
England and the English in the Nineteenth Century, i. 238, cf. Place, Add.
MSB. 27825, p. 79 (B.M.) ; Select Committee on Education (1835), Q. 800 ;
J. H. Dixon, Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of
England (1846) ; Ashton, Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century.

102 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

every evening, but almost every large town has its
weekly historian who regularly circulates his periodical
intelligence and fills the villages of his district with con-
jectures on the events of the war.' * All foreigners/ he
adds, ' remark that the knowledge of the common people
of England is greater than that of any other vulgar.
This superiority we undoubtedly owe to the rivulets of
intelligence which are continually trickling among us,
which anyone may catch.* ^ More than one authority
has recorded the intense excitement which prevailed
among all classes during the campaign of that year ;
the eagerness with which small knots collected in the
streets to hear the proud possessor of an Observator or
a Review declaim its smattering of news and comment.
At an earlier crisis a traveller had remarked, with
mingled amusement and surprise, during a visit to
London, that * workmen habitually begin the day by
going to the cofiee-house in order to read the latest news.
I have often seen shoeblacks and other persons of that
class club together to purchase ' a journal. ^ It was not
the least significant of the many portents which were
gathering on the horizon of English life.

1 Idler, Nos. 7 and 30.

* A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and II ; Letters
of M. de Samsure, tr. Madame van Muyden (1902), 162.

CHAPTER III

THE ERA OE REVOLUTIONS

A TENDENCY to difierentiate educational methods in
accordance with the supposed requiiements of different
classes was, in some ways, an inevitable incident in the
advance towards a policy of universal instruction. The
contrast which is commonly drawn between the Grammar
Schools of the sixteenth century and the Charity Schools
of the eighteenth — ^to the disadvantage of the latter
— involves, to a large extent, the fallacy of comparing
institutions which had different functions to perform,
and of reading into the theory of an earlier age ideas
which belong to modem democracy. The Charity
School movement may, at any rate, be explained with
reference to social preconceptions which influenced
Elizabethan statesmanship and have their roots in
earlier usage and tradition.

The nucleus of conservative tradition may be
traced in the mediaeval conception of society as consist-
ing of a series of classes, each with its appointed status
in the commonwealth, its customary scale of income
and expenditure, its round of duty which ranked almost
as a public trust. Each commodity had its * just
price * ; to each class there was a fair reward for labour
which was relative to its customary standard of living.
To lower this standard was an act of oppression ;
to better it might be tantamount to an encroachment.
It was the business of government to see that each group

103

104 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

fulfilled its allotted role and, by striking a balance
between conflicting interests, to secure for each its
proper livelihood.

The' inference that each class had its appropriate
standard of culture, and that the prospects of the
individual which depend on instruction should be
determined by the rank of his parents, was not part of
the mediaeval theory. The impulse to education was
religious, not economic. The question of educating the
masses had not arisen, but to the individual belonged
God-sent talents which it was a duty to cultivate.
Schools existed for the elite, but not an elite of wealth.
The same statute that debarred villeins from apprenticing
their children confirmed their right of access to places
of instruction.^ A change occurred in the sixteenth
century. The measure of instruction prescribed by the
Apprentice Laws was governed by an economic motive ;
its aim being to secure that idle and vagabond chil-
dren should be trained for industry on conditions
defined by the State. ^ When the Grammar Schools
were reorganised, the old ideals were maintained, but
it was necessary to combat an objection that the son
of a ploughman was not called to learning, and that
his labour was as important to society as functions
which belonged to a higher rank.^ But the most

^ ' No one shall put their child apprentice within any city or borough,
unless they have land or rent of 20 shillings per annum ; but they shall
be put to such labour as their fathers or mothers use, or as their estates
require. But any persons may send their children to school to learn
Literature ' — 7 Henry IV, c. 17 (Raithby, Statutes at Large, i. 661).

* Craik, State in its Relation to Edwation {English Citizen Series),
dsq.

' It was ' meet for the ploughman's son to go to the plough, and
the artificer's son to apply the trade of his parents' vocation ; and the
gentlemen's children are meet to have the knowledge of government and
rule in the Commonwealth. For we have as much need of ploughmen as
any other State : and all sorts of men may not go to school ' — Strype,
Cranmer, i^l27.

THE ERA OP REVOLUTIONS 105

striking illustration of the turn given to mediaeval
theory in dealing with a new instrument of popular
instruction is found in a statute passed during the last
years of Henry the Eighth. To allay certain symptoms
of disorder occasioned by a free use of the Scriptures,
it was enacted that the English Bible should not be
read in churches. The right of private reading was
granted to nobles, gentry, and merchants that were
householders, but was expressly denied to artificers'
prentices, to journeymen and serving men * of the
degree of yeomen or imder,' to husbandmen and
labourers. 1 It was left to a later generation to draw
from sage premises absurd conclusions. The old social
theory is expressed in a saying of Edward the Sixth —
* this country can bear ... no husbandman or farmer
worth above £100 to £200 ; no artificer above
100 marc ; no labourer much more than he spendeth.'
Nearly two centuries later, the satirist produced a
scheme of municipal * nurseries,' to prepare children
for ' such a condition of life as befits the rank of
their parents and their own capacities as well
as inclinations ' — the offspring of gentry, merchants,
traders and handicraftsmen receiving appropriate de-
grees of culture, whilst the * cottagers and labourers
keep their children at home, their business being only
to till and cultivate the earth, and therefore their
education is of little consequence to the PubHck. ' ^

A mistrust of independent action on the part of
individuals or sections of society had followed^from the

^ 34 & 35 Henry Vm, c. 1 (Raithby, ii. 201). Burnet, History of the
Reformation, i. 517.

^ GuUiver's Travels, pt. i, ch. vi. Contrast the genuine mediaeval
attitude &s shown in Henry VIII's instructions to the clergy to exhort
parents, masters and governors of youth to ' bestow their children and
servants, even from their childhood, either to learning, or to some other
honest exercise, occupation or husbandry ' — Burnet, iv. 91 (the italics are
mine).

106 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEIVIENTS

premises on which the mediaeval theory of social equili-
brium rested. A maximum, no less than a minimum, of
opportunity had been implied in the doctrine of * just
price. ' The persistent efforts of government in the Middle
Ages to control capitalist enterprise, to manipulate
the labour market, to fix the limits of remuneration and
profit, above all to prohibit collective bargaining, were
an essential part of the policy which aimed at protecting
the standard of Hving through all grades of society.
Within these limits the course of Tudor statesmanship
suggests little more than an extended application to
the nation as a whole, of * ideas which had been im-
phcit in the local organisation of earlier times ' ; but
the reorganisation which it involved has an important
bearing on the political growth of the nation, and marks
a dividing point in its economic history. It is difficult
to find any metaphor adequate to express the process
of national consolidation that reached a climax during
these years of transition. Broadly it may be said that
a number of individual organisms, exhibiting various
degrees of structural complexity, have coalesced to
form a larger and more complex unit co-extensive
with the nation. Underlying the process is the con-
ception that society as a whole, and each of the units
composing it, is a corporate structure subject to some
form of organised control. Its starting point is the
clustering together of members of a social or economic
group for the protection or advancement of their com-
mon interests. As society becomes more complex with
the differentiation of economic functions, each new
group tends to associate in self-defence, until it is
incorporated as part of a larger unit.

Some such course of evolution may be traced in the
growth of the gilds during the later Middle Ages. The
town has already emerged as a self-governing com-

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 107

munity, with its methodic organisation of commerce and
production in the interest of its members. The rise of
the craft-gilds marks an advance in economic complexity
and a corresponding differentiation in the structure of
local government. The burgess body is thus reorganised
in a number of constituent associations, standing sever-
ally in the same relation to the municipal authority,
and forming together the * subordinate mechanism of
self-government * and the instruments by which the
town carries out its system of economic regulation.
It is characteristic of this phase of urban life — so
long as the market is essentially local and there is a
substantial equality among those enjoying the privi-
leges of burgess-ship — that municipal self-government is
broadly representative of the main body of the towns-
folk and relatively free from outside interference, and
that each subordinate group retains a large measure
of self-determination subject to the control of the
municipal authority which is in turn responsive to the
corporate will of the community. Meanwhile forces
which were destroying the economic isolation of town and
manor, worked with disintegrating effect on the old
forms of communal life. The whole structure of trade
and industry reacted to the influences of a widening
market and the growing importance of capitalist
enterprise. Capitalism brought new problems — the
growth of wage-labour, a redistribution of functions,
a new rivalry of interests, the economic and political
subjection of class to class. The movement affected
not only the organisation of the crafts, but also
the balance of town government. Power concentrated
in the hands of oligarchies ; self-government became
less a reality ; and the gild-organisation entered
' into a smaller part of the daily life of the members.'
The same tendency may be traced in the process by

108 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

which associations originating among the new journey-
man class were gradually divested of every semblance
of spontaneity, and became instruments whereby a
trading corporation provided for the relief of its
dependants. With these internal changes in town life
were connected the spread of industries over the rural
districts and the increased intervention of the central
authority. As industry extended beyond the sphere
of local regulation, as local institutions fell short of the
requirements of discipline and justice, there commenced
a process of reconstruction in which the lines of national
policy were marked out by the central government
and local organisation was enwrapped in a framework
of national control. National legislation encroached
more and more on the sphere of the municipality and
superseded the custom of the manorial courts ; the
task of supervising the gilds, together with a part
of their administrative functions, was gradually trans-
ferred to magistrates controlled by the central executive.
A definite drift of political tendency underlies the
course of economic development. There is an intelligible
transition from the forms of association and self-
government which may be studied in the earlier stages of
town Hfe, to the urban oligarchies of the fifteenth century,
and to the centralised paternaHsm of the Elizabethan
age. The central government, working for national
ends, asserted its control over a form of association which
had drifted from its original intention, and a quasi-
representative system which had fallen into decay ; and,
in doing so, it tended to supersede them both. The pro-
cess of national consoHdation was a gradual movement
towards the stage at which poHcies were designed and
executed from above. The tendency reappears beyond
the sphere of economic regulation. In the rehgious
movements of the period there is the same element of

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 109

emancipation as in other phases of national develop-
ment, but the prevailing note is a renewal of discipline.
The conception of national religion as an instrument
for enforcing the duties and positions of the social
system comes out in the language of the Church Cate-
chism, and in the special prayers for landlord and
labourer which were formulated by royal command.*
The Church service finds its place in the same compre-
hensive scheme of delegated responsibility that en-
trusted magistrates with the assessment of wages and
a general supervision of popular morals. At the same
time, with the passing away of the old order, important
social influences may have fallen into decay. The effect
of the disendowment of religious fraternities depends
not merely on the quantitative loss or gain which
accrued from the reapplication of their funds to various
objects, but also on the extent to which it crushed
a habit of voluntary co-operation whose loss was not
to be compensated by any increase of efficiency.''

The situation at the close of the Tudor period
illustrates the truism that, while it is easy to formulate

1 Cf. Heath, English Peasant, 20. Compare Henry VIII's Instructions
to the Clergy, describing the Bible as ' the Spiritual Food of man's soul,
whereby they [his subjects] may the better know the Dutys to God, to their
Sovereign Lord the King and their neighbour ' — Burnet, History of the
Reformation, iv. 91. Mr. R. H. Tawney has sent me an extract from a
document {Considerations delivered to the Parliament, 1559, preparatory to
the Statute of Artificers, 1563), preserved among the Burleigh MSS., which
throws light on the connection between religious and social discipline as
conceived by the Government. It is recommended {inter alia) that ' no
man hereafter receive into service any servant without a testimonial from
the master he last dwelt with, sealed with a Parish seal kept by the con-
stable or churchwarden witnessing he left with the free hcense of his
master, penalty £10. So by the need of the masters servants may be
reduced to obedience, which shall reduce obedience to the prruce and to
God also ; by the looseness of the time no other remedy is left but by
awe of the law to acquaint men with virtue again ; whereby the Reforma-
tion of religion may be brought in credit, with the amendment of manners,
the want whereof has been as a thing grown by the liberty of the GospeL'
* The same remark appUes to the suppression of local drama, etc.,
which took place in certain districts, under Puritanical influences.

110 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

schemes of social equilibrium, it is difficult to control
the material forces by which the course of social develop-
ment, and ultimately of social thought, is actually
determined. Though in the sixteenth century property
was widely distributed and persons dependent entirely
on wages formed perhaps a minority of the whole
population, the * two nations ' were already emerging
from the wreck of feudal society — on the one side,
*the classes enjoying a large common measure of
economic freedom ' ; on the other, the wage-earners
who were to become the * masses,^ * in whose
position, as defined by the law, there is an element
of mediaeval serfdom, an element of freedom, an
element of protection and guarantee/^ The position
of the latter had been accepted, rather than modi-
fied, by national legislation. Their status was most
easily controlled and apparently most in need of regula-
tion. Their power of initiative and constructive action
was little developed, and upon them restrictions on
personal freedom fell most heavily. They were a
class, as it seemed, marked out by circumstance for
protection and control. This actual cleavage necessarily
tended to weaken that sentiment of social soUdarity
which had been enforced by Tudor despotism in the
face of economic change ; an effect which became
more apparent in the next century, as political pre-
dominance shifted from the crown to the governing
classes, and as with the decay of personal monarchy
there passed away some part of the idealism which its
prestige had sheltered.

If the constitutional conflicts of the Puritan era
weakened the machinery for enforcing Elizabethan
policies and loosened the conceptions on which they
rested, the Eest oration and the Eevolution of 1688

^ Meredith, Economic History of England, 86.

THE EEA OF REVOLUTIONS 111

revealed with growing emphasis the strength of
those interests which became a dominant influence
in eighteenth-century pohtica. Attempts to define
the position of the masses assumed an altered com-
plexion, when they were conceived no longer as part
of a general scheme of subordination embracing society
as a whole, but reflected primarily the opinion of one
section of society as to how another should hve ; and
the confusion was increased by a blending of feudal
tradition with the maxims of commerca In the plea
for cheap labour which influenced both supporters
and opponents of the Charity Schools, there is at once
an echo of the old social theory which imposed a
customary restraint on the class standard of Uving,
and a foretaste of the attitude of later economists who
treated labour as an item in the costs of production.*
Meanwhile complementary sides of economic thought
were slow to develop. While the protective system
of the EHzabethan age gradually lost its warmth and
vigour, the independence of the wage-earning classes
was hardly more intelligible to eighteenth-century con-
servatism than the ' masterless man ' to the Tudor
statesman. The judicial assessment of wages was
abandoned as a general practice, and unions of employers
tacitly admitted, some time before the labourers were
granted a legal right of combining to protect themselves.
If certain lines of economic advance during this period
illustrate the danger to be apprehended when national
welfare is estimated in terms of rent and profit, the
measures introduced at the close of the century show
yet more plainly, not only how far paternal rule had
receded in practice from the tradition of a fair wage,
but also the confusion bound up with a system of govern-
ment which was yielding to a new economic principle

^ C/. Mandeville, Essay on Charity and Charity Schools,

112 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

without admitting its corollaries. In the interval
there appeared the writings of Mandeville, in part a
caricature of the Elizabethan ideal, in part a shrewd
assertion of fact, in part an anticipation of individualism
in its cruder forms. The welfare of the masses is sub-
ordinated to the liberties of a successful minority ; * and
they are consoled with the thought that individuals may
rise to positions of comfort by virtue of self-discipline
and the love of money. His tract on the Charity
Schools was publicly burnt. He was both behind,
and in advance of, his age. He had outraged genuine
instincts of duty and benevolence ; he had stated
difficulties which were more easily ignored than solved ;
he had also held up the mirror to social snobbery.

Yet the change of sentiment may be easily
exaggerated. Criticism did not crystallise into a
reasoned body of thought before the coming of Bentham
and Adam Smith. The aegis of paternalism had passed
from the Privy Council to the governing class which
had been educated under its control, and social effort
continued to be inspired and biassed by tradition.
While the main part of the controversy concerning
Charity Schools turned on the expediency of instructing
the lower grades of labour in subjects previously appro-
priated to traders and craftsmen, ^ the movement itself

1 ' It is impossible that a society can long subsist and suffer many of
its members to live in idleness and enjoy all the ease and pleasure they
can invent, without having at the same time great multitudes of people
that to make good this defect will condescend to be quite the reverse ' —
Mandeville, Fabk of the Bees (6th ed.), 326. Contrast the saying of
Edward VI. — ' Wherefore as in the body no part hath too much or too
little, so in a commonwealth ought every part to have ad victum et non
ad saturitatem ' (Meredith, op. cit., 86).

* Mandeville's main argument, which has a permanent interest, looks
forward to the danger of recruiting a surplus army of ' clerks,' or, as he
would have expressed it, of ' tradesmen and artificers ' — Fable of the Bees,
328, 370. He reiterates a traditional view that the Church service and
catechising should be sufficient to the needs of the labouring poor,
* without the assistance of reading and writing' — 352 sq.

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 113

was not contrary to precedent ; it was neither so
great a degradation as has been sometimes suggested,
nor so great an advance as might appear from its
advocacy of popular instruction. A system of teaching,
essentially remedial in its objects and subordinated to
the needs of industry and religion, followed, in fact,
as a legitimate extension of Elizabethan principles.
The status of the poor was still roughly predetermined ;
education was as much a means of restraint as of
improvement. The rescue-motive lay at the root of
popular instruction, just as in later years the recovery
of lost ground was the original object of the trade-
union movement.

So far we have traced a connection between certain
lines of educational poHcy and certain tendencies in
economic organisation and political thought. In the
period of reconstruction which follows the Reform Bill
of 1832, there will be something hke a reversal of these
tendencies and corresponding changes in the aims of
educational reform. The People's College at Sheffield
and similar institutions which developed during the
middle years of the nineteenth century, represent the
intellectual side of a progressive movement whose
aim was to raise the status of the masses, and which
finds an illustration in the familiar antithesis between
a training for livelihood and a training for life. The
movement towards national education was already con-
necting itself with the vague conception of a ' common
school." The carrihre aux talents, hitherto subordinate,
was becoming a motive of primary importance in the
direction of educational poHcy. The history of the
intervening period of transition is concerned with
changes in the economic structure of society which
altered the character of social problems, and with the

114 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

growth of new ideals and energies which led men to
a higher level of social consciousness.

It has been suggested that the authoritative super-
vision of national life in all its details, which was carried
to a logical extreme in the system of * thorough/ received
a permanent blow from the constitutional struggles of
the seventeenth century. During the hundred years
which followed the Puritan Revolution, analogous
abuses accumulated in the administrative systems of
Church and State ; ^ a slackening of discipline and
restraint being apparent no less in the sphere of religion
and morals, than in different phases of economic regula-
tion. The lax administration of the Poor Laws finds
a counterpart in the gradual disuse of the practice of
catechising and of the inquisitorial system, scrupulously
carried out by many local authorities in the earher half
of the seventeenth century, which enforced attendance
at divine worship and corrected indifferently contra-
ventions of the law and forms of misbehaviour which
lay beyond the scope of any legal enactment. ^ The
rise of new industries, for which no provision had been
made in the Statute of Artificers, was accompanied
by the growth of population in urban areas beyond

1 Pluralism in the Church, which was partly the result of insufficient
endowment and one of the main causes of absenteeism, may be paralleled
by inequaUties in the distribution of magistrates between different parts
of the country (Webb, English Local Oovernment, i. 321) ; again, just as
incompetent persons found their way into the magistracy {ibid., 328 sqq.),
so a faulty method of examination admitted unqualified candidates to
Holy Orders (Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century,
ii. 361). Negligence and irregularity in the conduct of the clergy are
ascribed in a large measure to the decay of episcopal supervision (ibid.,
ii. 338), just as the decline of dihgence and efficiency in local government
is ascribed to absence of the stimulus which was formerly brought to
bear on magistrates and local authorities by the Privy Council through
the Judges of Assize. Both in civil and rehgious matters the effects of
misgovernment were most noticeable in the growing urban centres (c/.
Webb, i. 85, 198 sq., 328 sqq. ; Bosanquet, London, 126 n.).

* Roberts, Social History of the Southern Counties, 141 sqq., 204 sqq,
Overton and Relton, English Church, 1714-1800, 294.

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 115

the reach of Church discipline and magisterial control.
But there is another side to the picture. If the decay
of regulation is responsible for instances of physical
and moral neglect, it produced also a comparative
freedom of enterprise and gave a stimulus to new forms
of thought. In the reaction from paternalism, opinion
drifted by degrees towards a conception of * natural
liberty,' which found expression in the economic gospel
of free competition and the opposition of early liberals
to authoritative interference in the domain of thought
and conduct. Further, if the actual decrease of State
intervention prepared the way for a doctrine of laissez-
faire, the materials for a conception of equality of
opportunity were furnished by the rise of individuals
at the commencement of the Industrial Revolution
and by the influence of political and religious move-
ments which, extending downwards in the social scale,
had commenced a process of intellectual selection.

But the failure of paternal methods of government
meant more than the growth of individualism and
individual effort. The emancipation of the individual
was a necessary step towards a wider policy of social
reconstruction. If the removal of restrictions en-
couraged individual initiative, it gave rise also to new
combinations and a new spirit of solidarity. The
theory of * natural liberty * — or rather the form which
it assumed in the writings of Priestley and Adam Smith
— is open to the same general criticism that applies,
perhaps in a less degree, to Elizabethan statesmanship ;
it was based on a study of conditions which were already
passing away. Formulated at a crisis when new adjust-
ments of regulation and discipline were becoming im-
perative, its influence on the condition of wage-earners
is reflected in a widespread degradation of their habits
and standards of living. It was a sense of weakness.

116 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

quite as much as the instinct of monopoly, which led
them to cling with impracticable conservatism to those
forms of legal protection which belonged to a passing
phase of economic development, and ultimately, as the
old safeguards disappeared, to pursue their interests
not as individuals, but as organised bodies working for
a common end. In the new era of competition, as the
unit of production was enlarged, the weakness of the
individual labourer, standing alone, became increas-
ingly apparent. Self-help and co-operation came to be
almost interchangeable terms. Individual betterment
was largely dependent on a general improvement in
social conditions. Here, too, the tendencies which
developed rapidly with the progress of the Industrial
Eevolution appear in an embryonic form in the years
which preceded. From an early stage in the eighteenth
century different forms of combination spread gradually
among the labouring classes, which challenge com-
parison with a corresponding movement that occmTed
four centuries earlier. Friendly societies in town and
country, trade combinations, debating clubs and read-
ing circles, religious associations, musical and horti-
cultural societies, were various manifestations of a new
impulse, severally of little significance but important
collectively as showing the current. The history of
the Methodist Societies, which occupy a position in
the group somewhat analogous to that of the religious
gilds in the earlier movement, may be said to illustrate
one aspect of the difference between two stages of
civilisation. Not only was the social order less capable
of assimilating without friction new forms of associated
effort, but the conditions under which such activities
developed, and the influences by which they were in-
spired, were in many respects fundamentally changed.
An impulse which contains the germ of democracy

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 117

may be seen advancing by alow degrees among new
classes which had formed in the interval. The religious
awakening which Puritanism had brought to the middle
class extends with the progress of the Methodist Revival
among a considerable part of the labouring population.
Trade unionism and mutual assurance spread from the
urban handicrafts to industries of an inferior grade.
The transient combinations of journeymen in the
mediaeval crafts are replaced by associations of different
kinds which were destined, after more or less inter-
ruption, to acquire a permanent place in the industrial
system. 1

(1) The Religious Revival

The conclusion suggested by a recent inquiry into
the religious state of the people — that the most vital
forms of religion are found in areas which have developed
since the Industrial Revolution, and represent rather a
reawakening of spiritual consciousness than a survival
from the past — has a peculiar interest in connection
with certain phenomena disclosed in this period of
transition. It was in districts which presented a
model of paternal discipline, that religious observance
seemed most liable to degenerate into a social custom.
It was the new scenes of missionary labour that profited
most from the growth of self-consciousness which under-
lay different phases of the Evangelical movement,
originating among small groups of associates who met
together for mutual edification and the promotion of
good works.

The Religious societies of the eighteenth-century
revival may be compared with associations which had
arisen at different periods in the history of the Mediaeval

^ Webb, History of Trade Unionism, ch. i.

118 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Churcli. As bodies of laymen supporting certain
recognised forms of devotion, they bear a remote
resemblance to the religious gilds. As a nucleus of
the elect consecrated to a religious life and to works
of charity and education, they performed to a limited
extent and in relation to altered circumstances some
of the functions which had devolved on the Monastic
orders. In so far as they developed a mission to the
oppressed and afflicted, their position is analogous,
and sometimes closely akin, to that of the friars. There
is, in fact, more than a superficial parallel between
the Methodist Revival and the Franciscan movement
which invaded England in the thirteenth century.
The man who claimed the world for his parish, who
developed an elaborate organisation and rules of pro-
cedure, and exercised a plenary jurisdiction in the
choice and discipline of his subordinates, had the genius
which would have given birth in the Middle Ages to
a religious order or an heretical sect.^ The Methodist
body might be said to fall between these two categories.
It consisted partly of an order of preachers loosely
connected with the Established Church ; it was partly,
also, a new sect. The doctrine of conversion involved
a dubious attitude to the ecclesiastical system, and an
organisation of converts whose position in the parish
was an anomaly and a possible source of disturbance.

^ The mingled approval, jealousy, and contempt which confronted
the Methodist preachers in their dealings with ecclesiastical authorities
and the reUgious world, find a parallel in the experiences of the early
Franciscans ; incidentally, the same charges of illiteracy and ignorance
were made ia both cases. The religious conditions which gave birth
to either movement were roughly similar ; in either case the clergy were
losing touch with the vital needs of the people ; and as the Monastic
orders had degenerated before the coming of St. Francis, so the dissenting
bodies which preceded Wesley had lost in the eighteenth century much
of their earlier zeal. But it is unnecessary to force the parallel ; the
attitude of Wesley to the Establishment, after his conversion, differed
materially from that of St. Francis to the system of the CathoUo Church.

THE EKA OF REVOLUTIONS 119

The unsectarian composition of the society, and the
opposition which it encountered at the hands of the
clergy, gave it the character of a distinct denomination.
The atmosphere of the class-meeting and the practice
of recruiting preachers from an imeducated class were
at variance with the recognised system of Church
discipline and the social traditions of the time.

* It has been a great fault all along/ wrote Walker
of Truro, * to have made the low people of your council ' ;
and nothing in the Methodist organisation gave greater
offence than the character and antecedents of many
of its preachers and class-leaders. A circle of labourers
or mechanics, led in worship or * conference ' by one of
their own rank,^ stood on a footing essentially different
from the middle-class gatherings of Churchmen and
dissenters which appear at the commencement of the
century, and from the type of parochial society which
was a later product of the EvangeHcal movement.
Much has been said both of the emotional side of the
revival and of its effect on morals and parental re-
sponsibility. The part which it played in the political
education of the masses has been as often misrepresented
or ignored. Like every movement which makes a
new demand on the poor, it formed in different neigh-
bourhoods a bond of union between the most active
and independent of their class. An exceptional degree
of intelligence and attainment was not uncommon among
Methodists of humble station and those who had been
reared in Methodist homes ; and the same influence
generally underlies the reading circles that are found
occasionally among the labourers and artisans in rural
areas. The class-meeting was a starting point for serious
friendships, and often contained an inner circle of com-

1 Wesley, Journal, June 13, 1757 ; June 18, 1777, etc. Anti-Jacobin
(1801), 157.

120 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

panions more intelligent than the rest, who would meet
to converse on religion and matters of general interest
and occasionally entered on a com-se of reading. ^

The effects of a spiritual awakening have been seldom
confined to the sphere of religious practice and behefa.
Puritanism had given birth to movements and reactions
in politics, and was connected with underlying streams
of social and economic tendency. A similar interaction
of forces may be observed in the popular movements
of a later age. A group of Cornish Methodists became
interested in the American War of Independence.'
Paine 's * Age of Eeason ' was accompanied by the
* Rights of Man/ and both were read by a circle of
Methodists in Lancashire who were moderate supporters
of political reform. ^ Politics and religion went together
in the debating societies formed among the artisans and
tradesmen of London and the provincial towns. * Though
it has been justly claimed that the religious movement
exercised a steadying influence on political agitation and
formed a defence against the cruder forms of infidelity
which were mingled with the spirit of sedition, there was
sufficient connection between disturbances in either
sphere to explain the attitude of alarmists who included
Methodism and radicalism under a common ban of
denunciation.^ Both in religion and in politics new

^ Life of Samuel Drew, by his son ; Bamford, Early Days, 52 sq. (ed.
1893). Drew, a Cornish shoemaker, was a man of exceptional talent
who owed his inspiration to the revival ; but it is clear from his biography
that smaller men might imbibe intellectual conceit.

^ Life of Drew, 102 sq.

' Bamford, Early Days, 52 sq.

* Cf. Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 165.
Brentano, History and Development of Gilds, remarks that, during the
Puritan Revolution, the London apprentices had been wont to pronounce
on the rehgious and political questions of the day.

* The attitude of the Anti-Jacobin to Methodism may be expressed
in the words of the Cardinal De Lorraine with reference to the Huguenots.
* If the secular arm fails in its duty, all the malcontents will throw them-

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 121

forces were astir beneath the surface, and within the
framework, of traditional beliefs. In either case, ex-
amples of deep and earnest devotion, implying a new
attitude to the problems of life, were disgraced by
outbm:sts of mireason and emotional excess. In either
case, those of the poor who became converts to a
new teaching fomid their bitterest opponents in the
multitude of their own class.

(2) Political Unrest

The familiar accessories of modern political agitation
had their origin in the critical events which followed
one another in rapid sequence from the accession
of George the Third to the outbreak of the French
Revolution. The pubHc meeting — * a custom unknown
to our earlier constitution ' — acquired an increasing

selves into this detestable sect. They will first destroy the ecclesiastical
power, after which it will be the turn of the royal power ' — Smiles, Hitguejiot
Settlements, 33.

A pamphlet entitled The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies
in this Metropolis, by WUliam Hamilton Reid (1800), describes the mutual
provocation which arose between rationalist infideUty and the more
extreme forms of reUgious enthusiasm. It appears that about 1795 a
body of rationalists commenced a campaign among the working classes,
organising open-air meetings and debating clubs, and invading benefit
societies where they raised religious discussions and sang democratic
songs. At the same time the Lady Anne's Preachers were holding
meetings during the summer months in the Spa-fields and in Hackney,
Islington, etc. — ' a wandering tribe of fanatical teachers,' says Reid,
' mostly taken from the lowest and most UUterate classes of society ;
among whom are to be found raving enthusiasts, pretending to divine
impulses, of various and extraordinary kinds, practising exorcisms and
many other impostures and delusions and thereby obtaining an unhmited
sway over the minds of the ignorant multitude.' They attacked the
clergy, says the same authority, and visited the sick. A coimter-move-
ment was organised by their opponents. ' A very formidable party . . .
assembled every Sunday morning at seven o'clock near the City Road ;
here, in consequence of the debates forced upon the preachers or their
hearers, several groups of people would remain upon the ground tUl noon,
giving an opportimity to the unwary passengers to become acquainted
with the dogmas of Voltaire, Paine, etc.'

122 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

importance from the time of the Middlesex Petition.^
Smiday newspapers came into existence during the
American War of Independence ; ^ and the influence of
the cheap press may be traced at the same period in the
growth of debating societies in the towns, ^ and in the
appearance of the * pot-house oracle * as a new factor
in rural life.* The intermixture of sporadic demands
for constitutional reform with the general stream of
radicalism during the opening phase of the French
Revolution produced the form of propaganda which
has covered the land with a network of political or-
ganisations, working through the medium of pubUc
meetings and private canvassing, through the distribu-
tion of literature or the more personal influence of
lectures and debates. »

* ' These assemblies, in which the nation dehberated apart from its
aristocratic chiefs, cannot be distinctly traced higher than the year 1769 ;
they were now (1770) of daily occurence ' — Cooke, History of Party, ui. 187.
But we must not overlook the influenca of the pubUc meeting in open
vestries ; and it is perhaps significant that an instance of political partisan-
ship in vestry elections occurs in 1771 — ^Webb, English Local Ghvemment,
i. 113 n.

* Andrews, History of Newspapers, i. 273 ; cf. Buckle, Cimlisation
in England, i. ch. vii. 393 n.

' Sydney, op. cit., ii. 165 ; Langford, Century of Birmingham Life, i.
243 sq. ; Cooke, op. cit., iii. 412 ; Knight, Pursuit of Knowledge under
Difficulties, iii. 76 sq.

* ' His features, though considerably relaxed by intoxication, bore
the stamp of intelligence far above his situation. ... It appeared that
he read several newspapers, and in all probabiUty is the oracle of every
pothouse in the surrounding country ' — ' Pedestrian Tour through parte
of England and Wales,' Monthly Review, viii. 619 (1797). Crabbe, The
Newspaper (1785), ridicules and laments the appearance of this type.

* The London Corresponding Society (1792) was in touch with the
Revolution Society, the Society for Constitutional Information, the
Unitarian Society, etc. ; it formed centres in the large towns, and circu-
lated pamphlets, newspaper cuttings, Paine's Rights of Man, etc. ; its
emissaries are said to have canvassed in factories, ale-houses, barbers'
shops, etc. — ' individuals who, though deficient in education, had received
talents from nature which frequently shone through coarse and vulgar
language.' Annual Register, xxxiii. 115 ; xxxiv. 365 ; xxxvui. 8. Cf.
Langford, op. cit., ii. 285. ' Originally an obscure club, composed of a
few mechanics and inferior tradesmen ' — Cooke, op. cit., iii. 413. Cf.
Annual Register, xxxvi. 266.

Numerous reading rooms and lecture halls appear to have been closed as

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 123

How far this growth of agitation reflects a serioua
movement of public opinion, is a problem which
is not simplified by the fact that a large num-
ber of the reformers found their inspiration in
political developments which occurred abroad, their
material in the distress of the people at home. There
is certainly nothing in these earlier phases of radi-
cahsm to compare seriously with the massed forces of
enthusiasm which concentrated in the next generation
behind a definite demand for political reform. The
positive incentives which arose from the new grouping
of population in the manufacturing districts, and from
the glaring contrast between ' changing social conditions
and unchanging laws,' had not come to maturity before
the close of the Napoleonic struggle. The political
distractions of the intervening period were as much cal-
culated to evoke the native conservatism of the masses
as to incite them to revolt ; its economic incidents
served rather to emphasise a divergence between the
interests of the middle class and those of the rising
proletariat, than to furnish a common platform on
which both might unite. Sympathy with the cause
of reform seems, in fact, to have been confined at the
outset of the movement to a section of the aristocracy
and a section of the artisan and trading classes ; and
whatever influence it may have obtained during the
period of distress which accompanied the war of
the first Coalition, was more than counterbalanced
by reaction against foreign ideas and by the patriot-
ism which united all ranks, when opposition to the
Revolution became associated with the cause of national
defence.

The true explanation of the very different effects of

a result of the Seditious Meetings Act, 1796. On the distribution of radical
literature, c/. Reid, Rise and Dissolution of the Inf.dd Societies, 86 sqq. ;
Remarks on the Poor Bill {1807), by one ofH.M, Justices of the Peace, 13 sq.

124 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

revolutionary teaching in England and in France,
must be sought in an antecedent stream of circumstances
which had been steadily emancipating English labour
from those particular forms of oppression which in
France prepared the materials for an explosion ; ^ in
historic conditions which led unerringly in the one
case to an industrial, in the other to a political, revolu-
tion. The closest point of connection between English
distress and the grievances of the French peasantry
may be found in the injury to vested interests re-
sulting from different forms of agrarian enclosure,
and from the new phase of industrial competition
which deprived the artisan of his customary wage.
It is necessary merely to state the case in thia form,
to realise one fundamental point of difference which
renders comparison between the two countries alto-
gether illusory. France was passing through a phase
of economic growth which finds its nearest English
analogy in the decay of the manorial system and during
the period of the Peasants' Revolt. Though there were
parts of France where complaints were made of en-
closure by landlords, yet on the whole the French culti-
vators represented a progressive force pressing against
antiquated monopolies ; whilst the English masses,
already falling under the subtler oppressions of a
triumphant capitaHsm, found that their interest lay, for
the moment, in resisting change. In France the cause
of the peasants was identified with that of all pro-
gressive sections of society in opposition to a privileged
caste which had forfeited its power ; in England
the forces of civiHsation were ranged on the side of a
governing aristocracy, to whom the masses had not
c eased to look for protection and redress. Meanwhile the

1 Maine, Early Law and Custom, ch. ix.

THE EKA OF REVOLUTIONS 125

condition of the French peasantry had been steadily im-
proving, the position of the English masses in town and
coimtry was becoming on the whole more isolated and
depressed. To the maxim which found in the ignorance
of the multitude a safeguard of national stability, might
have been added the more cynical assurance that a state
of economic depression does not necessarily conduce
to an effective confidence in sweeping reforms. The
attitude of the skilled artisans in urban handicrafts,
whose position was relatively secure and who formed
for some time to come the backbone of democratic
movements, stands in striking contrast to that of
the newly organised masses who wavered between
submissive appeals to the government and spasmodic
insurrections equally devoid of purpose and effect.*
How far the crowd-instinct has been leavened by
rational motives and guided into the channels of a
constructive policy, is one of the main problems to
be considered at a later stage of political development.
At any rate the unrest which followed at the close of the
Napoleonic wars was very different from the discontents
of the previous century. The failure of the government
to redress their grievances had infused an element of
solidarity and self-dependence into the scattered groups
from which the labour movement arose. The whole
course of repressive legislation, which for a time stifled
every expression of discontent, worked ultimately in th^
same direction. When agitation revived, even the specific
grievance of the Combination Laws was overshadowed
by issues of a more fundamental and definitely political

^ ' The prevailing tone of the superior workmen down to 1848 was,
in fact, thoroughly Radical. . . . But their trade clubs were free from
anything which could now be conceived as political sedition. ... In
the new machine industries (on the other hand) . . . both leaders and
rank and file were largely implicated in political seditions, and were the
victims of spies ' — ^Webb, Trade Unionism, 7&-9.

126 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

character.^ And in the meantime the groundwork of
society had been shaken by an economic upheaval, with
which the modern phase of educational problems may
be said to commence.

(3) The Industrial Revolution

The term Industrial Kevolution has been applied
to a series of changes in the technique and structure of
industry, extending roughly over the interval between
the acce sion of George the Third and the advent of the
Reform Bill, of which economy in production may be
described as the final cause, whose tendency was towards
a general redistribution of economic functions and a
more concentrated management of industrial resources,
and which resulted socially in a * new form of human
settlement.' It is sufficient here to refer briefly to certain
general features of the transformation which have a
bearing, more or less direct, on educational problems.
In the first place, a change in the technique of production
was accompanied by an enlargement of the productive
unit and by corresponding changes in the structure of
social life. * The small master- workman is superseded
by the capitalist manufacturer, the small farmer dis-
appears before the capitaHst farmer ' ; the mass of the
agricultural population tend to become grouped together
on large farms under capitalist management, the mass
of the manufacturing community in large estabhshments
under the direction c f the proprietor and his officials.
Secondly, there was a widespread specialisation in the
functions of the individual labourer, who became normally
dependent on one source of subsistence, the wage of a
particular line of employment. This was partly the result
of a general growth of trade facilities, but it was also a

» Webb, Tradt Unionism, 86.

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 127

corollary of enlargement in the unit of production. In-
dustrial reorganisation tended to deprive the agricultural
population of the subsidiary means of support provided
by the domestic industries, and the manufacturing
classes of the element of subsistence-farming which they
had shared with jther sections of the rural peasantry ;
while the enclosure movement gradually displaced the
type of labourer who had been engaged partly in farming
on his own account, or had supplemented his earnings
by the exercise of rights of commonage. Lastly the
movement of population and its numerical increase,
which were incidental to these changes, had social
effects of a revolutionary character. The centre of
gravity shifted from the south toward the north of
England, and from the country to the town. In due
course urban surroundings came to be regarded as the
normal environment of the labouring class, and exercised
an increasing influence on the general trend of social
thought. In more senses than one, ' commerce and
industrial enterprise ' had been * grafted -on the stock
of agriculture,' and the rural districts had * become
the dependents of the manufacturing and trading
centres.'

It is important to realise the extent to which reformers
had been gradually prepared to welcome, on general
social grounds, changes which placed the resources
of the country in the hands of those who were most
likely to exploit them to the full, and to accept some form
of reorganisation on the lines which have been described
as a means of social discipline. The commercial poUcy
of the Whigs, which from the age of Walpole gave a
distinct advantage to the man of capital, was conceived,
at least incidentally, in the interests of the population
as a whole. As the Tudors were continually falling
back on personal government where * democratic*

128 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

institutions had sunk into decay,^ so a later generation
of statesmen came to rely on capitalism as a sovereign
remedy for social disorders. The widespread irregu-
larity of employment, revealed in the records of the
period, 2 might serve to identify the cause of social reform
with some drastic measure of industrial development ;
and examples were not wanting, in which the civili-
sation of a backward district was a direct outcome of
commercial adventure.^ Nor was the lightness of
organisation which offered the labourer a choice of
resources and gave him a certain detachment and
independence, so obvious or unmixed an advantage
as is sometimes suggested by writers at the present day,
who contrast it with the concentration and strain of
modern industrialism. * Ease of living ' was associated
with a habit of * lazy-diHgence,' which Defoe remarked
as a leading characteristic of his age, and of which
examples might be found in times of prosperity alike
among the manufacturing and the agricultural classes.*
If the open-field system offered certain incentives
to thrift and a chance of rising in the social scale, it
gave no safeguard against idleness ; while the cormnons
afforded shelter to a parasitic population whose manner
of life was precarious and unprogressive. Behind the
economic wastage lay a moral waste, a lack of steady
enterprise and ambition without which advance in civili-
sation was impossible, an element of moral stagnancy
which flowed from a thriftless use of material resources.
Underlying the argument for enclosure is the conception
of a stricter discipline which should concentrate attention

* Cf. Meredith, Economic History of England, 139.
« Ibid., 195.

» Cf. Smiles, Brindley, 272-4.

* Kalm, Account of Visit to England, 1748 (tr. Lucas, 1892), 333. Young,
Northern Tour, iii 248 sq.

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 129

continuously on a definite task, exacting more from
the labourer and giving more in return.*

The origin of these ideas must be sought in a general
view of economic necessities whose bearing on the welfare
of the masses was at most indirect. A change of attitude
on questions of social policy seems traceable to the
growing importance of trade as a source of taxable
wealth and a basis of national power, which suggested
gradually a new conception of social progress. Govern-
ment during the eighteenth century ceased to be
concerned primarily with the * breeding of men ' and
the task of guaranteeing to each a reasonable and
secure subsistence. It approached the problem, as it
were, from the other end of the scale, by seeking to
augment the general fund of wealth and plenty. The
change, however, was not merely one of means and
methods ; there was, also, a change of outlook and
aim. There was at once a more definite conception
of material progress resulting from an increased inter-
change of commodities, and a more exacting demand
on the energies of the labourer. It was no longer
sufficient that the worker should subsist ; he must
contribute his full share to an economical system of
production and exchange on which the common welfare
depended ; and this involved a progressive division of
labour, and its redistribution according to the needs
of the market. Young's ' Pohtical Arithmetic," which
expresses this train of thought, approaches the problem
of reorganisation, for various reasons, from the side
of agriculture and the land ; but his outlook extends
over the whole field of commerce and industry, and
the argument for large farms may be read also as a
defence of the later factory system.

* Johnson, Disappearance of the Small Landowner, 96 8q., 103 ; Eden.
State o/ tiie Poor, i. p. xviii sq.

K

130 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

The reasoning proceeds from the general to the
particular, from the good of the nation to that of the
individual. The economic aim is to increase the net
wealth of the community, the social aim is to increase
the sum of employment, and these ends are ultimately
the same. The argument, it is to be observed, is not
assailed by a local decrease of employment and gross
produce, such as followed the conversion of arable land
into pasturage in certain cases of Cxiclosure. Take
the country as a whole and labour as a whole, and the
aggregate of production includes the product of * useless
hands ' transferred from agriculture to the manufacturing
industries. It is further argued that any incidental
loss involved in the transition will be compensated by
a general advance in comfort, owing to the growth of
national wealth and its distribution in wages and to the
discipline of higher standards of industrial efficiency.

From this standpoint, what may be described as
an educational test may be applied to the economic
tendencies of the period. It would appear that some
form of reorganisation, imposing a severer discipline,
was demanded as a complement to the increase of wealth.
In industries which preserved the loose structure of
the domestic system a rapid increase of earnings seems
normally to have resulted in increased license and
demoralisation.^ On the other hand, it did not
follow that a reorganisation of industry on a more
economical basis would correspond in any strict sense
to an educational process. Allowance must be made,
in the first place, for a large element of friction in the
readjustment of labour to altered conditions and new
types of environment. Some of the arguments for
enclosure betray an excessive confidence both in the
fluidity of labour and in the possibihty of converting

» Cf. Bosanquet, The Strength of the People, 79.

THE EEA OF REVOLUTIONS 131

into efiective workers those who had been used to a
precarious existence on the land, by a simple change
in agrarian conditions and the removal of commons.
When the local demand for labour was diminished by
enclosure, there was a tendency rather for the weaker
elements among the peasantry to remain stranded on the
land, with the result of depressing the rate of wages — a
tendency afterwards repeated in the case of domestic in-
dustries, as the pressure of factory competition increased.
The difficulty of adapting domestic workers to the
discipline of the factory system was certainly a cause
of one of its main abuses, an excessive employment
of child labour. The argument, again, that labourers
displaced from agriculture would find employment in
the manufacturing centres, does not touch the question
as to whether the new conditions were socially better
or worse than the old. The growth of industrialism
and town life introduced new forms of debasement,
which enter into the educational problems of a coming
age. Meanwhile, if specialisation was laying the ground-
work of a new society, it involved also the unweaving
of an earlier fabric of habits and ideas in which the good
and the evil were closely intertwined. The phenomenon
is noticed in an oft-quoted passage of Adam Smith,
which describes the narrowing of personaHty that
formed a moral counterpart to the division of labour
in the manufacturing industries.* An equally striking
example of the same tendency may be found in certain
aspects of the enclosure movement. The reckless mar-
riages, so often denounced at a later date as a sign of
the demorahsed state of the rural districts and ascribed
directly to a pernicious system-of outdoor-relief, have
an earlier source in the social disintegration which

* Wealth of Nations, bk. v^ ch. i* axt. 2.

132 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

foUowed the upbreak of an old form of rural economy.*
An increased wage, even if it had been realised, was
no compensation for the loss of subsidiary resources,
in so far as these stood for a sense of ownership and
independence and were bound up with the traditions
of a corporate life.

The impression that * an increase in the quantity
of human life ' has been attained * at the expense of a
degradation in its quality,' is most strongly suggested in
the cases of agriculture and the textile industries, where
the economic structure was most radically changed. The
problems presented by the factory system have a special
reference to the care and training of the young; and
the main issues to which attention was drawn during its
initial stages are among those which confront educational
effort at the present day. * On the one hand, there was a
decay, amounting in some cases to an extinction, of the
influences of domestic training ; on the other, a system
of employment which consumed the energies of the
child by excessive toil in an unhealthy environment,
casting the young adrift at the close of their apprentice-
ship with faculties impaired and without the training
requisite to a future career. Certain forms of child
exploitation and a certain decay of home life among

^ Slater, English Peasantry and Enclosure of Common Fields, 265.
On the psychological and social effects of enclosure, see Denson, Peasant's
Voice to Landowners (1819), also some remarks in a journal of Robert
Bums — ' The more elegance and luxury among the farmers, I always
observe, in equal proportion the rudeness and stupidity of the peasantry.
This remark I have made all over the Lothians, Merse, Roxburgh, etc, ;
and for this, among other reasons, I think a man of romantic taste — a
" man of feeling " — wUl be better pleased with the poverty, but intelligent
minds, of the peasantry in Ayrshire (peasantry they are all below the
justice of the peace) than the opulence of a club of Merse farmers, when
he at the same time considers the vandalism of their ploughfolks, etc.
I carry this idea so far, that an unenclosed, half -improved country is to
me actually more agreeable . . . than a country cultivated like a garden.'
— Works of Robert Bums, Cunningham, 64.

» Cf, Aikin, Description of the. Couniry round Manchester (1796), 219.

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 133

the manufacturing classes are clearly prior in origin
to the factory organisation ; but the new system, with
its extensive employment of women and children
away from their homes, the social atmosphere of large
establishments, and the physical strain imposed by
machinery, had the effect of aggravating old disorders
and producing others for which no precedent existed. It
is not difficult to discover a superficial parallel to these
evils in the condition of agricultural districts during
the early part of the next century ; in the decay of
rural housing, in the organisation of labour under the
* gang ' system, and in cases where the employment of
women in field labour left them neither time nor energy
to attend to the training of the young. The comparison,
however, is instructive mainly as illustrating com-
plementary, rather than parallel, effects of the same
economic tendency in different spheres. In the manu-
facturing districts we have the chaos of a new society
in process of formation; rural distress is connected
with the dissolution of an old order of social life. In
industry economic reorganisation is in the main a
driving force ; in agriculture it is largely a process of
suppression. One of the tendencies of agrarian reform
was to remove those intermediate positions between
the labourer and the farmer which had opened to the
small man a means of investment and a chance of
advancing in the social scale ; in the manufacturin g
industries the situation is so far reversed as to present
a ladder of social opportunity which, if steep, * is at
least continuous,' while an apparently unlimited in-
crease of production impressed ideals of material pro-
gress on the minds of the industrial class. * In agriculture,
again, the destruction of the open-field system and
the growth of new social divisions involved, in various

^ Meredith op. cit., 262, 301 ; Hammond, Village Labourer, 33.

134 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

ways, a loss of independence and mutual helpfulness
and of the sense of membership in a corporate group ;
in the industrial centres, there was the independence of
large masses, and the opportunity for new forms of
social co-operation. Lastly, while all these changes
reacted on the traditional culture of the country-side,
the advance of urban industry awakened new intellectual
interests, partly through the effects of science and in-
vention on certain kinds of employment, partly through
the growth and conflict of pohtical ideas. It was as if
the school of social progress had been transferred to new
and more adventurous scenes ; as if the economic process
were destroying old opportunities in the country only
to create new opportunities in the town. It is also, in
some ways, a characteristic feature in the contrast, that,
whereas in agriculture it was the man of capital who
added field to field and the large landowner who initiated
improvements, the lead in industrial movements fell
in no slight measure to men of smaU means and humble
extTaction. A large proportion both of the great engi-
neers and inventors and of the manufacturers who made
fortunes in the textile industries were men who had
risen direct from the ranks ; and in the varying types
of character which they present, there is some suggestion
of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the mass
beneath them. Just as the new directing class included,
side by side with the rough diamonds of the cotton
manufacture, others whose genius had been kindled
by a constant struggle with large ideas and overwhelm-
ing difficulties ; so we shall find, among the new prole-
tariat, men whose minds were forced into the groove
of a hard struggle for existence, and others who had
visions of an improved society and whose strivings
after enlightenment are among the redeeming features
of a commercial age. So too, if we isolate the factor

THE EEA OF REVOLUTIONS 135

of employment, there were tendencies which made the
worker the slave of the machine, and there were occu--
pations which induced hiiu to understand it. If the
Industrial Revolution was responsible for the * factory-
hands,' it also called into existence a new race of
mechanics.

In the attitude of Government to social problems
during these critical years there are many symptoms of
the political bankruptcy that marks the close of an era.
A separation of class-interests, which rendered the political
system incapable of comprehensive measures of social re-
adjustment, was aggravated by a dearth of imagination
in the ruling class. Popular discontent, in an age of
unparalleled turmoil, was combated by methods of re-
pression drawn from the armoury of Tudor tradition. A
new literature was created to impress upon the poor the
duties of religion, loyalty, and contentment. Magistrates
combined to suppress amusements and assemblies of
the common folk. Laws which sometimes confound
independence with treason accompanied a general
prohibition of collective bargaining, compromising every
form of trade-union activity. Meanwhile there was no
real counterpart to the constructive side of Tudor poli-
cies. Government drifted into a partial acceptance of
new economic doctrines, without any effective attempt
being made to protect the labourer's standard of
living from rapid deterioration. Enclosure was carried
on without adequate regard to the permanent interests
of rural society. Poor Law reform ended in a courageous
but abortive scheme of industrial training.* A single
measure dealing with child-labour under the factory
system was based on precedents already out of date.^

» Hammond, op. cit., 149 8qq. (Pitt's Bill, 179&-7).
• Health and Morals of Apprentices (etc.) Act, 1802.

136 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

The neglect of remedies which might have preserved
and educated the character of the masses found its
nemesis in a form of poor-rehef which added to their
demoralisation. Yet it is fair to observe that the
difficulties besetting the statesmanship of the period
were, in a general sense, the legacy of problems left
unsolved in the Tudor age and rendered formidable
by a sudden change in economic conditions. Where
it had been sufficient to restrain competition and enter-
prise, it was now necessary to define their relation to
social ends. Where it had been possible to invoke the
power and prestige of personal monarchy, it was
necessary to reform the political system and to re-
organise the machinery of administration on a new
basis Elizabethan statesmanship was most successful
when its action was guided by precedent and based
on the strength of conservative traditions, while in
the preceding period of transition there had been
little change in the groundwork of economic thought.
In the eighteenth century a rapid change in material
conditions, producing problcDis unprecedented in kind,
followed the dawn of a new theory of progress which
for a time imduly restricted the sphere of State
intervention.

It may be said of this, as of an earlier, period of
social history that an ' illusion of increasing selfishness '
is produced by an * increase in the opportunity for
anti-social action,' and that in statements which testify
to an extension of human suffering there is evidence,
also, of growing sympathy and insight. The interests
of the peasantry may be of little account in a question
of enclosure, but there is no proof that an aristocratic
Parhament would have acted differently, if possessed
of the same imcontrolled authority and faced by a
similar situation, at an earher stage. It is important

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 137

at any rate to recognise in certain proposals, which
appeared when the movement was at its height, an
attempt to remedy hardships which had long been
endm-ed. But for the revulsion caused by the French
Revolution and the burden of a prolonged war, the last
quarter of the eighteenth century might rack as one
of the important phases in the awakening of a social
conscience. Not only does the literature of the period
supply the first examples of a detailed and systematic
study of economic facts with reference to the condition
of the labouring class, but the thought awakened by
new forms of oppression goes to the root of problems
which a weaker sense of responsibility had allowed to pass
unobserved. The remarks of Dr. Percival on the factory
apprentices are more than a criticism of the factory
system ; they mark the beginning of a new attitude
to the problems of childhood.^ The new economic
conditions illustrated and strengthened the plea for
instruction advanced by Adam Smith ; whose aim, it
may be observed, was not to increase the efficiency of
the worker, but to develop the faculties of the man.
Different streams of opinion were already converging
in an educational movement which to this day bears
the marks of an original conflict of social ideals. Re-
pression was not the only result of the concentration
of political forces towards the close of the century which
gave birth to a conservative party. A more scrupulous
discharge of magisterial duties, not wholly the outcome
of reactionary panic, ^ was accompanied by an awaken-
ing among the parochial clergy, who busied them-

^ The exploitation of physique drew attention to the exploitation
of ' mind and spirit ' which had been a common accompaniment and
result of child labour before the rise of the factories. Meredith, 267,
cf. 268.

* Webb, English Local OovemmerU, i. 377 sq.

138 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

selves in visiting the poor, and in organising libraries ^
and other forms of instruction. Hannah More, who
expounded * Village PoHtics ' and left the comforts of
London society to teach the poor in a derelict country
parish, was not an unworthy pioneer of that form of
authority— assumed in turn by every fresh group of
reformers —which sought to establish its influence by
educating the masses. That it is difficult to draw any
hard distinction between the principles of authority and
self-control, is suggested by Bentham's aphorism which
defined education as government acting through the
* domestic magistrate. ' The attitude of the early
'liberals to educational questions displays, however, a
distinctive bias proceeding from a fundamental re-

^ Sunday Friendly Societies for the aged poor, 1798, at Bishops Auck-
land and Winston (Durham), in connection with which books and tracts
were read and distributed. Parish Libraries at Steeple Morden (Cambridge)
1801, and Himmanby (Yorks) 1805. Parochial Society for the purchase
of Bibles at Melksham (Wilts) 1811. Ses Reports of Society for Bettering
the Condition of the Poor, 1798, etc. There is no means of estimating the
influence, for good or evil, of the incalculable mass of tracts flimg broad-
cast in these years by supporters and opponents of Church and State.
Sydney Smith, a privileged humorist, mentions a proposal that travellers,
' for every pound they spend upon the road, should fling one shilling's
worth of these tracts out of the chaise window ' ( Works, i, 205). Wesley
had published penny tracts for his converts, followed by an edition of
his works in sixpermy numbers which brought him a considerable profit
(Telford, Life, 321 sq.). From this we pass to Legh Richmond's Annals
of the Poor ; Rowland Hill's Cottage Dialogues ; Hannah More's Village
Politics and Repository Tracts, containing ballads, stories, Sunday reading,
etc., published 1792-8 and circulated by local committees to the extent
of some milUons of copies. Thence to Mrs. Trimmer (1788-) ; John and
Dame or the Loyal Cottagers, by a certain Pratt (1803) ; an Address
to the Mechanics, Artificers, Manufacturers and Labourers of England,
on the Subject of the Threatened Invasion (1803) ; A Friendly Address to
the Labouring Part of the Community, concerning the Present State of Public
Affairs in Church and State (1804) ; and The Life and Adventures of Job
Nott of Birmingham (1793), which 'nobody can read without laughing,
nor leave it ofiE without being more loyal and more moral ; . . . and to
my Brother Artificers and the small fiy my advice is, get a dab of over-
work that you may be able to lay out threepence on a book wrote entirely
for your use, information and amusement ' — attributed, probably with
some malice, to one of the local clergy (Langford, Century of Birmijigham
Life, ii. 117).

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 139

sistance to authoritarian tradition. Overrating the
rational side of human personality, they tended to form
an exaggerated conception of the speed with which
results are achieved ; but they were also among the
first to insist that a man's capacity for sharing in the
life and culture of his time is not rigidly determined
by his social status or the nature of his employment,
and that his redemption from evil courses is to be sought
by extending the range of his moral and mental interests.
The theory of * rational recreation ' was expressed by
an enlightened writer of the conservative school at
the close of the century, who pleaded that a decent
observance of the Sabbath might be best ensured by
tolerating amusements whose aim should be to * raise
the genius and mend the heart. ' *

The educational movement in England during the
eighteenth century is concentrated within two periods
of_ about equal length, the one concluding with the
death of Anne, the other commencing with the growth
of Sunday schools in the eighties. The latter phase
of the movement was in a broad sense a revival and
continuation of the former, although its character and
aims were strongly influenced by the intervening
course of events. Popular^ education was still ap-_
preached as a missionary enterprise for the uplifting
of a .neglected class, where earlier means of training
had failed. But the class which could be so described
had become so large, especially in the towns and manu-
facturing districts, that organised instruction could
no longer be regarded as the exceptional need of re-
cipients of charity. In the meantime the maxim that
every child should learn to read the Bible had appeared
as one of the first-fruits of religious revival. Thus

1 Eden, 8Usle of the Poor, L 446.

140 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

there was a definite advance towards the idea of national
education, involving incidentally a change of method
and a stricter differentiation of social aims. Industrial
training retained a place in the programme of educa-
tional reform ; ^ but there was no longer the same
attempt, as in the earlier years of the century, to in-
clude it as an integral factor in the school curriculum.
The school of industry developed as a distinct institu-
tion dealing with exceptional cases of affliction and
neglect ; the main stream of philanthropy passed it
by, in an attempt to extend the elements of religious
and literary instruction to the majority who were
already in the way of earning a livelihood. The special
incentive in this later movement was the hope of securing
a decent observance of Sunday. Partly for this reason,
partly also because it was natural to select a time when
the industrial population was most accessible and
assistance in teaching could be most readily obtained,
effort was concentrated on the promotion of Sunday
schools, which remained for an indefinite period the
most widely organised medium of instruction for young
and old and the starting point for further experi-
ments. 2 The Sunday school led back to the day school,
and was often connected with a system of night classes
during the week. Even at this early period there were
developments which recognised the principle of the
continuation school, leading forward to higher grades

^ Schools of industry, 1791 onwards, at Lewisham, Kendal, Banburgh
Castle and elsewhere, see Reports of Society for Bettering the Condition of
the Poor ; Monthly Review, iii. 431 ; Lyson, Magna Britannia, i. 482.
Day industrial schools were sometimes formed in connection with Sunday
schools, and we find the wish expressed that ' some institution could be
established for the idle children ' ; Jenkins, Clmrles of Bala, ii. 15, 10 sqq.

* For a view of Sunday schools as agencies intended to make up for
the absence of home training, ' compensatory institutions highly creditable
to the teachers but very discreditable indeed to the parents,' see Miller,
My Schools and Schoolmasters, 39.

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 141

of instruction. Thus in 1789 the Sunday school teachers
of Birmingham formed a society, with the object of
continuing the education of their former scholars,
which was subsequently amalgamated with a local
scientific association and developed on the lines of a
Mechanics' Institute.

Another distinctive feature of the period, and one
perhaps of still greater importance, was the j:emarkable_
growth of educational activity among adults of the
working class, both as teachers and learners, which
characterised the closing years of the century. It is
in the wider outlook, and in the demand for knowledge
produced by the religious movements of the period and
the economic and political consequences of the Indus-
trial Revolution, that we must seek the origin of those
ideas of democratic government which have entered
so largely into adult education in recent times. The
intellectual awakening showed itself in various ways :
in the growth of adult Sunday schools and the rapid
spread of night classes in the north of England, in the
formation of book clubs,* reading societies and dis-
cussion circles, and in the beginnings of scientific and
technical studies. The examples which fall within
the last category illustrate different types of organisa-
tion which are continually recurring. Thus at Birming-
ham in 1794 a small group of artisans, known as the
* cast-iron philosophers,' were attending lectures at
the house of Thomas Clarke, a local patron of science.*
Two years later, they were merged in the Brotherly
Society, an association which advertised instruction
in elementary and more advanced subjects, provided
a newsroom, lectures and classes free of charge to

1 Monthly Review, iv. 275 sqq., mentions a book club formed by a
few mechanics in Lincolnshire.
* Mechanics' Magazine, i. 307 n.

142 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

working-class members, and in the following year
started the first Artisans' Library.^ About the same
time, Professor Anderson invited workpeople to attend
his comrse on Experimental Physics at Glasgow Uni-
versity. His successor. Dr. Birkbeck, deUvered lectures
to a crowded audience of mechanics, who for a short
time, after his departure in 1804, continued to hold
meetings of their own accord, the class being revived
subsequently as the nucleus of a Mechanics' Institute.
But it is to the religious rather than to the scientific
renaissance that we must look for the manifestation
of that corporate spirit which is the most abiding
characteristic of the new democracy. The modern Adult
School movement is lineally descended from a small
group of students who met at Nottingham in 1798 to
learn Bible-reading and the elements of secular know-
ledge ; and, if its distinctive feature at the present
day is an effort to discuss the problems of life on
terms of mutual forbearance and Christian fellowship,
it may trace back its pedigree a stage further — to
some of the more fruitful examples of the Methodist
class-meeting.

* Mechanics^ Magazine, I.e. ; cf. Hudson, Adult Edtication, 29.

PART II

THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER IV

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

In the comparison between English and German
educational systems— once a famihar topic, now dis-
tasteful by common consent — it was customary to
refer back to the course of political events in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, which in the one
country increased the authority of the State over
social institutions and in the other weakened its power
of constructive intervention, leaving behind a legacy
of social discord which opposed a lasting obstacle
to any broad measure of educational reform. But
though this circumstance may account for wide
differences of opportunity, it does not fully explain
the different ways in which ideas were developed and
opportunity employed. School attendance was already
being enforced in at least one of the Grerman states
during the earlier decades of the seventeenth century,
at a time when the power of the central government
in England was still vigorously exercised in many
branches of social discipline without extending in the
same degree into the sphere of education.

It was due to something more than political accident
that the basis of a national system appeared earliest
in countries which had carried out the religious changes
of the sixteenth century with drastic effect, and that

146 I.

146 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

in England, where it had been the ideal of the beat
Churchmen to steer a middle com:se between rival
extremes, national education was indefinitely delayed.
In England, though there was an eminent group whose
hopes centred in education,^ there was no counterpart
to the organised zeal which accompanied the most
vigorous phase of the Lutheran Reformation, or to the
democratic force of the Scottish movement. The re-
forming party, led by the government, showed a
characteristic reluctance to admit the consequences of a
new departure. Their watchword was renewal rather
than revolt, and they held generally to the principle of
reconstructing on safe lines which threatened the least
disturbance to the political s} stem and the inherited
fabric of social ideas. Henry the Eighth ordered a copy
of the EngHsh Bible to be placed in all churches, and
gave instructions that the laity should be encouraged to
read it, that they might better understand their duties ; "
but the privilege was afterwards curtailed and held in
abeyance for fear of dissension.' The young of all
classes were to be instructed in the Paternoster, the
Articles of Behef, and the Ten Commandments, which
were to be deHvered in writing to ' them that can
read and will desire the same. ' * Parents were exhorted
to * bestow their children . . . either to learning, or
to some honest exercise, occupation or husbandry,'
to prevent idleness and to preserve the State.' On the
broader question of providing schools for the masses
there was no authoritative pronouncement, though
individuals realised that the need existed and Cranmer

^ Craik, The State in its Belation to Education {English Citizen
Series), 4.

* Burnet, History of the Reformation, iv. 91, 138 (Instructions to the
Clergy).

» lUd., i. 517. * lUd., iv. 91. • Ibid.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 147

developed a ' scheme of new schools for every class. ' *
On the other hand he rebuked those who would have
diverted educational endowments to the exclusive
benefit of the higher ranks, reasserting in the name of
reUgion the traditional claims of the poor with talent. •
The canons of 1604 show the same tendency. The
educational system, as it existed, was placed under the
sanction and control of the Church, the aim being to
ensure efficiency and soundness of doctrine ; and it
was ordained, further, that the * youth and ignorant
persons ' should receive catechetical instruction in the
parish church. •

A more democratic impulse came from the Puritan
side, and emerged under the Commonwealth. At one
time it seemed possible that education would be re-
organised and a general system of schools established
on a statutory basis. Outside Wales, however, the
design, if it existed, never matured. Public instruction
in the turmoil of the age was little more than a side
issue, and after the Restoration the provision of schools
was left again to voluntary effort.

New factors made their appearance in the eighteenth
century — on the one hand, the growth of organised
philanthropy developing a network of schools for the
poor ; on the other, a fundamental antagonism to the
idea of universal instruction. Class-feeling went far
towards establishing monopolies in higher education,
and opposition to the Charity Schools derived support

* Craik, op. cU., I. ■ Strype, Crantner, i. 127.

» Canons 69, 77-79 » Cardwell, Synodalia, i. 280, 291. The fifty-
ninth canon, dealing with catechetical instruction in churches, repeats
— ^with the addition of the Catechism — ^Henry VIII's Instructions to the
Clergy, issued in the year 1536, which particularise a method of oral
teaching, adding that books containing the subject-matter are to be
pointed out to those who were able and desirous to read them (Burnet,
ivi 91).

148 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

from an economic conception of class-gradations which
had survived from an earUer age. The mediaeval view
of learning as an alternative to labour was interpreted
to mean that labour is incompatible with rudimentary
knowledge. The oral teaching which the Church had
authorised as the minimum required for all classes was
taken as the standard of popular enlightenment. * There
is a prodigious difference/ wrote Mandeville, * between
debarring the children of the poor from ever rising higher
in the world, and refusing to force education upon
thousands of them when they should be usefully em-
ployed ' ; and his opinion gained adherents in later
years, at a time of conservative reaction and amid
revolutions which heralded the advent of democracy.
The criticisms which appeared at the commencement
of the nineteenth century are governed by the same
traditional preconception, that education is normally
a means of rising in the social scale and that any widely
organised instruction of the people would incapacitate
them for necessary labour and diffuse an atmosphere
of social unrest.*

If the defects of school-training have been most

* ' A vast number of those who had been broiight up at Sunday
Bchools were wandering from their proper callings, had become fanatical
teachers, had deemed themselves qualified to hold disputations on religious
topics, had turned sceptics, infidels and anarchists, and were spreading
a malignant influence throughout the mass of the community ' — Anti-
Jacobin, Oct. 1800 ; cf. the royal injunction, 1641, that laymen reading
the Bible should not take upon themselves public disputation (Burnet,
op. cit., iv. 138). Even Hannah More had been charged with promoting
fanaticism and sedition (Overton and Relton, History of English Church,
1714-1800, 248) ; and twenty years later Brougham had to protest in
the House of Commons against this form of attack on popular education.

' It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be generally instructed
in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes — that they may read
the Scriptures. As to writing and arithmetic, it may be apprehended that
such a degree of knowledge would produce in them a disrehsh for the
laborious occupations of life ' — Remarks on the Poor Bill -. . . by 07ie of
H.M.'s Justices of the Peace in the County of Lincoln, 1807 ; a fair
representation of moderate conservative opinion.

ELEMENTAEY EDUCATION 140

commonly remarked precisely among those sections
of the poor which supplied the chief materials of
controversy, it does not exculpate those who in
opposing education closed their eyes to the problems
arising from economic changes and the competing
demands of urban and rural life, and to the new facts
which made it necessary to remodel social discipline
and give a healthy outlet to growing aspirations. Nor
has the criticism which education encountered merely
that degree of significance which belongs to a negative
and transitory phase. It opposed a continual obstacle
to deliberate measures which might have saved the
situation, and it favoured compromises which prevented
efficiency and helped to create the evils against which
it prophesied. Yet the Enghsh habit of compromise
is not without its advantages. It has secured a wide
liberty for voluntary experiment and for the clash of
rival ideals, which may prove in the long run the surest
way to a higher synthesis reconciling freedom with
order, and comprehending all that is of permanent value
in a variety of social traditions. It has, also, given to
the history of English education its peculiar attraction
as a record of the national character in every phase of its
growi;h. Just as philanthropic enterprise in the early
years of the eighteenth century had reflected the business
methods of the period, so the movements which com-
menced a hundred , years later are impressed with the
spirit of the Industrial Revolution. There can be little
doubt that the forms of child-labour and labour-saving
machinery which appear in Lancaster's ' plan ' and the
monitorial system played an important part in recom-
mending education to public patronage. The imagina-
tion is haunted by the prospect of a * clear easy practical
system,' carried out with a maximum reduction of labour
and expense and bringing speedy and calculable returns.

150 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

The language of philanthropy combines with dis-
interested benevolence the hardened optimism of a
commercial prospectus.* The movement commenced
with the strife of rival leaders, Joseph Lancaster and
Dr. Andrew Bell ; and it accorded well with the spirit
of the age that the matter should be left in the hands of
two great competing associations, summing up in them-
selves the history of former conflicts of creed and tradi-
tion— ^the National Society formed in allegiance to the

* ' We meet to erect a perpetual standard against ignorance and vice,
to confirm and render permanent an establishment intended to train up
the children of this town in knowledge and virtue. We expect thousandi
of children will here be taught not only the grounds of human science,
but the first principles of Christian religion, that religion which,' etc. —
Speech of the Treasurer at the opening of a gigantic Sunday school built
by the mill-owners of Stockport, 1805 (Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures
(3rd ed.), A08). One is tempted to mention Robert Pemberton's Addrtsa
to ihe people on the necessity of popular education in conjunction with emigra-
tion, as a remedy for all our social evils (1859), announcing the formation
of a * People's Shilling Company for Popular Education ' on the author's
system, which was to ' give general knowledge and produce excellent
mechanics and good scholars at fourteen and the finest orators at twenty-
one } wonder not, for this is the scientific age of discovery.' In a Report
of Proceedings at the Inauguration of Mr. Pemberton's new Philosophical
Model Infant School, for teaching languages native and foreign on the natural
or euphonic system (1867), it is stated that he had devised a 'Nursery
Chromatic Barrel Organ, for the express purpose of developing the
musical attribute of the infant and naturalising on its mind from birth
the perfect language and harmony of music'

Incidentally it may be remarked that Lancaster himself seems to have
derived inspiration from other than industrial and religious sources.
The son of an old soldier, he retained to the close of his life the spirit
of a recruiting sergeant. His system was essentially one of drill, every-
thing being reduced to rule and regulation ' with the object of saving the
teacher's time and thought.' The children were to be kept in ' constant
activity,' each having ' at every moment . . . something to do and a
motive for doing it ' i and it seems that badges or other small marks of
distinction were distributed as a reward for good conduct (Binns, Century
of Education, 1908, &-20). Mrs. Trimmer, according to Sydney Smith,
accused him of preparing the materials for a rebel army. ' On half-
holidays,' we are told, ' he would marshall his scholars in order, the monitors
acting as captains over their class, and sally forth to some outlying village,
with sports and games in the fields.' The system which modem writers
have described as mechanical and barren of result, was probably asso-
ciated in his mind with those ideas of discipUne and esprit de corps which
have found expression in Lads' Brigades, etc.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 151

Established Church (1811), and the British and Foreign
School Society (1814), an outgrowth of Lancaster's
Committee and the Royal Lancasterian Institution
(1808) which had succeeded it in the interval.

(1) General Lines of Development

The resolution of Lancaster's Committee, *to con-
stitute themselves a society for the purpose of affording
education, procuring employment, and as far as possible
to furnish clothing to the children ' of the poorer classes,*
is evidence of an underlying continuity in educational
thought, and carries us back to the aims with which
philanthropy had started a hundred years earlier.
Lancaster had already spoken of adapting his system
to the teaching of agriculture and handicrafts.' To
connect educatioQ with manual employment was the
policy of his rival, Dr. Andrew Bell.' During the cen-
tury and a half following the birth of the Charity
School movement the idea was continually reasserting
itself, without any permanent effect.* Apart from the

1 Binns, op. cii., 32. • Ihid., 22.

' Adams, Elementary Schools Contest, 59.

* Montague Burgoyne in an Address to the Governors and Directors
of Public Charity Schools (1829) refers to the alleged tendency of the
' present system of popular education to unfit the poor for those laborious
situations in life in which they would have to move, making them aspire
to preferment which they cannot reach.' He proposed to establish an
industrial agricultural school at Potton, Bedfordshire, where in addition
to ordinary elementary subjects the boys might learn tailoring, shoe-
mending, gardening and agriculture, and the girls needle and laundry
work, dairying and housewifery. Cf. a minute drawn up for the guidance
of the Committee of Council (1839) — to ' include instruction in industry
as a special department of the moral training of children,' and to give
' such a character to the matter of instruction in the school as to keep
it in close relation with the conditions of workmen and servants.' There
was a ' Colony-at-Home ' established by William Allen at Lindfield,
Sussex, where he pvirchased a property in 1826 and proceeded to erect
labourers' cottages and a schoolhouse, with an infant department and an
industrial day-school for boys and girls — ^Allen, Plan for Dimivishing

152 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

question of expease, there was a growing opposition, on
economic and educational grounds, to any scheme which
bore the appearance of converting the school into a
substitute for the workshop. There was also a tendency
for elementary schools to become monopolised by a
comparatively select class of children, for whom manual
training was not always an immediate or apparent
necessity.

It is probable that the main stimulus to philan-
thropy, all along, had been the hope of dealing with
the sources of crime and destitution and civihsiag a
class whose ignorance was a menace to society. The
difficulty of reconciling this aim with any general
scheme of education based on voluntary enterprise was
soon realised, especially in the urbau districts. The
tone of a school and its standard of discipline would
improve in proportion to its success. It would attract
by degrees a superior class of children, and appeal to a
more respectable and fastidious class of parents. The
managers, finding it difficult to accommodate all under
the same system of discipline and instruction, would
drift from their original aim into safer paths of financial
security.^ It followed that successive groups of philan-
thropists were continually rediscovering a submerged
class for whom nothing was done, and whose condition
grew more ominous and lamentable in proportion to the
general progress of manners and intelligence. Just as

the Poor Rates (1833), 3 ; Stephen Grellet, Memoirs, ii. 183. Industrial
Schools for waifs and strays — Select Committee on Education, 1834, QQ.
2697-2749 ; Langford, Century of Birmingham Life, ii. 363.

* Thus Matthew Arnold reports that in British and Wesleyan schools
in his district the children of the poorest were not found ; small farmers,
skilled artisans, etc., pajnng a considerable fee, ' often object as much aa
the classes above them to the contact, with their children, of the children
... of the class found in Ragged Schools' (1853); again, 'Ragged
Schools, rather than National Schools, take the really poor of London who
are not Roman Catholics ' — Reports on Elementary Education, 19, 151.

ELEMENTAEY EDUCATION 153

in the eighteenth century the establishment of Charity
Schools had been followed by a special provision for
waifs and orphans, so a hundred years later, a genera-
tion after the founding of the great national societies,
we find a supplementary group of rescue movements
[^working strictly on a poverty test. One line of experi-
ment, which aimed at isolating children of the destitute
and criminal classes in permanent institutions, is repre-
sented by the Children's Friend Society, whose origin
coincides very nearly with the centenary of the Foundling
Hospital.^ Another is seen in the more flexible organisa-
tion of the Ragged School Union. A ragged school
might start as a Sunday school, a day school, or an
evening class. It might include industrial classes, a
b'brary, and a provident club, and become a centre for

* The Children's Friend Society for the Prevention of Juvenile Vag-
rancy was founded through the exertions of Captain Brenton, R.N.,
who in 1830 opened a small house of reception in West Ham. By
1837, when he wrote an account of the work, there were (1) the Brenton
Asylum, 150 boys, (2) the Victoria Asylum at Chiswick for girls, sup-
ported by the society, with branch committees in the Colonies. Upwards
of a thousand children had been rescued from workhouse, street, and
prisoner's dock. They stayed about six months, receiving an industrial
and general education, being kindly treated and constantly employed.
The Brenton Asylum stood in ten acres of ground cultivated by the
inmates. At the end of their time the boys went to the Colonies to be
apprenticed — Brenton, The Bible and the Spade (1837) } Fanny Forsier,
a Sequel (1837) ; Select Committee on Education (1834), Q. 2576 sqq. Kay-
Shuttleworth, Social Condition and Education of the People, i. 394 (1850),
reckons that there were 30,000 destitute, filthy, lawless children in London
alone, the source of nineteen- twentieths of the crime committed. The
Royal Asylum of St. Ann's Society (1702), the Foundling Hospital (1739),
and the Marine Society (1767, which collected street arabs and trained them
for sea service) may be mentioned as corresponding types of rescue work
in the eighteenth century. We may refer, also, to the work of City Missions
in London and elsewhere, which commenced about the year 1825 and
seem to have been inspired by the ideal of a ' Ministry for the Poor,'
emanating from America — BLay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods of English
Education, 46-115 ; Social Condition and Education of the People, i. 414 sq. ;
Langford, op. cit., ii. 581. Knight, Passages in a Working Life, iii. 86 sq.,
relates how a stockinger, named Brooks, came to Birmingham in the
forties and instituted a ' Ministry for the Poor,' which led to a Ragged
School, a People's Instruction Society, a Provident Institution, Sunday
schools, evening classes, etc.

154 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

social and religious meetings and different forms of
amusement. It might develop into a boarding institu-
tion, a reformatory or home for destitute children.*

The work of Bell and Lancaster had helped to re-
assert the principle of full-time attendance at a day
school, for a varying period between the ages of six
and eleven, as the basis of an educational system;
but for some time the greater part of the industrial
classes, both young and old, found their only means of
instruction on Sunday. The rapid growth of Sunday
schools in the manufacturing districts is one of the most
important signs of social advance during the early years
of the nineteenth century ; and in two respects the
movement possesses a special interest in the history
of education. The Sunday school seems to have afforded
the teacher a more general opportunity for exercising a

\ personal influence than was possible in the large classes
of a day school under the monitorial system * It suppHes
also the first traces of a course of instruction pursued

N. consecutively for a number of years and covering the
critical period of adolescence.

In 1816 the number of adults attending Sunday
schools in East London was estimated at about six
hundred ; at Manchester, a few years later, the ages
ranged from six to twenty-five, and some scholars
were known to have attended for twenty years in

* C. J. Montague, Sixty Tears in Waifdom. The clientele of the
early Ragged Schools was not entirely composed of illiterates. Thus
about 100 of all ages, 1&-35, attended a reading room at the Marylebone
Ragged School, being attracted by the warmth and sociability of the
place and gradually getting interested in the books ; many had previously
read a good deal in the way of penny dreadfuls — Committee on Public
Libraries, 1849, Q. 3194 sqq.

• At the Stockport Sunday School, mentioned above, the monitorial
system was discarded and small classes insisted on. Ure, Philosophy
of Manufactures (3rd ed.), 408 sqq.

ELEMENTAKY EDUCATION 155

succession.* Where attendance was thus commenced
in childhood and carried on for a considerable period,
there might be some chance of arranging a continuous
course of instruction. Such, indeed, was the object
of the Sunday Society estabhahed at Birmingham
towards the close of the eighteenth century, and of the
senior classes which became a common addition to
Sunday schools at a later date.* But in these early
years, when scholars of all ages were beginning to
learn, the distinction between a juvenile and an adult
class would not necessarily imply much difference of
curriculum." Putting aside differences of age, the
schools admit of a twofold classification ; according
as the religious teaching was conducted on denomi-
national or on unsectarian lines, and according as in-
struction was or was not extended to include secular
subjects. Not uncmnmonly a sharp distinction was
5 drawn between reading (which implied reading the
Bible) and writing and arithmetic, which were considered
secular, besides being difficult to teach effectively in
the time available.* It appears that in 1834 the average
length of attendance in London might be estimated
at three years, in the manufacturing districts at four,
and in the country at five ; ' that there was little time

1 Select Commiitee on Education, 1816, 76 } 1834, Q. 2312, 2323.

* Watson, First Fifty Years of the Sunday School [Unionl (1853).

' The Adult Sunday School, as a distinct institution, first appears
in the form of classes) for men and women started by Fox and Singleton
at Nottingham in 1798, which have continued to the present day. The
Bristol Institution for Instructing Adult Persons to read the Holy Scriptures
(1812) was the meaiis of spreading Adult Schools over the country and
enlisting the support of the Society of Friends. After an interval of
decay (the attention of the Churches being concentrated on the needs
of children), the movement was revived by Sturge of Birmingham between
1845 and 1852.

* Cf. Rowntree and Binns, History of the Adult School Movement, 13.
Bamford, in his Early Days, speaks of a Methodist Sunday School where
the ordinary subjects of an elementary education appear to have been
taught.

* Select Committee on Education, 1834, Q. 1224 sqq., 1498.

156 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

for secular instruction ; and that the majority were
fortunate, if they left with a fair knowledge of reading.
A number of schools, however, had subsidiary evening
classes during the week, where the more promising
scholars might learn to write legibly in the course of
three years. ^

Night schools grew up in rapid succession in the
North during the last years of the eighteenth century,
and afterwards extended over all parts of the country.'
They became scenes of considerable energy, and helped
to satisfy the desire for self-improvement inspired by
certain aspects of the Industrial Kevolution. At a
candle factory in Vauxhall, in the year 1847, some
dozen boys set an example by starting a night class
on their own initiative, ' hiding . . . behind a bench
two or three times a week, after they had done their
work and had their tea, to practise writing on scraps
of paper with worn-out pens begged from the counting
house/ Their efforts received judicious encouragement
from the managing director, and made the beginnings of
^ a well-planned scheme of social betterment.^ From the
early years of the century, there are instances of day
schools remaining open at night for the benefit of lads
in employment,* so that the evening class may have
gradually come to be regarded as a continuation of

1 Seleci Committee on Education, 1834, Q. 310, 1233 tqq., 2310.

■ Sometimes under the auspices of local associations, e.g. the Bene-
volent Evening Schools Society of Bristol (1806) — ^Hudson, Aduli Educa-
tion, 15-17. The Adult Institution for Berks and Bucks (1814) provided
for all ages from 10 upwards : the villagers might be seen in cottageg
of a night seated round a table, learning to read the Bible — Knight,
Passages in a Working Life, i. 189.

» Quarterly Review, Dec. 1852, No. 183, art. I.

* The Royal Lancasterian Free School at Birmingham had an
elementary class for factory lads three evenings a week, 1816 — Langford,
op. cit., ii. 372. The Roby Day and Sunday Schools at Manchester had
evening classes in writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, and dxawiiig
for mill-hands over 13 — ^Hudson, op. cit., 19 sq.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 157

the day school no less than as a supplement to the
teaching received on Sunday. But the familiar hind-
rances appear from the outset. Juvenile employment,
which interfered with the day school, handicapped
every attempt to provide a substitute. Children were
often too exhausted after the labour of the week to
make a regular attendance on Sundays ; and night
schools were liable to fail for similar reasons. It was
often as hard to find scholars, as to secure competent
persons to volunteer the service of teaching.* When
a class had been successfully enrolled, the difficulties
were not at an end. ' The evening school,' wrote
a Government inspector in 1840, * which only affords
instruction for four hours in the week, and that when
the scholars are jaded with twelve or thirteen hours
of toil, cannot educate those who attend it.'

(2) Sitccess and Failure

During the second quarter of the century, much
attention was directed to the state of elementary
schools and the condition of the rising generation.
The results include a._series of estimates, possessing
at the time no doubt considerable value as a means
of stirring public opinion, but comparatively useless for
historical purposes. There is evidence not only of an
increase in the number of schools and of the children
receiving some form of instruction, but also of some
general improvement in manners and intelhgence.
Otherwise the conclusions formulated at intervals during
these years are a set of vain repetitions, leaving the
history of the period, so far as the quality of education
is concerned, to all appearance a complete blank.
Allowing for irregularity of attendance, the average

* Sdect Committee on Education, 1834, Q. 311 ; 1835, Q. 389.

158 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

length of school life rises on a favourable estimate
from about one year in 1835 to about two years in
1851 ; ^ but in either case an overwhelming majority
leave school before, or shortly after, the age of eleven,
and there is little, if any, sign of improvement in the
results achieved. In 1834 the curriculum in the better
class of national schools was limited in the main to
religious instruction, reading, writing, and arithmetic ;
in some country schools writing was excluded for
fear of evil consequences ; at the central schools of
the British Society, ' children remaining one year ' —
the normal period — might * read well, write fairly, and
have a tolerable knowledge of the first four rules of
arithmetic : this is, however, above the average of
the whole/ ^ In 1850, we find that ' even of the children
of the poor who have received some instruction, very
few know anything ' beyond the rudiments.^ Seventy-
five per cent., writes the inspector of the Midland
division, leave school unable to read the Bible.* * Many
children," again, ' say they can read when they only know
the letters of the alphabet, or can at most pronounce
monosyllables . . . and in like manner, comparatively
few who state that they have learnt to write are capable

* 1834-5, average attendance (day schools) : London, just over a
year ; manufacturing towns, a few months longer ; agricultural districts,
two years continually interrupted by jobs ; few stay after eleven — Select
Committee on Education, 1834, Q. 64, 258 sqq., 716, 2246 j 1835, Q. 12.

1845-50, average attendance (day schools) just over a year, ending
at eleven in manufacturing, at nine in agricultural, districts — ^Kay-Shuttle-
worth. Public Education, 267, 281 (1845), Social Condition, etc., of the People,
i. 587 { ii. 476 (1850). Census Report (1861) puts the number of children in
England between 3 and 15 years at 5,000,000, of whom 2,046,848 were at
school, 49 per cent, staying tUl 11, 28 per cent. tUl 13 » Dr. Sadler estimates
average attendance of working-class children (5 to 15) at about 4 years,
brought down in practice by irregularity to about 2 years — Special
Reports {Education Department), ii., No. 20, 449.

» Cf. Select Committee on Education, 1834, Q. 60, 252-267, 274, 2071 sq.

* Blay-Shuttleworth, Social Condition, etc., ii. 462.

* Kay-Shuttleworth, Public Ed'ucaHon, 291, 309.

ELEMENTAEY EDUCATION 159

of writing a sentence legibly/* School inspectors
were continually commenting on the absence of globes,
maps, blackboards and other apparatus, especially in
village schools, and on the habitual use of the Bible
as a textbook of general instruction, problems in
arithmetic being extracted from the pages of Exodus
and Joshua. 2 Complaints as to the scandalous state
of accommodation certainly showed no tendency to de-
crease as the years went by. * The teaching profession in
1850 was still thronged with uneducated and * worse
than incompetent ' men and women, who traded on
their physical infii-mities or had failed in other walks
of life.* In 1848, as in 1834, three months was the
average period of training at the estabhshment in the
Borough Road. It might be said that, from whatever
aspect the situation was approached, the further the
inquiry was carried, the more terrible the nakedness
of the land appeared.''

The explanation is simple. At the stage of develop-
ment through which education was passing under the
voluntary system, calculation by averages is essentially
misleading. Take the industrial population as a whole,
and it is found that a majority have received no instruc-
tion. Take the school children throughout the country
or in a particular district; the notorious defects of

* Children's Employment Commission {1843). Digest, 171, 206 sq.

* Kay-Shuttleworth, Public Education, 238, 257, 303 sq. ; Horace
Mann, Report of an Educational Tour (ed. Hodgson, 1846), 268 n.

• ' Thousands of such schools in aU parts of England and Wales . . .
many which are held in cellars, garrets, chapels and kitchens, badly
warmed, wretchedly ventilated, dirty, unfiu-nished, dark, damp, un-
healthy ' — Kay-Shuttleworth, SocieU Condition, etc., ii. 474.

• Kay-Shuttlewor*h, Public Education, 215-19, 228, 270 i Children's
Employment Commission (1843), Digest, 171-4, 205 sq.

' Statistical societies, formed at Manchester and elsewhere to repudiate
charges of insufficiency of education, revealed uniformly a state of
ignorance and neglect which had been only dimly suspected to exist.
Adams, Ektaentary Schools Contest, 94 sq.

160 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

private schools will probably account for the greater
part of the results. Take the schools under some
responsible management over a considerable area ;
small and ill-supported rural schools or over-crowded
schools in the larger towns will tend to predominate.
Whatever mode of classification is adopted, there is
always an excess of scandalous instances which bring
down the average. It must be remembered, too, that
in the course of the inquiry the standard of values
was continually rising. Methods and results which had
been received with uncritical enthusiasm at the outset
of a new movement passed to the wrong side of
the account as the movement progressed. Lastly, the
difficulty of organising a populous district increased
directly with the growth of its population.

To the historical student it is precisely those isolated
cases of improvement which are lost in the flood of
averages and generalisations, that possess at such times
of slow transition the highest importance. Dr. Sadler
has justly repudiated the excessive attention which has
been paid, ' in estimating the quality ' of education, ' to
the facts disclosed in regard to the large towns and the
poor results obtained at the dame schools.' ' If we
could take the ordinary school in a moderate-sized
village, or in a small town, where the population had
not increased too rapidly for the school accommodation
to keep pace with it, we should find a more satisfactory
state of affairs than is generally imagined.' ^ It is
equally true that in every kind of neighbourhood, in
large manufacturing towns, among mines and collieries,
and in agricultural districts, a better class of school
was making its appearance.' Even the adventure

^ Sadler, Special Reports {Education Department), ii. 450.

* E.g., a superior school in St. Mark's parish, Sheffield, offering
geography, history, vocal music, algebra and elementary mechanics,
attended (1845) by nearly 700 children, whose parents paid £180 annually —

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 161

schools, which played so large and ominous a part
in English education, were not without a redeeming
renmant. ' My school,' writes Thomas Cooper, * was
a perfect passion with me for a time. I was in the
schoolroom often at five in the morning until nine at
night, taking my meals in a hasty, imperfect way while
the boys were gone home to theirs. I had quill pens to
make in great number, the first work in the morning,
and for a time I had early classes each morning. Then,
again, in the evenings, although other day-schools
broke up at five, I drew the older scholars around the
globe, and described the countries upon it until a late
hour, or talked to them on some part of history, or
described the structure of animals or, to keep their
attention, even related a story from the Arabian Nights.
I spent at least fifty pounds on the walls of the large
club-room, by covering them with pictures of every
imaginable kind, and filling the corners with plaster
figures and busts. The sill under every window of the
schoolroom was fitted up with small divisions so that
the boys might have a miniature museum of pebbles,
coins, etc. I was intent on making their schoolroom
their delight.' *

(3) Sources of Improvement

The work of public authorities may be left to a later
survey. It was too early, at the close of this period,
to expect much from the influence of inspectors and

Kay-Shuttleworth, PvJblic Education, 298 sq. At the Killingworth Colliery,
three large schools (one an infant school) were opened by the owners in
1840 ; attendance 528, paying threepence a week — Our Coal and Coal Pits,
etc., by a Traveller Underground (1853), 211. Similar schools at the
lead- mines of Alston Moor — Children's Employment Commission, Digest,
193 sqq.

* Cooper, Life, 74. School opened at Gainsborough 1828 i average
attendance 80, mostly working class.

162 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the new scheme of supervision and encouragement
fore-shadowed in the government minutes of 1846.
Until recently, the State had practically confined
itself to distributing money between the two largest
voluntary organisations which together exercised
some of the more delicate functions of a central
authority.

The annual reports of the British Society, from
1832 onwards, deal with important questions of school
organisation — the necessity, for instance, of broaden-
ing the curriculum and introducing better methods of
instruction ; the training of teachers ; and the compila-
tion of suitable textbooks. From an early period the
Model Schools had set an example. In 1823 it was
reported that a * select and small nmnber of boys *
had been ' instructed in the elements of grammar,
geography and geometry " as a reward for good
conduct.'* * ^ Later on, subjects such as singing, linear
drawing, and mathematics were added, and the methods
*■' of Pestalozzi adopted to some extent. Between 1837
and 1858 a number of improvements gradually spread
from London to the provinces. The ' barn-like build-
ings ' of the monitorial system were broken up into
classrooms. Science and music appeared in the curricula.
The Scripture lesson was supplemented by the reading
of primers and the institution of school libraries, from
which the children were encouraged to borrow books,
taking them home to read and to show to their parents.^
The training of teachers was to form, for many years,
one of the gravest and most difficult problems. Early
in the forties, the establishment in the Borough Koad

^ * Those remaining three or four years (at the Borough Road School)
will both read and "write well and perform any sum in the usual books of
arithmetic | they will acqxiire also a considerable knowledge of geography,
can draw maps and are made acquainted with the elements of geometry ' —
Onl^ a small minority. Select Committee on Education, 1834, Q: 262 sq.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 163

was enlarged and became the scene of interesting
experiments. Soon afterwards we hear of special
classes and lectures in history and mathematics for the
London teachers, and a summer school at which their
fellows from the country assembled during the harvest
vacation.^ But if it was premature to expect much
from State interference, either for good or evil, it is easy
to award a disproportionate share of credit to the great
societies. The best schools, as well as the worst, were
beyond the sphere of their influence ; and in any case
such were the conditions of organisation thit improve-
ment in the quahty of teaching depended principally
on local initiative. The comparative failure of British
schools outside the large urban areas has been attributed
in no small degree to the absence of persons quahfied
to assiflt and encourage the teacher, such as might be
found in the case of schools attached to the Church. ^
On the other hand, the two standard examples of
excellence in rural education were due to the personal
efforts of Professor Henslowe and Richard Dawes,
Dean of Hereford.* At this, even more than at a later
period, the secret of improvement must be read in
the lives of individuals in different ranks of society :
some of them, as clergymen or employers, occupying a

» Biniw, Century of Education, 113-17, 157-62. I take the British
and Foreign School Society as an example, because the information con-
cerning its work comes nearest to hand«

» Ibid., 221.

" The dean's school at King's Sombome is mentioned as exceptionally
good by Matthew Arnold (1853, Reports on Ekmentary Education, 21), its
influence on the agricultural labouring class being due to the ' union
of instruction in a few simple principles of natural science, applicable
to things famihar to the children's daily observation — with everything
else usually taught in a national school.' See Lubbock, Addresses,
Political and Educational (1876), 84. Prof. Henslowe, ex-Professor
of Botany at Cambridge, taught a botany class (42, ages 8-15) in a
Suffolk village school ; an early and successful example of nature
study, well received — Public Schools Commission, 1864, Dr. Hooker, Q.
21-27.

164 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

position of trust and influence, others standing in no
official relation to the masses but impelled by genius
or the force of circumstances to venture beyond the
beaten track.

Concerning the attitude of employers much the same
might be said in general terms as at the present day.
The Manchester men were held to be generally favour-
able to the education of their people. Some of them
were munificent and enthusiastic, others in practice
apathetic and even hostile ; well-regulated schools
affording a strange contrast to the notorious coal-hole
seminaries improvised in contempt of the Factory Acts.
In isolated cases, from the earliest years of the eighteenth
century, iron-masters and owners of colUeries and
mines are found building chapels, opening pleasure
grounds, and supporting schools of the accepted type.*
The new directing class which rose a hundred years
later, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, commenced
afresh on a larger scale. To this period may be traced
the origin of those organised settlements which have
contributed in various ways to raise the standard of
social enterprise throughout the country. A new factory
erected in rural surroundings, where ties of loyalty
might grow up between master and man, became the
centre of an organised community, decently housed,
with facihties for physical exercise and various aids to
health and cleanliness, and a large school-house estab-
lished in a prominent position which served the purposes
of instruction, worship, entertainment and social inter-

* Sir Ambrose Crowley builds a chapel at the iron- works, Winlaton,
near Newcastle — Richardson's Reprints of Historical Tracts, Travels of
Defoe, etc., 17 n. (1705). Charity schools maintained by Welsh mine-
owners and a Yorkshire iron- master — List of Several Charity Schools
(1707). Later, Richard Reynolds at Madeley, near Coalbrookdale, lays
out extensive walks through the woods on Lincoln Hill, for his iron-
workers— Smiles, Industrial Biography, 96. Cf. Young, Norihem Tour,
ii. 288 aqq.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 165

course.* Later on, in the second haK of the century,
as the population increased and the town extended
its dominion, came a series of movements back to
the country: Saltaire, Boumeville, and other more
recent experiments. Meanwhile the schools provided
by the more responsible class of employers appear to
have been considerably above the average, possessing
in the matter of equipment the advantages which might
, be expected of business capacity and a ready command
lof capital. The buildings were large, well lighted and
ventilated, and furnished with appliances which stood
the test of expert criticism for many years to come.
The teaching was plain and thorough ; the curriculum
was decidedly advanced according to the standards of
the time ; and importance was attached to punctuahty,
neatness, accuracy, and the various qualities which
made up the virtue of the middle class. The care exer-
cised in selecting competent teachers was no small
advantage at a time when broken adventurers, male
and female, monopolised a large share in the training
of the young.*

^ Messrs. Greg, new cotton mill near Manchester, 1832 } cottages,
Sunday schools, baths, evening parties, outdoor exercise — Knight,
Passages in a Working Life, ii. 85. Cf. account of Thomas Aahton's
nulls in township of Hyde — Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures (3rd ed.),
349 sq., cf. 363. Clay Cross Company (collieries and ironworks) founded
by GJeorge Stephenson, 1838 j a system was gradually evolved, by
which in return for a fortnightly subscription, levied on all employes, the
following privileges were guaranteed — (1) day schools for all children;
(2) night schools for lads — optional ; (3) access to Workmen's Institute \«ith
lectures, reading room and library ; (4) medical attendance } (5) sick and
disablement funds ; (6) fortnightly dance ; (7) bands and Choral Society ;
(8) cricket club ; (9) prizes for cottage gardens, and flower show.
Smiles, Life of Stephenson, 479-81 ; Machinery Market, Aug. 1, 1891,
6-7, 17.

• The following examples appear to be typical of the best schools
founded by employers at this period. (1) Robert Owen, New Lanark
Mills, 1816 (see p. 166 sq.). (2) Messrs. Bright, Rochdale. For some
time before a school was built, Mrs. Bright, mother of John Bright,
gave elementary instruction to employes in their homes ; and an office
was set apart in the mill, where the younger employes received lessons

166 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

The system established by Robert Owen in 1816
in connection with his cotton mills at New Lanark
stands in a class by itself, deserving the reputation which
brought innumerable visitors every year from all parts
of Europe. The full curriculum, commencing in an
infants' department and extending over three grades of
elementary instruction for children up to the age of
twelve, concluded with evening classes which covered

in reading under Joshua Haigh, each one coining separately and then
returning to his place in the mill and sending the next; 1840, Fieldhouse
School was built, large and well equipped, Mr. John Greenwood, of
Heptonstall, being engaged as schoolmaster, ' a man of cultured tastes '
(says his grandson, to whom I am indebted for these notes), ' who strove
to give his students an interest in many subjects beyond the 3 r's.' To
a newsroom attached to the schoolroom was removed a Ubrary which
had been kept in the mill j books were let out at Id. a week, the money
being spent on additions. The schoolroom formed a convenient centre
for week-night lectures, pubhc meetings, etc. Subsequently a music;
master was engaged to give singing lessons in the winter. 1846-7, when
nearly all the cotton mills had stopped work, Messrs. Bright fitted up a
room in the new mill as a night school, engaged a master and six assistants,
and provided books and slates, offering instruction free to all comers. From
the first there appears to have been a night school for adult employes,
in which Jacob Bright displayed an interest, ' purchasing school-books
which were lent free to the students and at one time himself teaching
special classes ' in geography, history, and English grammar. Long
aiterwards men and women who had attended the night school, treasured
memories of the benefits derived, ' the wider outlook upon life ' and the
' interest in literary and scientific subjects which would ' otherwise ' never
have been brought within their reach.' It was remembered of the Bright!
among the manufacturers of the neighbourhood that ' no other family
did so much personal work.' (3) Messrs. Chance, Smethwick. Spon
Lane Schools, 1845 (Girls and Infants, 1846), the first complete set of
schools with teachers' residences built by a Midland firm : a ' set of
buildings which even now (1887), in the presence of the magnificent
schoolrooms erected by Boards, still vie with them in general adaptation
to their purpose, and especially in respect of spaciousness, light and
ventilation.' Between 1845 and 1887 (after which the schools were
transferred to a School Board), about 10,000 were educated ; the
schools were open to all in the neighbourhood and attended from distant
parishes. From the first, free-hand drawing was a special feature in the
curriculum. ' Half the school learn to draw, and some have arrived at
great proficiency in drawing scrolls and other forms used in ornamental
art' (H.M. Inspector, 1851). A small fee was charged after much
deliberation. The firm established a reading room and hbrary for adults,
with the usual forms of entertainment, and took a prominent part in the
promotion of evening classes.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 167

a five years' course in history, geography, music, and
scientific and technical subjects. But it was on the
earUer stages that its fame rested. The great aim,
which represents all that is best in Owen's philosophy,
was to instil habits of good-breeding and mutual con-
sideration from earliest childhood and to develop every
perfect gift. The dawning intelligence was stimulated
by music, pictures, and object-lessons ; and it was a
maxim of the founder (which he abandoned with reluct-
ance) that formal instruction should not commence
before the age of ten. A constant change of employ-
ment banished monotony and kept the faculties alert.
Manual training and bodily exercise were allowed their
share in the building up of mind and character. Among
the older children, a certain time was set apart for gar-
dening and recreative employments. The boys danced
in the Highland costume, and both sexes sang and
drilled together, performing miHtary evolutions to the
amazement of all comers and the confusion of some.
* We heard no quarrel,' was the report of a Yorkshire
deputation, * and so strongly impressed are they with
the conviction that their interest and duty are the
same . . . that they have no strife but in the offices of
kindness.'

The new Lanark experiment has a twofold interest.
It drew attention to the problems of the infant school,
and it represents the first important attempt made
in this country to base a practical scheme of
education on an original study of the child. The work
of Owen was continued by Wilderspin and others,
whose efforts gave rise to the Infant School Society
of 1836. Experience had shown the inexpediency of
attempting to instruct infants by methods commonly
applied to older children, and attention was drawn
periodically to the systems of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and

168 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

other continental teachers. The fact that the problem
is still one of primary importance, although its urgency
was recognised and treatment successfully applied in
isolated cases from an early period, affords an example
of the slow movement of new ideas and a warning
against generalisations based on favourable instances.*
Nevertheless these experiments have probably done
more than anything else to raise the question of
educational aims and methods.

Before the middle of the century an appeal arose from
a different quarter. The early secular schools are
remembered chiefly as an item in the long catalogue of
abortive attempts to override the religious difficulty.
Their real significance is found in the idea of recasting
the curriculum of elementary schools on scientific
principles, and in a conception of equality of opportunity
which sums up the liberalism of the period.* The
philosophy of the movement was supplied by George
Combe, a disciple of Spurzheim, whose ideas he developed
and promulgated until his death in 1858. Education,
whose object was a healthy development of the individual
in preparation for the manifold duties of life, consisted,
first, in the training of mind and body by appropriate
exercises, secondly, in instruction in various sciences
relating to the constitution of man and his place in
nature and human society. The two sides of the
process, though logically distinct, were actually in-
separable ; for the mental faculties could not be trained

^ Wilderspin ' discovered much of the true nature of the child, and
employed such materials and methods in his work as are too seldom
found in some of the very best infant schools at the present day ' — ^Holman,
English National Education (1898), 41 sq.

* The Lancastrian (afterwards National) PubUc School Association
(1847), advocated a national system of secular schools, maintained by
* equal taxation,' free and open to all classes (the ' Common School '
ideal) : the scheme included infant schools, evening classes, and industrial
training — George Combe, Education, ed. William Jolly (1879)j 224, 237 aqq.

ELEMENTAEY EDUCATION . 169

except through the act of acquiring knowledge, and
instruction could succeed only on the basis of a healthy
constitution. Combe, in short, complained that in
existing schools the element of training was too often
disregarded, while the course of instruction was an
inadequate preparation for practical life.^ His attempt
to discover the laws of mental growth with the aid of
phrenology was in some sense a foretaste of psychological
experiments, relating to a science of teaching, which
have been undertaken in more recent times.

In 1848 he founded the Edinburgh Secular School.
A few months earlier, similar efiorts had been
set on foot in London by William Ellis and Lovett
the Chartist, working at j&rst independently of Combe
and of one another but stimulated by the same general
idea of enabling children ' intelligently to know them-
selves and their surroundings in nature and social
life. ' ElHs opened a day school at the London Mechanics*
Institute, the first of a series of schools subsequently
estabUshed in different parts of the Metropolis and
named in memory of Dr. Birkbeck. Lovett followed
suit at his National Hall in Holborn. Each attempted
to bring some branch of science within the compre-
hension of school children. Ellis took up social science.'
Lovett turned to anatomy and physiology, the elements
of which he taught by means of diagrams to separate
classes of girls and boys, endeavouring to impress upon
their minds in a simple manner some of the fundamental
laws of health.

^ Combe, op. cit, pp. xvii-xliii.

■ In 1846 he had given simple lessons in social science at a British
School in Camberwell, and was surprised at the ease with which the
children grasped his meaning. For the growth of secular schools, see
Combe, op. cii., 201-59.

CHAPTER V

THE mechanics' INSTITUTES AND HIGHER EDUCATION

If elementary education is connected with the religious
movements of the eighteenth century, higher popular
education may be said to spring from the Industrial
Revolution and the stirrings of poHtical discontent.
Its familiar methods — ^the lecture, the class, and the
discussion circle, culminating in some form of corporate
institution— had made their appearance at one or two
centres before the close of the eighteenth century.
In the course of the next fifty years they were widely
established ; and it becomes possible to discuss their
merits, and to enter on the study of certain problems
of organisation which have reappeared in all subsequent
movements.

The network of industrial settlements which sprang
up over the Midlands and the North of England during
this period, opened the way for a new class of teacher
following in the wake of the itinerant schoolmaster.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, lecturing
before popular audiences was developing into a pro-
fession which speciahsts did not disdain to pursue.*
Men of science and letters volunteered their services in
East London ; * while some of the most successful
lecturers, especially in the manufacturing and mining

* Committee on Public Libraries, 1849, Q. 2432 sqq. ; , cf. Mechanics^
Magazine, Nov; 1823 (opening of London Mechanics' Institute).
» Ibid., Q. 2713.

170

HIGHER EDUCATION 171

districts, were self-taught amateurs, often of the same
class as their hearers.* Commencing with science,
the subject-matter extended gradually so as to include
literature, poHtics, and religion ; and its treatment
showed a corresponding variety of aims and methods.
There were courses of lectures for a circle of students,
propagandist addresses, and single lectures whose
object might be described as entertainment rather
than instruction.

Class-teaching with an element of discussion,
which forms a recognised complement to the lecture
in modem schemes of higher education, finds its origin
in one of the most characteristic aspects of voluntary
enterprise. The intermediary stage between private
study, of which the eighteenth century affords so many
I examples, and organised instruction under an expert
' teacher, was supplied by the formation of societies
for ' mutual improvement.' The plan was exceedingly
simple, and might be easily adapted to varying needs.
The members arranged to meet at each other's houses,
or hired a room for the purpose, accumulating mean-
while a small supply of books and stationery. They
would proceed to lay down a few simple rules, to appoint
teachers, and to arrange a programme of classes, essay-
readings, and discussions. Such societies were constantly

* Hudson, AduU Education, 200 (1851), mentions 'Mr. Richardson,
a self-educated man,' who had been busy for the past fifteen years lecturing
' on electricity, pneumatics, etc ' in the villages of Northumberland and
Durham, travelling about day by day with his apparatus valued at £500 ;
' somewhat provincial in his dialect, perfect as a manipulator, and correct
in his statements.'

One of the best lecturers was Detroisier, at one time a factory operative,
who acquired a knowledge of French, Latin, and various branches of
science and mathematics {Select Committee on Education, 1835, Q. 855).
His practice of performing chemical experiments in the pulpits of dis-
senting chapels, to the scandal of the congregation, may recall James
Mill's egregious scheme for the conversion of the Church of England into
a National Mechanics' Institute (Dicey, Law and Opinion, 321).

172 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

springing up in the large towns during a depression
of trade, and dissolving as rapidly when the novelty
wore off or employment increased ; * but in certain
cases, notably in the West Riding of Yorkshire, their
history extends over a period of years, and it is possible
to trace the stages of their development into organised
institutions. A society founded at Leeds by a small
body of operatives in the summer of 1844 is a typical
instance. The members commenced by assembling
every evening for elementary instruction at a * Garden-
house ' on Richmond Hill ; one of them presiding in
the * house ' as teacher, and the rest hanging about the
door among broken flower-pots and rakes. As winter
drew on and their numbers increased, they hired a room
in the town and proceeded to organise a discussion-
circle and classes in French and chemistry. Six years
later they had migrated to more commodious premises,
and were in possession of a museum and a library of
three hundred volumes ; there were eighty members,
subscribing threepence a week.'

It is in the ' mutual improvement ' circle that we
find the connecting link between the science lectures
which Dr. Birkbeck addressed to the Glasgow artisans
at the close of the eighteenth century, and the or-
ganisation of Mechanics' Institutes in which he took
a leading part some thirty years afterwards.' The

* Committee on Public Libraries, 1849, Q. 1990 sq.

* Hudson, op. cit., 95 sq. Such institutions were common in the
West Riding, where there were a number of Oddfellows' Literary Institutes,
each with its library, reading-room, and evening classes, generally handi-
capped by want of money — Committee on Public Libraries, 1849, Q. 1984 sqq.
Lovett mentions a hteraxy society of workmen and others, called the
'Liberals'; when he opened his coffee-house (London), in 1834, be
provided newspapers, periodicals, and a hbrary, and set apart a Con-
versation Room for classes, recitations, and debates — Autobiography, 34,
88 sq.

' Dr. Birkbeck's class for mechanics at Glasgow was continued after
bill departure in 1804 by the enterprise of the members, and subsequently

HIGHER EDUCATION 173

Mechanics' Institutes, and the Schools of Design which
commenced a decade later under the auspices of the
Board of Trade, supply the first traces of an organised
system of technical instruction. * This Society,' ran
the prospectus of the Manchester Mechanics' Institute,
* has been formed for the purpose of enabhng mechanics
and artisans, of whatever trade they may be, to become
acquainted with such branches of science as are of
practical application in the exercise of that trade, that
they may possess a more thorough knowledge of their
business, acquire a greater degree of skill in the practice
of it, and be quaHfied to make improvements and even
new inventions in the arts which they respectively
profess. It is not intended to teach the trade of the
machine-maker, the dyer, the carpenter, the mason or
any other practical business ; but there is no art which
does not depend more or less on scientific principles,
and to search out what these are, and to point out
their practical application, will form the chief objects
of this Institution.' Birkbeck, in his inaugural lecture
at the London Institute, spoke in a similar strain of
the * projected union of science and art,' and of the
advantage to be derived from a study of the scientific
principles underlying industry and invention ; but
his standpoint was different. What gave the move-
ment its initial stimulus, was not so much the thought
of commercial expediency as a desire to cultivate the
minds of the artisan class, by appealing to objects
within the sphere of their daily experience which seemed
to present the widest range of intellectual interests.
The Institutes, in fact, were continually varying their

revived in the form of a Mechanics' Institute. C/. the Mechanical Institu-
tion founded by Claxton and a few kindred spirits of the artisan class,
who met weekly in different parts ol London between 1817 and 1820 to
disouss arts and science^.

174 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

programmes and accumulating the apparatus of general
culture. Science-teaching alternated with lectures on
drama and the fine arts, and with classes in literature,
languages, vocal music, and elementary subjects ;
natural history museums were ranged side by side
with workshops for practical training ; and instruction
was supplemented by entertainments and social gather-
ings, which under happier circumstances might have
formed the centre of a vigorous corporate Hfe.

Every phase in the history of the movement — its
high promise, its universahty, its imposing statistics,
its bhghted hopes, and its long decHne — has a special
message for later times. It was the beginning of battles
yet undecided. On November 11, 1823, a mass meeting,
two thousand strong — journeymen, masters, politicians,
and philanthropists — assembled at the Crown and
Anchor to consider the advisabiHty of founding a
Mechanics' Institute in the Metropolis ; and some
hundreds of members were enrolled on the spot.
Within a few months the institution was at work at
the Southampton Buildings, in Chancery Lane. Two
years later it moved into new premises, containing a
spacious lecture hall — opened by Royalty — a lending
library of two thousand volumes, a reading-room,
newsroom, chemical laboratory, machines, maps, and
diagrams, as well as suitable accommodation for classes,
and an elementary school. In the first year Francis
Place had seen 800 artisans attending a lecture on
chemistry, and there were 1300 of their class already
on the books. Institutes sprang up rapidly throughout
London and the provinces, in large manufacturing
centres, watering-places, villages, and hamlets. Man-
chester and Liverpool erected huge fabrics replete with
every requirement of luxury and learning. The Well-

HIGHER EDUCATION 175

ingborough Institute was established in a workhouse.
The villagers of Ripley, in the West Riding, met in
a hayloft. Everjn/vhere, under all circumstances, the
same enthusiasm prevailed. In 1850 there were 610
Institutes in England, and 12 in Wales, with a total
membership of over 600,000.^ Meanwhile the cry
had arisen that the Mechanics' Institutes were losing
their mechanics. In the early forties it was ' universally
acknowledged, that the members . . . are, nineteen-
twentieths of them, not of the class of mechanics,
but are connected with the higher branches of handi-
craft, or are clerks in oflSces, and in many cases
young men connected with liberal professions.' * The
membership of the London Institute, after various
fluctuations, fell in 1845 to 600; and James Robert-
son, a somewhat uncertain authority, asserted that
for some years the number of artisans in attendance
had not averaged 200 annually.^ The Institutes at
Manchester, Liverpool, and Huddersfield, and in the
smaller towns and villages of the West Riding, are
cited as exceptions ; but when Brougham went to
Manchester in 1835, he noticed the small number of
mechanics on the register, and apparently the same
thing was remarked at Liverpool. The large enrol-
ment of artisans at Huddersfield and the West Riding
centres was, indeed, exceptional ; of which the reason
will appear.

The London Institute had not been in existence a
year when the mechanics drew up a biU of grievances.

^ Hudson, op. cit., p. vi sq.

' James Hole, History and Management of Literary, Scientific and
Mechanics' Institutes, 21 } cf. Comm. Pub. Lib., 1849, Q. 1956.

• The Hackney Mechanics' Institute, soon after its foundation, changed
its title to ' Literary and Scientific,' because the expression 'Mechamcs* '
yvas no longer applicable — Mechanics' Magazine, Jan, 1828,

176 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

They complained that the rulea were crude and un-
intelligible, the lectures desultory and unpractical, and
the library deficient in technical works of reference.
The criticisms which came periodically from this source
refer in general to the teaching, the question of manage-
ment, the rate of subscription, the influx of well-to-do
tradesmen who put the poorer members out of coun-
tenance, and the exclusion of pohtical controversy.'
* Nothing can persuade us but that all systems of
education are false which do not teach a man his political
duties and rights. ' ^ It was precisely in the extent to
which it offered larger opportimities than the mutual
improvement circle, that the Mechanics' Institute en-
countered problems of a new and formidable character.
The work of a permanent institution, with a numerous
roll of members, involved administrative difficulties
of a kind which did not arise among a small group of
friends aad equals controlling their arrangements from
day to day. Skilled instruction was an advance on
the co-operation of unskilled students, but a teacher
did not necessarily understand the needs and mind of
his class in the same way that a band of fellow studenta
realised one another's perplexities. It was difficult,
moreover, in a large institution, with no traditions to
build upon, to secure the same motive power and
binding force that developed naturally among a circle of
intimates meeting on equal terms. The manifold sources
of friction which arise in the mingling of different
social strata and in uniting groups of teachers and
students occupying different ranks of life, were a side

* Mechanics^ Magazine, passim. Social Science (Prize Essays, Cassell,
1859). Cf. Ludlow and Jones, Progress of the Working Class, 174.

■ Mechanics' Magazine, Sept. 11, 1824, etc. The Blaydon-on-Tyne
Mechanics' Institute, at which there were political, social, and ' theo-
logical' lectureB (Holyoake, History of Co-operation, i. 504), waa
exceptional

HIGHER EDUCATION 177

of the problem which the founders of the enterprise
ignored.

The complaint of the London mechanics raises a
more immediate issue. The subjects introduced during
the first year of the parent Institute range from ' juris-
prudence ' to the * structure of chimneys,' from * hydro-
statics ' to * Greek and Roman antiquities/ and from
'mummies' to 'savings banks.' It was no wonder
that Dr. Playfair, a generation later, should describe
the lectures as unsystematic and the teaching as
cumbrous and inefficient. One of the most promising
features of the movement was the importance attached
to class instruction, which might be expected to afford
greater opportunity than the lectures for close and
connected study. Here, too, the same kind of criticism
was continually repeated. * Each class is to a great
extent isolated. . . . There is no regular course of
study through which a student is expected to pass.
To working men these classes often present few, if
,any, advantages, except the acquirement of elementary
^ knowledge ; and those really desirous of obtaining in
the Mechanics' Institutes a knowledge of the principles
of their trades, seldom find that knowledge there.'*
The serious students were the first to leave, making
way for a heterogeneous company which had httle in
common with the original members. The programme
was then diversified by the inclusion of lighter subjects
and various forms of entertainment, with the result
of increasing the disorder and further aUenating the
student element.

But if the supply was ill-organised, the reason was
to be found to a large extent in the inadequacy of the
demand. Where, in the early days, ' as many as ninety
lectures were delivered on one branch of natural philo-

^ Cf. Hole, op. cit., 60, ,

178 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

sophy,' the number had fallen to two or three a year by
the middle of the century.^ Excellent scientific appara-
tus was left to rust, and museums of natural history
failed to secure attention. At Manchester lectures on
chemistry were discontinued after a three years' trial ;
and the number of science lectures delivered annually
decreased by sixty per cent, between 1835 and 1850.
At the Liverpool School of Arts, where there was a
connected scheme of evening classes in eighteen depart-
ments under twenty-six masters, chemistry and natural
philosophy had been dropped owing to the egress of
working mechanics. One writer complains that even
those who came to study desired only as much instruc-
tion as had a direct bearing on their trades. ^ Another
found, 'from a comparison of a large niunber of
institutes,' that the attendance at evening classes com-
prised 'less than one-sixth of the total number of
members,' and that even the classes for elementary
instruction had not increased ' in proportion to the
number of members,' and ' those for more advanced
studies still less so.' ^ Nor is this remarkable, when we
remember that the majority had received no previous
schooling or had lost the habit of application.

James Hole, who wrote a history of Mechanics'
Institutes, observes that ' small means and small
advantages mutually alternate as cause and effect/
The artisan ' does not subscribe to the Institute, for he
can gain little by so doing ; and the Institute can give
him nothing because he furnishes no means.' * The

^ Cf. Report of Society of Arts on Industrial Instruction (1853), 37.

• A secretary of the Leeds Institute — Traice, Handbook of MecJianics*
Instittttes (2nd ed., 1863), 11.

» Hole, op. cit., 34 (1852).

* Ibid., 88. The Secretary of the Warrington Institute writes : ' Our
subscription is so low that we cannot afford to pay teachers and are
dependent on gratuitous aid ' — Report of Society of Arts on Industrial
Instruction (1853), 193.

HIGHER EDUCATION 179

annual subscription varied from six to twenty-four
shillings, the latter sum being often prohibitive,
especially where the payment was quarterly. Hole
asserted that the tendency to reduce subscriptions had
gone too far ; and that, if efficient teaching were
provided to meet their needs, working men might be
trusted to contribute their share, which could be sup-
plemented from other sources. Assuming that their
demand was for elementary instruction, there was one
eminent example which seemed to bear out the argu-
ment. The Huddersfield Institute was maintained on
a weekly subscription somewhat above the average,
supplemented by generous contributions from the local
manufacturers. It offered an elementary course, con-
ducted by an efficient staff of paid and unpaid teachers,
which was largely recruited from the neighbouring
college. In 1852 there were 800 students in attend-
ance, the great majority of them working men.^ In
so far, however, as the Institutes held to their original
design of providing ' higher ' education, the argument
is little to the point. The evidence seems to show that,
if there had been any considerable demand for teaching
of an advanced standard, the financial problem would
have been comparatively small. The difficulty was to
allocate funds to the support of a science class which
only a small, perhaps an infinitesimal, minority could
be induced to attend.

Two methods of reconstruction were suggested, the
one directly, the other incidentally, by the early ex-
periences of the movement. The first aimed at re-
establishing the Institutes, or broadening their resources,
by a process of federation. The second introduced

» Hole, op. cit., 34, 39, 93,

180 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the principle of difierential grading — or, in other
words, of adapting different institutions to different
demands.

The Yorkshire Union of Mechanics' Institutes ^
was the most conspicuous of a series of county federa-
tions commencing in the year 1837. Its original aim
was to engage a permanent staff of lecturers, who should
visit the affiliated Institutes in rotation and give
concurrent courses on chemistry, mechanics, political
economy, and general subjects ; but, though the prin-
ciple of effecting economies by wholesale purchase
was in itself a pregnant discovery, the scheme seems
to have met with little success. The real work of the
Union commenced a few years later, when the sum of
£200 was raised among the Yorkshire gentry and a
salaried lecturer, or organiser, was appointed to go the
round of the Institutes, any of which might obtain his
services at a reduced fee. By means of its annual
report, the Union was able to advertise plans and suggest
improvements. It published a list of available lecturers,
offered manuscript lectures on loan, gave the names of
gentlemen willing to render gratuitous service, and
issued a catalogue of second-hand books. The organiser
spent his time travelling about the district, giving in-
struction, advising local committees, and promoting
new Institutes. Lastly there was an annual meeting
of delegates, to discuss the business of the Union and
to compare the experiences of the past year.^ In 1859
it was asserted that the Yorkshire Institutes ' not only
supply the educational wants of working men, but are
mainly supported and in many cases actually managed
by them ' ; forty years later, there were 274 affiliated
societies, many of them in a vigorous condition, with

1 It developed out of the West Riding Union, founded in 1837.
« Hole, op. cit., 12a-6.

I

HIGHER EDUCATION 181

a total membership of 58,000.* Notwithstanding the i
failure of * higher ' education,* the Union succeeded in r
securing for its constituents a career of even prosperity
and preserved them from the chequered fortunes which
elsewhere characterised the history of the movement.
(A number of societies throughout the country perished
^as soon as the original following withdrew. Some
^lingered on as billiard saloons in the hands of a clique.
Others, in the latter half of the century, transferred their
premises and appointments to the local authorities
under the Public Library Acts. A certain number sur-
vived as the home of Government Evening Schools.
The Mechanics' Institute at Manchester developed after f ">(
a long period of stagnation into a School of Technology. .
The parent Institute in London became a branch of
the City Polytechnic.

The Institutes represent one side of a general move-
ment for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, necessarily
/ experimental in its methods and from the outset handi-
capped by assumptions the falsity of which became
the text of a later generation of workers who built on its .
ruins. Birkbeck's first efforts were full of promise.
His enlightenment was free from the taint of patronage.
He wished to share with others the fruits of his learning,
and he made a silent appeal to the comradeship of his
hearers. The decision of his artisan students at Glasgow
to continue their class, when he left the city in 1804,
showed that he had been working on right lines. But

* Barnett Blake, paper on Mechanics' Institutes of Yorkshire (Ludlow
and Jones, op. cit., 170). Greenwood, Public Libraries, 476.

* A statement in 1860 shows that very little provision was made for
teaching other than elementary, and adds that not more than one-third
of the members attended classes and that many of those attending were
children — see Mansbridge, Survey of Working-Class Educational Move-
ments, 31. Cf. ' In most places where they (the Institutes) have succeeded, I
there are only boys and girls attending ' (Manchester) — Report of Society I
of Arts on Industrial Instrwtion (1863), 187.

182 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

it may well have been too soon for him to draw the
moral of his own success ; and when later on he was
called to assist in an organised movement, he became
associated with lesser men who had neither his humility
nor his perception of the difference between education
and instruction. It is probably less true to say that
they overrated the intelligence of artisans than that
they failed to discover it. The effort of which this class
is capable revealed itself gradually at a later stage to
those who approached them as individuals, and whose
primary aim was not to enlighten the masses, but to get
I in touch with their minds. It is clear that the Mechanics'
•^ I Institutes failed to utilise the corporate sentiment which
j had begun to permeate industrial movements, while it
' is doubtful whether the best means of arousing enthu-
- siasm lay in an appeal to intellectual interests directly
/ related to material pursuits. The importance of the
second method of reconstruction, to which we have
referred, is that it not merely involves an attempt to
analyse the popular demand, but introduces also new pre-
conceptions and forms of appeal which distinguish the
movements commencing in the latter half of the century
under the influence of Maurice and the Christian Socialists.
The first experiment was on behalf of the masses,
for which the Mechanics' Institutes were manifestly too
, advanced. The Lyceums which were opened in 1838
at Manchester and other centres were Institutes of a
, lower grade, combining recreation with miscellaneous
/ instruction of an elementary type. They promised
well so long as the novelty lasted, but they appear to
have developed little corporate vitaUty and failed to
maintain their hold.^ A People's Instruction Society,

^ For a time * eminently successful, the people eagerly availing them-
selves of the novelty ... of cheap newspapers, recreation and mutual
improvement ' — Goddard, Life, of Birkbeck, 142. Cf Hole, 26 ; Hudson,
140.

HIGHEE EDUCATION 183

founded a few years later at Birmingham by a working
man named Brooks, seemed to foreshadow a new order
of things. The equipment — consisting of a reading-
room, chess-room, and library, with a debating society,
lectures, elementary classes, and music, not to mention
the provision of refreshments, tea-parties, and excur-
sions, all for a nominal subscription — may have differed
little from that of a Lyceum ; but there was evidently
a higher tone among the members, assisted no doubt
by the personality of the founder, and a sense of pride
in an institution which they could call their own.
Charles Knight, who visited the society two years after
its foundation, described it in prophetic language as an
ideal working men's club.^

Meanwhile, as regards the approach to higher
education, a counterpart to the club appears in the
conception of a Working Men's College — a term chosen,
in preference to ' Institute,' to convey an ideal of humane
culture reared on a basis of democratic comradeship.
While the Mechanics' Institutes were falling into decay,
social unrest provided a stimulus and motive to educa-
tional effort that had been previously lacking. To
those who interpreted public events from the stand-
point of Christian socialism, the most impressive
feature in the Chartist agitation, side by side with its
evidence of social disunion, was the absence of ideals
and guiding principles in any way commensurate with
the passion it evoked. The moral purport of the
movement was a claim on the part of the industrial
classes to political manhood ; but its source lay in an
unhealthy state of society. The new forces which
had been called into play seemed likely to waste them-

^ Knight, Passages in a Working Life, iii. 84 sq. Brooks waa a stockinger
and Methodist, one of the many examples oif^ poor men who understood
the needs and spirit of their class.

184 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

selves in ineffectual, because ignorant, revolt, and
to degenerate on the return of prosperity, for want of
higher ideals, in the pursuit of selfish and common-
place ambitions. It was necessary that education
should start with the problem of social reconstruction,
and should be grounded on a deeper and more spiritual
analysis than had underlain earlier movements. The
new ideal was not information, but the enrichment of
personality ; a conception which at the outset tended
to draw a hard distinction between liberal and tech-
nical studies. The development of individuahty was
approached through an appeal to corporate feeling.
Lastly, following out the conception of social reunion
and admitting the postulate of human brotherhood,
it was claimed that education is a reciprocal process,
involving an interchange of thought between teachers
and learners and a persistent reaction of mind on
mind. It is perhaps more than a coincidence that
the fiasco of the last Chartist petition in 1848 was
followed within six months by the reorganisation of
the People's College at Sheffield on a democratic basis.
It is certain that the founders of the Working Men's
College in Eed Lion Square claimed the twofold in-
spiration of Chartism and the Sheffield experiment.

CHAPTER VI

LIBRARIES AND LITERATURE

In the early days of the British Society School in
the Borough Road the children were taught to read
from the Bible, no other textbook being admitted ;
but those who made sufficient progress at this stage
were enabled to study further on their own account
with the help of the school library. The authorities
did their best to encourage an inquisitive spirit, and
let it work its way.^ In so far as the business of a
teacher is to induce his pupils to educate themselves,
the method was commendable ; and it was one which
reflected the general course of mental development
among the working classes of the period. In the schools
few children were taught, and few adults aimed at
acquiring, much more than the elements ; but, given the
power to read with tolerable fluency, knowledge of some
sort would follow in its train. The Library formed the
most valuable feature in a Mechanics* Institute, and
remained a centre of attraction when classrooms and
lectures had been generally abandoned. The mass
of the people, for whom no organised instruction was
provided in after life, depended for information almost

In the notes to this chapter G.P.L. is an abbreviation for Sehci Com-
mittee on Public Libraries, 1849.

' ' We find that, if once an inquisitive spirit is excited in their minds,
knowledge they will have and will not rest till they obtain it' — Select
Committee on Education, 1834, Q. 276.

185

186 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

entirely on the standard or ephemeral literature which
was accumiilated in newsrooms and popular libraries,
or which they were able to purchase.

In a valuable monograph by Edward Edwards on
the ' Paucity of Libraries open to the Public in the
British Empire,' dated April 1848, the writer reckons
the number of ' Public ' Libraries in the United Kingdom
at thirty, two-thirds of which were University and other
collections not really accessible to the general public.
In Great Britain, he added on a later occasion, * there
are no free lending libraries ... of any kind.' ^ The
nearest approach to a public library, in the modern
sense, was to be found in the Chetham Library at
Manchester and the Williams Ecclesiastical Library
in the City of London. Neither of these could be
described as popular or modern in its equipment and
resources ; and, though the former was frequented
by artisans and factory operatives, the reason appears
to have been that it served the purpose of a news-
room and contained a supply of quarterly periodicals.*
The first instance of a library supported out of the rates
occurs at Warrington, where in June 1848 a reference
library was formed in conjunction with a museum
under the Museums Act of 1845 ; a similar course being
pursued at Salford in the following year.^

It is misleading to compare England with other
countries where State action was more fully organised,

1 C.P.L., Q. 281.

* Ibid., Q. 1167 sq. The Williams Library, like the Chetham Library,
required applicants to write their names and addresses in an entry book
(Q. 980 sqq.) ; the British Museum Library required a voucher of respect-
ability (Q. 154). Both appear to have been used to a slight extent by
artisans (Q. 1006, 1038, 2829).

' Ihid., p. xiv, Q. 1685 sqq. Libraries and Museums Returns, 1852-3,
P.P. 312. The Warrington Library was used by the working classes {C.P.L.,
Q. 1711).

LIBRAEIES AND LITERATUEE 187

without taking into account the growth of voluntary
enterprise, which afforded some compensation and gave
play to a large amount of public-spirited enthusiasm.
The Artists' Repository established at Birmingham in
1797, and the village libraries and book societies of
which there is some record towards the close of the
eighteenth century,^ set an example which was widely
followed during the next fifty years. Libraries were
formed in connection with elementary schools, ragged
schools and schools of design, churches and chapels,
factories and Poor Law Institutions, and coffee-houses
frequented by the working class. Parochial and village
libraries sprang up in towns and rural districts, from
Buckinghamshire to the West of England, and from
the collieries of Staffordshire and South Wales to the
mining centres of the North. In some cases the village
library would form the centre for a mutual improve-
ment circle ; while Friendly and Co-operative Societies
and other adult organisations had often a museum
and library at their places of meeting. There were
also special libraries, on a larger scale, for artisans and
apprentices at Liverpool, Sheffield, and Nottingham.

Most of the literature in school and parochial libraries
appears to have been derived from the Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Religious Tract
Society, and the Kildare Place Society in Dublin, and
consisted of moral and religious pieces, history books,
biography, poetry, stories of travel and adventure,
magazines for the young, and elementary treatises on
industry and science. In other cases the nature of
the supply varied enormously. The principal Mechanics*
Institutes in the manufacturing districts possessed a
varied collection of standard works on mathematical

* See Chap. III. A circulating library was opened at Birmingham
by William Hutton, bookseller, in 1751 — ^Hutton, Ldfe of himsdf, 279.

188 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

and scientific subjects.^ Smaller societies were inun-
dated with gift books, Annual Registers, and religious
magazines. 2 The supply in some institutions was sub-
jected to a rigid censorship which excluded light
literature, politics, and controversial theology ; ^ and
others purchased nothing but fiction.* This exclusive-
ness was partly responsible for a noteworthy and
characteristic development. If fiction and periodical
literature were all that the majority of men could
be expected to relish after the day's work, a
library composed mainly of fiction, and one that put
a veto on controversial topics, were alike distasteful
to the politician and to the more serious readers. It
was not unusual, therefore, for the latter to collect
libraries of their own ; * while others combined to
form library societies, commonly lodging their books
in the public-house where the group met for reading
and discussion.® A difficulty common to all these
forms of voluntary effort, with the exception of a few
opulent institutions, was to maintain a continuous
supply of fresh material. It was comparatively easy
to start a library ; but it often happened that, when

^ Hudson, Adult Education, 197 ) Handbook of Mechanics^ Institutes,
1839 (Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge), 55.

» C.P.L., Q. 1212.

8 Ibid., Q. 1220, 2494. « Ibid., Q. 1194^ 1200.

' ' I know a great number who have veiy respectable libraries ' — C.P.L.,
Q. 2796 (Lovett).

• Thus a group of readers, objecting to the exclusion of controversial
works from the Operatives' and Artisans' Library at Nottingham, with-
drew and ' formed a new library, and the books are kept in public-houses,
and there they go and pay a small subscription, and perhaps take a glass
of ale and read . . , the books are mostly novels . . . still there are a
great many political works ' — Ibid., Q, 1216 sq. Library of 800 formed by
Spitalfields workmen— tWrf., Q. 2709 i c/., Q. 1244, 1327 sq., 2490. Ludlow
and Jones, Progress of the Working Class (1867), refer to a mutual improve-
ment society of wood-carvers, founded 1833, which acquired a valuable
collection of books, casts and engravings (p. 179 n.) ) also to a book-buying
and lending society formed by six workmen of Sunderland, who collected
old English ballads (p. 180).

LIBRARIES AND LITERATURE 189

the original stock was exhausted, interest waned and
the books were ultimately sold for what they would
fetch.i The simplest remedy, which was adopted in
some cases, was to create a maintenance fund by levy-
ing a small weekly subscription or a charge on the loan
of books, the proceeds of which might be devoted to
fresh purchases. 2 An extension of this method is seen
in the circulating libraries which were estabUshed by
Mechanics' Institutes and developed with permanent
results by means of federations covering a wide area.'

From the problem of library orgam'sation we pass
back to more general questions concerning the supply
of literature available for purchasers of small means.
The situation at the commencement of the century,
when many of the poor had acquired some taste for
reading and were compelled to rely for materials on the
local market, was singularly discouraging. The scenes
which Charles Knight witnessed as a youth near his
home at Windsor are a fair indication of what occurred
on market days in every provincial town. There was
the artisan who spent ' his sixpence upon an antiquated
manual of history or geography, to which he would
devote his brief and hard-earned hours of leisure ' ; the
* careful matron tempted to buy the first number of
the " Pilgrim's Progress " or the " Book of Martyrs " —

1 C.P.L., Q. 303, 1951 sqq.

• Ibid., Q. 2053 sg^* » the practice appears to have been general in

parochial libraries.

^ The Chichester Mechanics' Institute circulated books among the
villages of the county, placing them under the charge of some farmer
or responsible person — Handbook of Mechanics' Institutes (1839), 61.
Circulating libraries were organised by the Northern Union of Mechanics*
Institutes (founded 1848), the Lancashire and Cheshire Union (1848),
and the Yorkshire Union. The Yorkshire Village Library, formed in
1858 by amalgamating with the library of the Yorkshire Union two
other local itinerating libraries, has had a prosperous career; in 1913-li
its circulation exceeded 240,000.

190 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

perhaps one less discreet bestowing her attention upon
the " History of Witchcraft " or the " Lives of Highway-
men " — each arranging with the canvasser for their
monthly delivery till the works should be complete, when
they would find themselves in possession of the dearest
books that came from the press, even in the palmy days
of expensive luxuries ' ; and for the young there were
* sixpenny novels with a coloured frontispiece, whose
very titles would invite to a familiarity with the details
of crime — something much more dreadful than the old-
world stories, the dreams and divinations of the ancient
chap-books.' ^

Commercial enterprise and the effort of philanthropic
or propagandist groups were already contributing to
improve the situation ; both phases of the movement
during the fijst half of the nineteenth century having
this in common, that they aimed not so much at circu-
lating standard works in a cheap edition as at producing
a special literature for popular use.^ The first im-
portant advance is ascribed to religious associations, of
which the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
is a characteristic example. The nature of its aims is
shown by the development, between 1812 and 1832, of
anti-infidel and general literature committees, which by

^ Knight, Passages in a Working Life, i. 226 sq. ' Are you able to
state how the lower classes in London are supplied with hterature ? — By
accident altogether. It is a scramble in London ; whoever can get a
penny, buys a book. There is no provision in London in that respect for
any poor person ' — C.P.L., Q. 1242.

» Moritz, Travels in England in 1782 (English ed., 1886), 36, mentions
' The Entertaining Museum and Complete Circulating Library,' a series
issued in weekly numbers (sixpence to ninepence each) and consisting
of English classics and translations from the best foreign literature.
Cf. the following item in Lacey's Library for the People (1827) — 'The
Chimney Corner Companion ... an exhaustless and everlasting magazine
of the curiosities and good things in the entire circle of literature, books
and knowledge, adapted to all tastes, fancies, ages and conditions, and
containing the quintessence of many thousand volumes, and everything
worthy of being read that ever was printed, in history, biography, politics,
medicine, law,' etc. (prospectus, see Mechanics' Magazine, March 31, 1827).

LIBRAEIES AND LITERATURE 191

means of a network of district organisations promoted
libraries and distributed a multitude of tracts, narra-
tives, and educational treatises on most branches of
knowledge. It is to some such operation that Cobbett
refers in 1821, when, in the course of a tour in the
Forest of Dean, he came upon ' two lazy-looking fellows,
in great coats and bundles in their hands, going into a
cottage.' ' Vagabonds of this description,' he exclaims,
* are seen all over the coimtry . . . they vend tea,
drugs and religious tracts.' ^ In the same year appeared
a publication of a very different kind — the Labourer's
Friend and Handicrafts Chronicle, a monthly periodical
sold at sixpence, the first of a long series of magazines
dealing in technical and general information, which
anticipated the trade journals of a later date. The most
successful of the earlier group was the Mechanics^
Magazine, which was started by Hodgskin and Joseph
Robertson in 1823 and issued monthly at threepence.
Professing chiefly to instruct artisans in the history and
principles of their respective trades and to keep them
informed of the latest improvements, it commanded a
large sale from the outset and seems to have maintained
its popularity for several years. Working men con-
tributed articles, and their correspondence gives the
modern reader an insight into their point of view on
education and self-improvement and into the numerous
embarrassments to which their efforts were exposed.'

1 Rural Rides, Nov. 14, 1821.

* Similax magazines, started at the same time, became rapidly extinct.
The earliest trade-imion journal was the Trades' Newspaper and Mechanics'
Weekly Journal, founded 1825 by the Committee of the London Trades'
Delegates. After the revival of trade unionism in 1843, we have the
Potters' Magazine, the Mechanics^ Magazine (Steam Engine and Machine
Makers' Friendly Society, 1841-7), and the Flint Glass Makers' Magazine
(monthly, octavo, pp. 96, founded 1850 ; it advocated the 'education of
every man in our trade ' ; 'we say to you • . . get intelligence instead
of alcohol ... it is sweeter and more larsting ') — ^Webb, Trade Unionism,
178-80.

192 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

In the meantime the idea of a special series for the
people had commended itself to a few well-known
pubHshing firms. Constable commenced his weekly
Miscellany in 1827, to ' extend useful knowledge and
elegant literature . . . within the reach of every class
of reader.* Lacey followed with his Library for the
People ; and Chambers, with the Edinburgh Journal,
Information for the People, Papers for the People, and
Educational Course.

The most attractive figure in the cheap literature
movement is Charles Knight, to whose writings every
student of literary enterprise owes a debt of gratitude.
The son of an enlightened bookseller at Windsor, he
inherited a taste for letters and developed a keen
interest in social affairs. With ample opportunity
for observing the disadvantages under which poor
men struggled in quest of books, he convinced himself
that a large amount of crime and disorder in the country
might be traced to unclean reading or to provocative
literature which was circulated among the people in
an age of unrest. The notion of counterbalancing
what was cheap and obnoxious with a supply of whole-
some material, which should come as far as possible
within reach of the poorest, runs through his corres-
pondence from an early period. In 1814 he spoke
of pubHshing in weekly parts a series of treatises on
law, religion, history, art, science, and matters of
general interest, but with no immediate result. His
first ventm:e was the Plain Englishman, a newspaper
intended for the working man, which commenced in
1820, but failed to attract attention. His opportunity
came some years later, when he was formally engaged
as publisher to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge — an organisation founded by Brougham
and others in 1826 with the object of imparting ' useful

LIBRARIES AND LITERATURE 193

knowledge to all classes of the community, particularly
to such as are unable to avail themselves of experienced
teachers or may prefer learning by themselves.* Its
publications, including the Penny Encyclopaedia, the
Libraries of Entertaining and Useful Knowledge, and
the Penny Magazine, were advertised and dispensed
by local committees in the principal towns, and enjoyed
a period of apparent success. Ultimately the circulation
fell and the Society suspended its work in 1846, having
incurred a heavy deficit. Two years before. Knight had
made a new venture on his own account, which was
in some ways a fulfilment of his original scheme. He
published, first weekly and then monthly, shilling octavo
volumes, of 300 pages each, which he suggested might
form the basis of ' Book Clubs for all readers.' He shared
the fate of his patrons, and gave up the under-
taking on financial grounds after a four years' trial.

There is no kind of association better able to cover
its retreat with a cloud of statistics and testimonies,
than one engaged in disseminating literature with a
philanthropic object. Instances were produced from
the poorer parts of London, in which casual labourers
had thrown aside their periodical horrors and invested
in the Penny Magazine ; while an artisan, in his autobio-
graphy, takes occasion to inform us that, having borrowed
the first volume, he found means to purchase the re-
mainder of the series by abandoning the use of sugar
in his tea. The Tract Societies could point to similar
achievements, and might justly claim to have commenced
a revolution in the supply of textbooks and stories for
the young. But neither the Useful Knowledge Society
nor the religious associations met generally with the
success for which they hoped. The common criticism
that the former aimed too high, the latter too low,
afiords at least a partial explanation. Knight somewhere

194 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

complains that the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge addressed ' working people as if they were
as innocent of all knowledge, both of good and evil,
as in the days when their mothers committed them
to the edifying instruction of the village schoolmistress.'
Its apologist would be justified in retorting that
Brougham and his friends went to the opposite extreme.
Their treatises were ' valuable,' but ' by no means
adapted to the wants of the classes for which they
were ostensibly intended.' * The Fenny Magazine
laboured under the same disadvantage — ' perhaps
too good, because too scientific,' as its friends explained.
The firm of Chambers were wiser in their generation.
Their journal combined amusement with instruction,
and outlived its rival.

Knight himself suggested a more fundamental
cause of failure. In the year that his society suspended
operations, he refers to the revival of a taste for inferior
literature. There were fourteen penny and halfpenny
magazines on the market, twelve social and economic
journals, and close on forty weekly sheets and booklets
of a sensational character. Foremost among the popular
magazines stood the London Journal, the Family Herald,
and Reynolds^ Miscellany — sold by thousands every
week and patronised by factory girls, clerks and ap-
prentices in the back streets — which he describes with
some contempt as harmless productions, devoid of
originality and matter. The language is significant.
There is reason to suppose that many of the worst
prints had disappeared from the market, and that the
societies had played their part in raising the standard.*

^ Journal of Society of Arts, ii. 438. Cf Handbook of Mechanics'
Institutes (Knight, 1839) ; Mechanics' Magazine, Jan. 3, 1829, Feb. 23,
1833 ; Quarterly Review, No. 168, 1849.

* Martineau, History of the Peace, i. 680. Knight, Passages, etc., ii. 328 ;
The Old Printer and the Modern Press, 300. Ludlow and Jones, Progress
of the Working Class, 182 sq.

LIBRARIES AND LITERATURE 195

It is equally probable that, in so doing, they had stimu-
lated competition from another quarter and to some
extent prepared the way for an ephemeral literature
whose aim was to satisfy, rather than to educate,
a popular demand. It was left for a future genera-
tion to realise more fully the comparative uselessness
of creating an artificial supply, and the necessity of
so developing a taste for letters in early life that
the laws of supply and demand may operate with
beneficial efEect.

When we turn from the mass to the individual,
the signs of progress are more easily discerned. From
the earlier generation whose achievements are written
in the ' Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties ' to
that of Francis Place and Thomas Cooper,^ the succession

* It is characteristic of Francis Place that, when out of work and half
starved, he waded through ' many volumes in history, voyages, politics,
law and philosophy, Adam Smith and Locke, and especially Hume's
Essays and Treatises.' This was in 1793, when he was a journeyman
tailor, aged 22. Previously he had mastered ' histories of Greece and
Rome and some trandated works of Greek and Roman writers ; Smollett,
Fielding's novels, and Robertson's works ; some of Hume's Essays, some
translations from French writers, and much on geography ; some books
on anatomy and surgery ; some relating to science and the arts. . . .
Blackstone, Hale's Common Law, several other law books and much
biography.' Most of these books were borrowed for him by his land-
lady, who had the care of chambers in the Temple — Wallas, Ldfe of Place.
Cooper's time-table, during the period when he worked as a shoemaker at
Gainsborough, will explain a serious breakdown in health from which he
recovered with some difficulty. ' Historical reading, or the grammar
of some language, or translation was my first employment on week-day
mornings, whether I rose at three or four, until seven o'clock when I sat
down to the stall. A book or a periodical in my hand while I breakfasted,
gave me another half- hour's reading. I had another half- hour, and some-
times an hour's reading, or study of language, from one to two o'clock,
at the time of dinner. . . ; I sat at work till eight, sometimes nine at
night ; and then either read or walked about our little room and com-
mitted Hamlet to memory, or the rhymes of some other poet, until
compelled to go to bed from sheer exhaustion. ... I was seldom later
in bed than three or four in the morning ; and when, in the coldness of
winter, we could not afford to have a fire till my mother rose, I used to
put a lamp on a stool which I placed on a little round table ; and standing
before it, wrapped up in my mother's old red cloak, I read on tiU seven.
... In the finer seasons of the year I was invariably on the hills, or in

196 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

of students among the poorer classes had never failed.
It was natural that their number should increase
during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Educational facilities were improving ; competition
and steam-power had lowered the price of good litera-
ture and extended the supply; and the stir of life,
accompanying economic change and political move-
ment, created a thirst for knowledge in many directions.
It is unsafe to generalise from the case of popular
libraries reporting an increased circulation of works
on Mechanics, Philosophy, History, and Science ; * but it
was a common observation that, as a man settled down
to a course of reading, his taste in selection gradually
improved. 2 This is suggested by typical examples
which enable us to form some conception of the progress
made under varying circumstances and among different
groups. Thus in rural Buckinghamshire, where there
was great ignorance and little time for reading, the
' Pilgrim's Progress,' * Kobinson Crusoe,' and ' Cook's
Voyages ' are mentioned among the most popular
works in a village library.^ In an institution attached
to the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Scott's novels
attracted some of the younger subscribers, who belonged
to the labouring class, and were said to interfere with
their attendance at church.* Elsewhere, especially in
the manufacturing and mining districts, a serious use
of literature was becoming every year more common.
A reading pitman in the Tyne Valley would have on

the lanes or woods, or by the Trent by sunrise or before ; and thus often
strolled several miles with my book in my hand, before I sat down in the
comer to work at seven o'clock ' — Cooper, Atiiobiography, 59 sqq. He
afterwards came in touch with Charles Kingsley, and his career clearly
suggested certain passages in Alton Locke ; in one plaice he is mentioned
by name.

1 C.P.L., Q. 1960 3q^ * Jbid., Q. 2426.

* Ibid., Q. 1381 ; the S.P.C.K, etc. did good work in this sphere.

• Ibid., Q. 2053 sqq.

LIBRARIES AND LITERATURE 197

his shelf one or two of Scott's novels, a volume of
mathematics or English History, and perhaps a few
Methodist classics.^ There were artisans who knew
something of the works of Milton, Byron, or Shelley ;
and some, it was said, had considerable portions of
Shakespeare by heart. ^ Astronomy was often popular ;
and studies in natural history were pursued with great
keenness by small groups in Lancashire and even in
the crowded parts of London, who collected literature
on the subject and made periodical excursions into
the neighbouring country in search of specimens.^
Political reading was encouraged by the events of
the period ; and, where the opportunity existed, there
was some attempt to discover both sides of an argument.*
There was occasionally a turn for more abstract specu-
lations in philosophy and religion.

A branch of literature which exercised perhaps the
widest influence remains to be considered. Newspapers
and partisan or sectarian tracts were said to drive the
educational magazines from the market.'' Newsrooms
formed the most popular feature in the Lyceums and
in a number of the Mechanics' Institutes. To exclude
from a working-class library writings which had a bear-

^ Our Coals and Coalpits, by a Traveller Underground (1853), 218, 225.

* C.P.L., Q. 1372 sqq. ; Engels, State of the Working Class, 240.

* ' I have often heard working men, whose fustian jackets scarcely
held together, speak upon geological, astronomical and other subjects,
with more knowledge than the most cultivated bourgeois in Germany
possess ' — Engels, op. cit., 239. Mrs. iGaskell, Mary Barton, oh. v,
refers to the botanists of Kersal Moor.

* ' I find that when their means admit of it, they never allow them-
selves to be confined to their own side ; . . . they take Blackwood,
Tait and so on ' — C.P.L., Q. 1327. It is said that the early Sociahst
movement developed an interest in continental theories of society, and
that a few had got so far as to read foreign literature in the original — see
Engels, 229 ; C.P.L., Q. 1199, 1240 ; A Working Man's Way in the World,
by a Journeyman Printer, 65 sq., 92 sq.

* Gaskell, Manufacturing Poptdation, 280 sq. ; Select Cotataittee on
Education, 1835, Q. 83-6.

198 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

ing on politics and current events was the best way of
ensuring its decline.

Controversial literature has made part of the stock-
in-trade of every popular movement since the people
became responsive to a written appeal. It was employed
by radicals at the close of the eighteenth century,
and revived in the critical times which followed the
Peace of 1815. From the rise of the Hampden Clubs
to the last phase of Chartism, every agitation — political,
social, or religious — had its paraphernalia of tracts and
handbills, printed at headquarters and industriously
dispersed. In the course of time, pamphlets of a more
elaborate and impartial character, together with the
leading quarterly Eeviews, might be found at coffee-
houses and at various libraries and institutions accessible
to the working class. The coffee-houses played also
an important part in popularising the daily and weekly
press. At the commencement of the century few
artisans had the energy to look at a newspaper. ^ At
times of excitement, during a General Election or at a
critical stage in the war, the journeymen in a workshop
might club together to take in the Courier or the
Independent Whig, employing one of their number
to read its contents ; ^ but interest was apparently
not maintained. The cheap coffee-houses, which multi-
plied rapidly in London and the provinces in later years,
provided a meeting-place at which they could assemble
for meals and obtain the papers gratis.^

Few developments in the eighteenth century are

^ Westminster Review, x. 476.

* Knight, Memoirs of a Working Man, hy a Tailor, 90, 170.

* Westminster Review, I.e. ; Select Committee on Education, 1835,
Q. 810. Coflfee-houses, etc., containing newspapers, periodicals and
libraries up to 2000 vols.— C.P.L., Q. 2773 ; cf. Porter, Progress of the
Nation (1850), 686 sg. Even in the early years of the previous century,
a foreign observer speaks of ' workmen ' beginning the day ' by going to
cofiee-rooms in order to read the latest news' — De Saussure, op. cit., 162.

LIBRARIES AND LITERATURE 199

more significant than the process by which journalism
passed from a bare narrating of events to the discussion
of policy, ending in a direct appeal to the man with a
grievance, which was renewed on the recrudescence of
agitation after the Peace of 1815.^ From the beginning
it had been viewed by conservatives with consistent
suspicion, and the profession of ' news-writing ' was
held in contempt ; but when to the discussion of policy
was added the criticism of established institutions, a
sharper contrast came to be drawn between expensive
newspapers which professed respectability and circu-
lated among the wealthier classes, and the products of
the cheap press which came within reach of the poor.
That violence was confined to no party, and that the
cheap press on the whole had probably the merit, claimed
for Cobbett's Political Register, of winning the people
from purposeless riots to more deliberate forms of agita-
tion pursued by relatively peaceful methods, were
arguments which involved subtle distinctions and were
not calculated to allay suspicion. The discourse which
came home to an uneducated populace was of the kind
for which no excuse is offered by friends or accepted by
opponents ; and it attacked with undisguised ferocity
most of the institutions and beliefs to which the govern-
ing classes attached social importance. It was remarked
that in 1816 every manufacturing town of any size had
its ' seditious ' journal, and that a Manchester weekly
reserved a special column to advertise anti-Christian
literature at a price accessible to the artisan.* The

* A considerable impulse was given to this type of journalism by
Cobbett, who in 1816 reduced the price of his Political Register to 2d.,
devoting the first number to an ' address to the journeymen and labourers '
of the United Kingdom ; it immediately attained an immense popu-
larity— Knight, Passages, etc., i. 188 ; Bamford, Passages in the Life of
a Radical, 7 (2nd ed., 1848).

* Knight, Passages, i. 234 ; cf. Walpole, History of England, i. 467,

200 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

very names of such publications as the Gorgon^ the
Black Dwarf, and Meditsa's Head, betokened no desire
for safe paths and easy compromise. In the legislation
which followed, neither of the great parties appears to
advantage ; but the Tories had at least the courage of
their convictions. Southey's advice to Lord Liverpool :
' You must crush the press or it will destroy the Constitu-
tion,' is more generous than the companion utterance of
Brougham : ' The Radicals have made themselves so
odious that a number even of our way of thinking
would be well enough pleased to see them and their
vile press put down at all hazards.' The sequel is
instructive. The stamp duty on whole-sheet news-
papers which had been raised to fourpence in 1815
was extended in 1819 to all daily and weekly periodicals
costing less than sixpence.^ That the measure was
intended as a weapon of defence appears from the fact
that certain publications, which were considered harm-
less, were permitted to pass unstamped. None the less
it was open to the objections which may be urged against
prohibitionist legislation in general, besides incurring
special odium as a ' tax on knowledge.' No form of
espionage could prevent the weekly circulation of a
multitude of ilhcit prints, which were often the des-
perate efiusions of souls embittered by the struggle for
liberty. At the same time the cost of papers which
might have presented a difierent view of the situation
was maintained at a prohibitive rate. All duties con-
nected with the publishing trade were sooner or later
condemned as a ' premium on rubbish,' and were
gradually repealed.*

^ In 1820 a Constitutional Association was formed ' for supporting
the laws for suppressing seditious publications,' etc. It was known
popularly as the Bridge Street gang.

* Stamp duty reduced to Id. 1836, repealed 1855 ; advertisement
duty repealed 1863 ; paper duty repealed 1861. Hetherington, Cleave,

LIBKARIES AND LITERATUEE 201

The Owenite and Chartist movements produced a
series of journals which sprang suddenly into existence
and often disappeared within a few months of their
birth, or became incorporated with others of a similar
tendency. The early co-operative papers, which were
beyond the means of the working class, were succeeded
by penny monthHes and weekhes which had a consider-
able sale in Lancashire and Cheshire. The claim that
they were the only popular periodicals ' which dealt
with religion and politics and recognised science as
one of the features of general progress ' is exaggerated ; *
but that they stimulated thought and dispensed a good
deal of useful information, need not be questioned. The
Chartist papers were generally of a different description.
* A ribald sincerity and a frantic courage ' is Kingsley's
comment. Some of them, however, edited by men of
abiUty, flourished for a time.

The decline of the Chartist movement was followed
by a period of comparative quiet and unbounded
confidence in the future. The optimism inspired by
free trade, which applied to the press as to other phases
of national activity, is echoed in the last words of
Charles Knight, as he looked back on the struggles of
a lifetime, on the whole well content with an improve-
ment which fell short of his earher hopes. ' Let the
cheap press purify itself. We have got beyond the
scurrilous stage — the indecent stage — the profane stage
— the seditious stage. Let us hope that the frivolous
stage, in which we are now to some extent abiding,

and James Watson are remembered as the trio who defied imprisonment
for the tree press ; and it is said that 500 of Hetherington's sellers suffered
in this way (Holyoake, History of Co-operation, i. 102). Hammond {Farm
Servant and Agricultural Labourer, 34) estimates, about the year 1850,
that 29,000,000 unstamped periodicaJa were circulated annually in defiance
of the law.

^ Holyoake, op. cii., i. 143.

202 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

will in time pass on to a higher taste and sounder mental
discipline.'

The newspapers and magazines served not only to
exercise the power of reading acquired in the elementary
schools, but gave also some scope to composition ;
articles, verse, and correspondence being not infre-
quently contributed by working-class readers.^ The
modern plan of essay-writing in connection with adult
education was foreshadowed in a series of prize composi-
tions, which were encouraged by Mechanics' Institutes
and publishing firms. The Prize Essays on Social
Science published by Cassell in 1859 represent a good
deal of serious efEort ; but that the practice was open
to abuse, is shown by the case in which a prize was
offered for the best novel by a working man. The
examiner on this occasion complained of ' wading for
days together through hopeless trash.' ^

Spontaneous composition appeared mainly in the
form of pamphlets on social and economic questions,
verse, and autobiographical sketches. The north
country, and in particular the Craven district of York-
shire, was at this time full of rhymers and versifiers —
Frank King, the Skipton minstrel, ' no scholard ' but
a man of parts, accustomed to improvise songs and
ballads, vulgar and heroic, to suit all companies from
the manor to the village tavern ; John Broughton,
and Will Cliffe, Lang Tom fra' Winskill, and Robert
Story, the author of many pieces, lyrical, narrative,
dramatic and political — men who made up for tech-
nical defects by a fund of native humour, a grasp of

1 C.P.L., Q. 1368 sqq.

• Knight, Shadows of Old Booksellers, 177- Mention may be made
of a curious and lengthy religious epic, entitled Musings of a Working
Man on the Pains and Praise of Man's Oreat Substitute, by Thomas Brown
of Cellardyke, 1861 ; the author explains that it was an essay in mental
recreation, and urges others of his class to follow his example.

LIBKARIES AND LITERATURE 203

local tradition, and a knowledge of their kind. The
pamphlets ^ and reminiscences come, as a rule, from
writers of some attainment ; they display considerable
force and clearness of expression, and afEord in some
cases valuable material to the student of social history.
It is fitting to conclude with a reference to two
remarkable men, whose writings possess some interest,
and whose names are intimately associated with the
fortunes of the class from which they sprang — Samuel
Bamford, the Radical, and Thomas Cooper, the Chartist.
Bamford was the son of an intelligent weaver, from
whom he inherited his passion for literature. His
early manhood was taken up with the political agitation
which followed the close of the Napoleonic wars, and
the course of which he has described in his ' Passages
in the Life of a Radical ' and in various pieces of
occasional verse composed at the time. In later years,
after a brief tenure of a government clerkship, he devoted
himself to letters, the handloom, and the society of
a few chosen friends. The circumstance that he was
brought up in a Lancashire village towards the close
of the eighteenth century gives the memoir of his
' Early Days ' a peculiar fascination. It may be
doubted whether there is any single work which brings
the reader into such close personal contact with the
inner history of the great economic revolution which
was transforming the social life of the industrial classes.
' Passages in the Life of a Radical ' takes up certain
phases of the same development at a later stage, being
an account of the political unrest which was temporarily
suppressed by the passing of the Six Acts in 1819. The
narrative is graphic, full of naive criticism, singularly

^ Pamphlets by trade unionists ; Webb, Trade Unionism, 76 n., 104 n.
A Peasants Voice to Landowners, etc., by John Denson, labourer, of Water-
beach, 1829. Letters to Working People on the New Poor Law (a defence
of it), by a working man (John Latey), 1841.

204 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

impartial and lit up by quiet sallies of humour — such
as his description of the indomitable herb-doctor
marching up a contingent of villagers to * Peterloo,* with
skull and cross-bones floating in the breeze before them,
as if he were ' heading a funeral procession of his own
patients.' These two autobiographical pieces have
been reprinted in a decent edition, prefaced with a
very readable introduction. The volume of collected
verse has no intrinsic merit. Keen intelligence and a
kind of hardy culture are displayed in every page of
his writings ; but the ' Early Days ' abounds in passages
analysing his emotions which reveal unmistakably his
lack of training and the sense of proportion.

Thomas Cooper also has left reminiscences which
describe the vicissitudes of his career from childhood
to old age in correct and straightforward English.
Like Bamford, he attended a variety of schools, receiving
what would then be considered a very fair elementary
education, and in after hfe suffered imprisonment,
though in a cause which the former was never disposed
to appreciate. Both men developed altogether out of
proportion to their early training, and displayed in
their public life a sensitiveness of manner and an in-
dependence of judgment which set them above their
fellows. Both, -too, possessed a strong conservative
instinct which came out with more than usual force
as life advanced. Here the resemblance ceases. Cooper
was a man of unique capacity and, in a peculiar sense
of the term, a born student ; and his character was
enriched by the softening influence of a deep religi-
ous experience, an inspiration which his predecessor
apparently lacked. A strenuous self-discipline, which
might have destroyed a man of less robust constitu-
tion, enabled him to pursue a wide range of studies
in the intervals of manual labour. He became in due

LIBRARIES AND LITERATURE 205

course a schoolmaster, a publicist and political agitator,
a man of letters and a minister of religion, and formed
the acquaintance of Kingsley and Carlyle. His works,
which include an autobiography and sundry reminis-
cences, a volume of poetry, miscellaneous sketches
and addresses on religious subjects, never attained any
wide celebrity; but the student of men will not look
in vain for evidence of an extraordinary character and
a versatile intellect, and for the sage impressions born
of the life-long experience of one who laboured for the
common people and paid them the compliment of
serious criticism.*

^ Life of Thomas Cooper, by himself, 4th ed-, 1873 ; Wise Saws and
Modern Instances, 2 vols., 1845 ; a volume of poetry, including two
epics noticeable mainly for their erudition {The Purgatory of Suicides,
a Prison Rhyme, composed in Stafford Gaol, 1842, afterwards republished
in a cheap edition by request of his admirers ; and the Paradise of Martyrs),
and various shorter poems, ballads, and poUtical songs ; several volimiea
of a Christian Evidence Series, based on lectures deUvered throughout the
kingdom in the latter half of his life ; Thoughts at Fourscore, 1885.

CHAPTER VII

EDUCATION BY COLLISION*

' Whatever might be the case in some other constitutions of society,
the spirit of a commercial people "will be, we are persuaded, essentially
mean and slavish, wherever public spirit is not cultivated by an extensive
participation of the people in the business of government in detail ; nor
will the desideratum of a general diffusion of intelligence among either
the middle or lower classes be realised, but by a corresponding dissemina-
tion of public functions and a voice in public affairs ' — J. S. Mill,
Disnertations and Discussion.^, ii. 25 sq.

'Universal teaching must preceae universal enfranchisement' — Id.y
Representative Government (1861), 160.

Mill's Essay on ' Representative Government ' con-
cludes a series of dissertations which connect the
philosophical radicalism of an earlier generation with
more recent attempts to formulate a defence of de-
mocracy. The basis of his argument is a definition of
the twofold aim of political institutions. The test of
a political system is, partly the efficiency displayed
in the management of public affairs, partly its success
in promoting the 'general mental advancement of the

^ ' In a large town the influences which educate a man against his
will are almost incessant ; there are so many public meetings. . . . That
forms the most valuable part of the education which an EngHshman
receives ? — Yes. It has put us beyond some of the nations of the Con-
tinent who have more school instruction. . . . Do you hold that this
Education by Collision, as it may be called, is the best of all V — It makes
them citizens' {Committee on Public Libraries (1849), Q. 1359-62).
Cf. Harriet Martineau's estimate of the Anti-Corn-Law campaign in the
agricultural districts. ' By means of exercising the minds of the labouring
classes on affairs interesting to them and within their comprehension, the
League Leaders did more for popular education than has yet been achieved
by any other means ' — ^Martineau, History of England during the Thirty
Years* Peace, iv. 296.

206

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 207

community.' Democracy is not simply a device for
balancing rival interests ; it is, at a certain stage of
social development, an indispensable means of educa-
tion. ' It is from political discussion and collective
political action, that one whose daily occupations
concentrate his interests in a small circle around him-
self, learns to feel for and with his fellow citizens and
becomes consciously a member of a great community;
but political discussions fly over the heads of those
who have no votes or are not endeavouring to acquire
them.'

This recognition of an educational purpose or ideal
in the growth of pubhc institutions forms a cardi-
nal distinction between the political theories of the
eighteenth, and those of the later nineteenth, century ;
but, as may be seen from Mill's treatment of the
question, it does not necessarily involve an unlimited
acceptance of popular government. His argument
suggests, in fact, a reaction from the creed of Bentham
and his immediate successors, proceeding from a
closer analysis of the forces which determine political
action and the formation of opmions. Retaining a
firm belief in the power of reason and the efficacy
of public discussion, he is aware also of counteracting
tendencies, whose strength may increase as democracy
advances in its career. ' The position which gives
the strongest stimulus to the growth qf intelligence is
that of rising into power, not that of having achieved
it ' ; for a body of men strong enough to prevail against
reason will no longer listen to its warnings, or invoke
its aid. In other words, the value of popular move-
ments as educational agencies will diminish as they
succeed in achieving their immediate ends, unless some
higher stimulus is brought into operation. It may be
truer to say that political argument gravitates towards

208 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the mental level of those to whom it is addressed. The
obstacle to political education, under any form of
government, is not any conscious unwillingness to
listen to reason, but the ease with which men are led
to adopt conclusions and even trains of argument
without going through the process of reasoning on
their own account. Where power extends in advance
of education, the art of organising delusion threatens
to keep pace with the agencies which aim at diffusing
enlightenment.

If the progress of the democratic movement has
been attended by an increase of mental activity, the
result may be ascribed, in part at least, to two safe-
guards which are not always taken into account. In a
modern state no victory in politics is final or complete.
\ Whatever form the constitution may assume, power
will ultimately depend on knowledge ; and the force
of this principle is realised only when the preliminary
triumphs have been won. The intelligence required
; by a class to render its power effective in action is
' much greater than that which was needed to assert a
right to it. In so far as intellectual effort can be
shown to have been directly influenced by politics,
there is no evidence that it has diminished permanently
as a result of enfranchisement. The forms of instruction
which are connected with the political awakening of
the masses in the early part of the last century cannot
be compared seriously with the systematic studies
imdertaken by artisans in recent years and stimulated
by a desire to assist in the solution of social and eco-
nomic problems. In the second place, it is necessary
to examine the assumption, more often implied than
expressed, that the mass of the people have no history
and no accumulating experience. Writers on democracy
have paid insufl5.cient regard to those changes in the

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 209

character and outlook of a people, produced by widening
opportunities and their own efforts for self -improve-
ment, whose tendency is to raise an increasing number
to the level of responsible citizenship and to place
them in a position to think for themselves. The nature
and the efEect of these changes, and the extent to which
a process of education may be traced in the sequence
of social events, are questions which must be considered
in estimating the prospects of popular government.

The point at issue may be illustrated by analysing
the connection between the growth of political con-
sciousness and recurring periods of prosperity and
economic depression. The natural outcome of depres-
sion, in an age of progress, is social unrest, awakening
visions of a new social order from which misery and
injustice have been for ever expelled. The natural
outcome of prosperity is contentment and a certain
degree of complacency. The former, if continued in-
definitely, might end in despotism or anarchy; the
latter in the extinction of large ideals. Mutually related
as alternate phases of social experience, they provide
complementary forms of discipline and encouragement.
A period of distress reveals the mass of human suffering,
calls into play new forces of enthusiasm and revolt,
and brings new groups into action.^ The return of
prosperity opens the way to a calmer and more detailed
study of social facts and the development of practical
policies. In so far as these vicissitudes enable us to
interpret the history of last century, it may be said
that a period of awakening consciousness, in which

^ It is true that a class may be brought too low by economic depression
to feel confidence in large ideals and drastic remedies, and that, as a class
advances in prosperity, it becomes conscious of its strength and the more
likely to chafe at obstacles to its further advancement ; but it is incon-
testable that, taking the nineteenth century as a whole, periods of distress
are the great periods of revolt, or those, at any rate, in which the feeling
of revolt takes its rise.

9

210 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

enthusiasm was stirred by vague ideas of social recon-
struction, was followed by an interval of detailed
thought and practical experiment, succeeded in its turn
by the challenge of new disorders and a new widening of
the mental horizon. In a broad sense the course of
events has an educational influence, whose results may
be tested by the growth of poHtical aims. The differ-
ence between modern labour policies, since the revival
of socialism in the eighties, and the vague ideaUsm of
the Chartist period shows the influence of adminis-
trative experience, of which the foundations were laid
during an interval of relative quiet. It is more difficult
to decide how far these influences extend beyond the
leaders and penetrate the mass of organised labour ;
and, again, how far the lesson learned during one
phase of experience is actually continued in that which
follows.

Martineau's history of the ' Thirty Years' Peace,'
from 1816-46, covers a well-marked epoch in the
political life of the unfranchised classes. It was a period
of chronic distress and of social change, which revived the
forces of unrest and enlarged their sphere. New indus-
trial conditions hardened the opposition between labour
and capital. The decay of paternalism removed influ-
ences which had kept labour in a state of disunion and
held it in play.^ Class consciousness was strengthened
by the conservative reaction which followed the close
of the Napoleonic wars, by fiscal injustice and organised
repression. 2 These circumstances, which hastened the

^ The wages and apprenticeship clauses of the Statute of Artificers
were repealed 1813-14 ; c/. the drastic reform of the Poor Law in 1834,
intended to sweep aside the demoralising tendencies which were a legacy
of paternal government, and to reassert the principle of self-dependence.

* Webb, Trade Unionism, 85. Cf. Effects of Com Law, 1815 — Prentice,
Historical Sketches, etc. of Manchester, 90 et passim. Dicey, Law and
Opinion in England, 123. Benn, Modern England, i. 97 sqq.

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 211

birth of an industrial democracy, turned the current of
its energies into idealistic and revolutionary channels.
Within a few years of the repeal of the Combination
Laws, the labour movement became involved in struggles
to effect a universal remedy for social ills. With the
conception of political equality, which found expression
in Chartism, went the Owenite gospel of social regenera-
tion and the vision of a ' new moral world.' The
character of the period is no less clearly defined by
comparison with the thirty years which followed. In
the prosperous times ushered in by the repeal of the
Corn Laws, the pursuit of panaceas gave place with
unusual abruptness to detailed schemes of reform and
the business of securing advantages under existing con-
ditions. Both the co-operative and the trade-union
movements showed a reaction from the universalism
and heroic assurance of the Owenite propaganda, and,
at the same time, a much steadier grasp of administra-
tive details and of possibilities within their immediate
reach.* The same practical attitude, combined with a
wider outlook, is seen in the beginnings of parliamentary
action which became effective during the early seventies.*
No two periods of activity appear, at first sight,
less related to one another in aim and achievement.
In the first, a succession of enthusiasms seem to vanish
without result, as if to illustrate by repeated trial the-
helplessness of the masses, the incompetence of their
leaders, and the impracticabiUty of their ideals. In the
second, more limited and less generous aims gave rise
to permanent and effective organisations whose history
shows at every stage an advance in business capacity,
discipline, and intelligence. From the outset a mutual
antipathy, developing in some cases into active antagon-

» Webb, op. cit., 199 (cf. 168 sq.), 206 sq. * Ibid., 223 sq.

212 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

ism, appears to separate the movements which are
characteristic of either period. Owen had little sym-
pathy with free trade, and disowned the ' commercial
co-operation ' which was to prove a lasting success. ^
Official Chartism was equally hostile to developments
which fell short of its demands. On the other hand,
what was left of the trade-union movement after the
crisis of 1834, parted company with the Owenite agita-
tion ; and the unions were never connected with
Chartism as they had been with earlier political move-
ments, and occasionally came into conflict with it."
Indeed the New Unionism, which made its appearance
in the forties, derived its characteristics in no small
degree from groups which had passed unscathed through
the turmoil of the heroic age, from a new generation
which had no part in the experience of former years,
and from the influence of ideas of middle-class origin.^
The nucleus of a new form of organisation was found in
unions which had held aloof from earlier movements, and
which had a superior record.* Where individual societies
moved in support of the old ideals, the protest came not
from 'cautious elders' who had outlived past failures,
but from the younger men who had never shared their
behefs.^ It was especially among the younger genera-

^ Podmore, Robert Owen, 453.

* Webb, op. cit., 158-61. ^ Ibid.

* Cf. the engineering and printing trades — ibid., If2. For growth of
the ' new model ' led by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (develop-
ment of orderly business methods and appointment of salaried oflRcials),
see ibid., 185 sqq. Webb notices an increased desire to get at facts and
an exact knowledge of the points at issue, which he attributes largely to the
entrance of the printing trades into the trade-union movement ; their
proceedings had been characterised throughout by moderation, formahty,
and a desire to deal with concrete fa'ts — ibid., 178. Cf. the proceedings
at the Miners' Conference 1863, where the meeting was organised on the
model of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science,
being divided ' into three sections, on law, on grievances, and on social
organisation, each of which reported to the whole Conference ' — ibid., 287.

' Ibid., 16J.

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 213

tion that an improvement was observed in the tone of
political discussion.^

It is true, none the less, that the first half of the
century was the parent of the age which followed. The
Rochdale co-operators of 1844 recognised Owen as their
prophet and laboured in a soil already prepared. The
trade- union movement in the forties emerged from the
storm of revolutionary unrest which had diffused ideas
of solidarity and was the necessary prelude to a saner
mood. It was in the course of a hopeless struggle to
combine all labour in a general union that the wage-
earning class had passed finally from an ideal of con-
servatism to an ideal of progress. The shortcomings of
the earlier period lie on the surface. There was more
rhetoric than knowledge, and more conviction than
clearness of thought. ' A few, but they are very few,
are well educated and know something of physical and
political science . . . and of those truths of political
economy which all educated persons admit and under-
stand.' 2 Of a group who were tried in connection with
a Chartist outbreak in the manufacturing districts, a
large proportion could scarcely read or write.' But the
human material was different from what it had been
half a century earlier. Intelligence, ' in a degree which
was formerly thought impossible,' had spread to 'the
lower and down even to the lowest rank ' ; and with
intelligence went the faculty of disciplined action and
an adherence to principle. Place remarked on the
agitation led by the orator Hunt at the commencement
of the period (1816) — 'There was no want of energy,
but it was not the mischievous energy of uncultivated
madmen, but the energy of much more cultivated men

^ Re Debating Societies, see Committee on Public Libraries {1849),
Q. 1319 sqq.

* Kay-Shuttleworth, Sociai Condition and Education of the People, i. 584.
» Ibid,, i. 379.

214 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

than these classes in former times contained ' ; ^ and his
testimony is supported by later events. The spirit of
insurrection persisted ; but it was modified by new in-
fluences which survived the moments of passion and
excess. Chartism bequeathed to the Lancashire oper-
atives that power of principled endurance which
possessed them at a later crisis occasioned by the
American Civil War. Yorkshire had supported Wilber-
force in his crusade against slavery ; but there was no
earlier example of a starving population suffering quietly
in defence of principles which were to the advantage of
an alien and distant race and detrimental to their own
immediate interests.^ It was a typical product of the
' heroic ' age.

Not less significant was the growth of an intelligent
minority which was to supply the elements of con-
structive leadership. In each movement there were
a minority of thinkers and a minority of extremists,
between whom the battle was waged ^ ; and the former
were quietly winning recruits. Lovett, writing to Francis
Place in 1834 during the lull which preceded the Chartist
agitation, analyses the mental experience through which
many must have passed in these troubled times : starting
with the dawn of political consciousness, passing through
the stage in which loyalty to principle is distinguished
from partisanship, and ending in the disillusionment
which is the beginning of wisdom. * I have known,' he
sajrs, ' many persons under thirty who a few years since
were dissipated, ignorant and besotted, and are now
sober, intelligent and excellent members of society. . . .
If I now enter a mixed assembly of working men, I find
twenty where I formerly met with one who knew any-

1 Place, Add. MSS, (B.M.) 27827, p. 220.

' Cf. Howell, Labour Legislation, etc., 140-2. Dicey, op. cit., 250 sq.

• Lovett, Autobiography, 68 sqq.

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 215

thing of society, politics or government. ... I have
been in the habit of corresponding with societies and
individuals in different parts of the country, and I have
perceived a great change in their opinions, social and
poHtical. Formerly they worshipped political leaders
— now they seek the establishment of principles.
Formerly they thought that Universal Suffrage, annual
Parliaments, and the vote by ballot would bring the
means of comfort home to every man's door — ^now they
see that something even more than Republicanism, as
hitherto understood, is necessary to efEect it.' ^

How much of this progress is to be ascribed directly
to the influence of organised movements, how much
to a wider range of experience and incentive less easily
defined ? It is necessary to start with some conception
of the materials which presented themselves. The
agitation of the period had not to deal with an un-
differentiated mass of weakness and ignorance. It
formed part of a process extending back into the past,
and acted on social groups at different levels of
political development. It was itself the product of
energies which it guided into a new channel.

The skilled handicraftsmen of the Metropolis during
the early years of the century occupied a position far
removed from the mass of workers in the textile trades.*
Their economic status was relatively secure ; they had
had long experience of the forms of * corporate govern-
ment ' ; and they were closely in touch with the class
above them.^ They supply the chief examples of a

1 Lovett to Place, Nov. 17, 1834. Place MSS., 30.

* Webb, op. cit., 75-7.

^ Cobden notices the success of middle-class liberal movementa (e.g. I
Free Trade) with the London artisans, who ' are all intermingled by their i
occupations with the class above them more completely than in any other
large town ' — ^Morley, Life of Cobden, ch. xii.

216 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

type which was not uncommon ; men possessed of much
general knowledge and of organising ability. Their
influence gave an element of stability to the trade-
union movement ; and they furnished recruits to the
mutual improvement societies which knew no master
and acknowledged no limitations.^ Their defects were
those naturally produced by contact with many streams
of thought at the centre of afiairs. The ' elite of the
London democracy ' included a proportion of certified
enthusiasts who displayed an undiscerning appetite
for new ideas.

The manufacturing districts of the North presented
a different picture. There, the industrial population
started at a lower level of political experience ; and
coming unprepared to a struggle with economic forces

^ Lovett mentions a * Literary Society ' composed mainly of work-
ing men, who met in Gerrard Street, Newport Market (about the year
1821 ), to discuss hterary, political and metaphysical subjects ; they formed
a select library — op. cit., 34. In 1814, on the failure of his co-operative
store in GrevilJe Street, he reopened the premises as a coffee-house, setting
apart a room for debates, classes, readings and recitations ; there he
established a small society, the ' Social Beformers.' ' I look back,' he
Bays, ' upon those two years of my life with great pleasure and satisfaction,
for during this period I gained a considerable amount of information
and was, I believe, the means of causing much useful knowledge to be
diffused among the young men who frequented the place ' ; he mentions
a chronometer- maker pnd a cabinet- carver as intelligent and accomplished
members — ibid., 88 sq. For similar instances, see A Workiyig Man's
Way in the World, by a Journeyman Printer, 14 sq., 65 ; also Thomas
Cooper, Autobiography. Webb notices that the skilled workmen of London
were radicals and generally free from ' sedition,' and ' from their ranks
came such organisers as Place, Lovett, and Gast ' — op cit., 76. A Working
Man's Way in the World, 8-10, refers to a journeyman printer who had
come from London to Bristol — ' He possessed a fund of information upon
all popular topics, and knew much of the personal history of the public
characters of the day. He had travelled all over England, and wrought
in most of the principal towns, and had received a substantial testimonial,
at a period when testimonials were not houily occurrences, for his success-
ful advocacy of the rights of working men upon occasion of a strike in
the north. Upon every topic, except Christianity, he reasoned gently
and modestly, and was the means and medium of much pleasant and
useful information to his companions. He was a great admirer of Franklin,
whom he was continually quoting and whom he confessedly made his
model.'

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 217

which cut at the roots of their independence, they
were easily misled. In Lancashire ill-organised in-
surrection followed the rioting of loyal mobs.^ By
degrees a new order was evolved out of the chaos, as
a constructive faculty began to assert itself. Before
the close of the Chartist period there were already
signs of that genius for association which is in a
peculiar sense characteristic of these industrial areas.
Some of the northern stores survived the collapse of
the co-operative movement in the thirties ; and it
was at Rochdale that a new phase of the movement
commenced. In the course of the Owenite agitation
initiative passes gradually from London to Lancashire.^

It is too readily assumed, however, that democracy
in the North was a specific product of the Industrial
Eevolution. Among the northern weavers were a class
corresponding to the more intelligent of the London
artisans ; and the first signs of democratic advance
appeared — side by side, as it were, with the new in-
dustrial system — among the survivors of an earlier
social condition. The transitional stage is less clearly
represented in the beginnings of trade unionism than in

^ Prentice, o^p. cH., passim.

* Lloyd Jones, Life of Owen, 293 sqq. — ' We had among us in Manchester
more life and energy, united to an active system of teaching. We possessed
a number of men who had proved their fitness to teach, and we were
therefore determined to throw ourselves into the movement' (1836).
There follows a sketch of the propaganda round Manchester. His refer-
ence to an ' active system of teaching ' is illustrated by an account of
a school opened by the supporters of a co-operative store in Salford.
The store wound up its business in 1831, and ' we set to work in a different
fashion. We had counters and shelves and a few tables and chairs, so
we took a couple of large rooms and opened a school for the instruction
of boys and girls and such adults as might think it worth while to learn
what we had to teach. We had among us two carpenters who were found
useful in turning the shelves and counters into desks and forms.' A
house-to-house canvass drew pupils of all ages (12 to 40) ; subjects —
drawdng, music, singing, dancing, and the three R's. No fees. The
school continued for six years. Sunday meetings, with essays and lectures
on social questions.

218 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

an agitation for parliamentary reform which followed
the Peace of 1815 and was terminated by the Peterloo
massacre four years later. Bamford has left a vivid
pictmre of the formation of Hampden clubs in the
/ neighbourhood of Manchester. The people thronged to
village assemblies, to listen to readings and speeches
on the subject of Reform ; local poets contributed
their effusions ; and the cottagers left their looms
at the close of day to drill upon the heath. The
episode is purified by a breath of romance and country
air, which contrast with the noise and stifling at-
mosphere of the London trade clubs. It is the last
appearance of an organised peasantry, which was to
transmit much of its spirit to the new proletariat ;
and the movement is significant on many grounds.
/ Sunday schools, which appear to have been exceptionally
democratic in the manufacturing districts, prepared
the way for the Hampden clubs ; ^ and they were closely
connected with the effects of the Methodist Revival.
The legacy of these religious influences played an
immense part in determining later events.

\ Two streams of agitation converged in the trade-

union movement in the early thirties — one inspired
by the ideal of political democracy, the other by that
of social democracy as presented in the teaching of
Robert Owen.^ The two aims were never completely

^ ' The Sunday schools of the preceding thirty years had produced
many working men of sufficient talent to become readers, writers, and
speakers in the village meetings for parliamentary reform ' (Hampden
Clubs, 1816) — Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, 7 sq. (ed. 1848).
For a sketch of the London trade clubs, which plainly offended his aesthetic
temperament, see 23 sq. ' Amongst the quiet but effective labourers . . .
had been the Sunday school teachers. . , . With the single imdeviating
purpose of promoting the eternal welfare of their pupils, they were
preparing them for the fit discharge of their sociaJ and public duties.
They were creating thought amongst the hitherto unthinking masses ' —
Prentice, op. cit., 116.

» Webb, op. cit., 139.

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 219

dissociated, however vaguely they may have been
linked together in the minds of the working class. But
the agitations which they provoked developed, in the
main, on different lines ; and their mode of appeal and
the ways in which they affected thought and character
in typical cases may be broadly distinguished.

The Hampden clubs mark the beginnings of a political
movement which issued in Chartism. With it may
be connected, for purposes of analysis, the earlier and
later stages of the Anti-Corn- Law propaganda and the
agitation for sundry specific reforms. Their common
characteristic is that they drew attention to particular
laws, or the state of the constitution, as inmiediate or
ulterior sources of evil. In so far as they set men
thinking of remote causes and general effects, thereby
substituting deliberate action for spasmodic outbm'sts
of vengeance, they accomplished an elementary stage
of political education. In so far as reliance was placed
on the force of numbers and what was a means to an
end tended to become confused with the end itself,
the original impulse was counteracted and repressed.
Both tendencies are foreshadowed in the personality
and career of William Cobbett. His writings were an
effective means of restraining violence, and sowed the
seeds of constitutional agitation.^ An untiring propa-
gandist, touring the country and lecturing in town
and village, he was the precursor of Cobden and the
League. He had also less favourable characteristics.

^ 'At this time (1816) the writings of William Cobbett suddenly
became of great authority ; they were read on nearly every cottage
hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire ; in those of
Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham ; also in many ot the Scottish manu-
facturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible ; he directed his
readers to the true cause of their sufferings — misgovernment ; pnd to
its proper corrective — parliamentary reform. Riots soon became scarce,
and from that time they have never obtained their ancient vogue with
the labourers of this comntry ' — Bamford, of. cit., 7

220 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

The idea of a change in the pohtical system, which was
to remedy every grievance, became a narcotic no less
stupef}ang than the breaking of machinery. Ruthless
invective degenerated easily into the grosser forms
of flattery and abuse which rendered Chartism the least
effective of popular movements.

The agitation led by Robert Owen had much wider
and less practicable aims ; but it was saved, as an
educational force, by elements which made it a direct
antithesis to the political movement. The object of
Chartism was a political deliverance. The object of
Owen was social regeneration and the creation of a
* new moral world.' The one might be achieved by
Act of Parliament ; the other demanded a ' revolution
of the human mind.' Whereas Chartist leaders were
continually appealing to class-antagonism and to the
power of numbers, the new social order was to evolve
through the effort and example of voluntary groups,
creating for themselves an independent livelihood and
joining in the work of mutual improvement. It is as
futile to judge Owen by his communistic utterances, as
to judge a religion by its formal theology. The ideas
which he suggested were of more value than the system
in which they were embodied. A vision had been
granted, and character was being formed. When all
his schemes had ended in bankruptcy, there were men
prepared to continue his work.

The ideal set before the Owenite Societies was that
of acquiring land and * living in community.' The
Brighton Co-operative Society, founded in 1827, went
so far as to purchase twenty-eight acres which were
cultivated in connection with their grocery store.
Members were admitted on a test of moral respectabihty ;
mental improvement was to be a means and complement
^to material progress ; and one of their first objects

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 221

was to provide for the education of their children.
They spent their leisure in reading and mutual instruc-
tion, and appointed one of their number librarian and
schoolmaster.* None of the early societies seem to
have advanced much further. They became small
trading and producing groups, performing to some
extent, in the supply of their immediate needs and
in relief of unemployment, functions which were after-
wards divided between the trade union and the dis-
tributive store. But the ideal with which they started
is not insignificant ; it is mentioned in the original
programme of the Rochdale pioneers ; and it must
be considered in valuing the experiments of this earlier
period, which were not simply exercises in economic
co-operation and the conduct of business. The idea
of a self-contained, self-developing community carried
with it the vision of social harmony and of a life well
ordered, sjrmmetrical and complete. It was the nucleus
of aims whose realisation on a larger scale is part of
the general progress of society. The higher ideals
were never wholly obscured. Some provision for
education and social intercourse was a characteristic,
and often the most persistent, feature of these early
experiments." At the central institutions where Owen
expounded his system there were weekly festivals,
with dance and song, which he refused to abandon in
a season of general distress.

^ Holyoake, History of Co-operation, 692 sqq. ; Podmore, Roberi
Otoen, 389 sqq.

* A group of stocking-frame weavers in Sutton- in- Ashfi eld (Notts),
to protect thenaselves from the middlemen, after the trade- union crisis
in 1 834, determined to start co-operative production. Their leader informs
Owen that they have devoted the remains of their ' late imion fimd '
to renting a building for the purpose, and ' believing that knowledge
is power, we shall appropriate the upper room ... to the purpose
of a school, lecture room, etcj' — Podmore, op. cit., 449 sq. Cf. n. 2,
p. 217.

222 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

In 1835, after the simultaneous collapse of the
* Trades-Union ' and the early co-operative movement,
the followers of Owen devoted themselves to a propa-
gandist crusade which extended roughly over a period
of ten years. The ' Association of All Classes of All
Nations ' was the measure of their enthusiasm ; its
later name, the society of ' Rational Religionists,' defines
the quality of their aims. An organisation was rapidly
called into existence, which borrowed from the example
of orthodox religious bodies. The kingdom having
been divided into districts, social missionaries were
appointed to go their rounds, lecturing and holding
discussions. In some of the towns ' halls of science '
were erected, where a form of service was held ; and
many of the branches opened schools for young and old.
The distribution of tracts alone was sufficient to alarm
the Churches. In 1841 there were eighteen mission-
aries and paid lecturers at work, in addition to many
who rendered voluntary service, travelling long dis-
tances in their scanty leisure. The avowed object was
to hasten the social millennium, by preaching the
principles of Owen, denouncing the evils of the present
order and stirring men to a practical effort. Many of
those who took part in the movement were emotional
and ill-informed ; but their sincerity was undoubted.
Their rhetoric was that of missionaries of a new faith
who were prepared to face contumely and misrepre-
sentation and who drove home, amid much crude
dogmatism, certain simple and necessary truths. If
they attacked apathy in high places, there were also
unsparing critics of ignorance and vice among their
own class. They were among the foremost advocates
of temperance and self-discipline, which they aided
by their example ; and they preached education as
the basis of all reform. There was some organised,

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 223

and much casual, opposition ; and they were occasion-
ally the victims of loyal mobs.^

All this bears a superJS.cial resemblance to an earlier
movement, which had been connected in many ways
with the growth of democratic consciousness. The
socialist crusade was in certain respects a secular
rendering of the Methodist Revival, and affords a
striking illustration of the change of circumstances
which has brought to bear on social problems some-
thing akin to religious enthusiasm. Both "Wesley
and Owen asserted the universality of their mission.
One claimed the world for his parish, the other founded
an association which was to embrace mankind. The
gospel of Owen was narrower than Methodism, in
that it was essentially of this world ; it was broader
in so far as it unfolded a vision of social progress ;
where its influence was limited, it appealed to the
elite rather than to the elect. The distinction is not
simply verbal. The colony at Greenwood consisted
of picked men ; the halls of science, at any rate
in London, were frequented by a prosperous class ;
and Owen was criticised on one occasion for neglecting
the poor.2 But the difference may be exaggerated.
The early co-operators and their successors at Rochdale
belonged to that class among the poor to whom Wesley
had appealed with greatest effect ; and the co-operative
movement loses its virtue and recuperative power
where its traditions and benefits are not held in trust
for the weaker brethren.

The main point at issue between the social and the

* Lloyd Jones, op. cit., 294-388 ; Holyoake, op. cit, 244 aqq. The moral
influence of the Harmony Hall Community (Hants) was remarked in the
neighbourhood — Somerville, Whistler at the Plough, 109, 116.

■ The subscription at the Gray's Inn Road Institution seems to have
been prohibitive — Podmore, op. cit., 426.

224 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

political movements was one of precedence. Socialists,
wrote a disciple, are Chartists ' in the abstract ' ; but
they would first have the people educated and placed
in a position of social independence. Then, too, the
case for political reform would be better worth advancing
and more likely to succeed. Above all, ' exhibitions
of brute force ' were to be avoided on principle.* Lovett,
who represented the moderate section of Chartist opinion,
seems to start from a contradictory premise. The fran-
chise, he maintained, was the ' best of schoolmasters ' ;
and history showed that prosperity and enlightenment
followed the attainment of political rights. ^ This did
not prevent him endeavouring to develop thought among
the masses, and advocating national education that they
might be empowered to assert their rights and prepared
to use them. Although the franchise was needed zo
effect any considerable improvement in their material
condition, much benefit might be derived from ' moral
culture ' and self-control ; and it was important that the
change should come ' without violence ' and through the
pressure of organised moral force. The course of events
matured his conviction that education was the only
way, if the movement was to succeed and if success
was to be a permanent benefit. ' True liberty,' he
concludes, * cannot be conferred by Act of Parliament . . .
but must spring from the knowledge, morality, and
public virtue ' of the people. ^

The Working Men's Association, for which Lovett
wrote, had formulated the Charter, but exercised very
little control over the course of the movement. It
had been organised in 1836 to promote radical causes,

^ Podmore, op. cit, 455.

* Address to the Working Classes of Europe ; Address to the People of
England (1838). Lovett, Autobiography, 158, 175.

■ Address to the Working Classes on the Subject of Education, 1837 ;
Address to the Political and Social Reformers, etc., 1841. Ibid., 135, 245.

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 225

to collect and sift information on labour questions,
to unite the intelligent sections of the working class,
and to educate pubhc opinion. It provided a meeting-
place for a mixed group of reformers ; and though its
influence was not widely extended, a number of branches
were formed in the provinces. In 1841 the London
members undertook the promotion of an educational
scheme which Lovett had outlined during his imprison-
ment in the previous year. A national hall was opened
in Holbom, containing a library and coffee-room for
the use of members, and providing lectures, concerts,
and classes, which were open to the public on reason-
able terms. The premises were used as a Sunday
school ; and subsequently a day school was added,
affording a superior elementary education to the children
of a superior class. The movement seems never to
have extended beyond the MetropoUs ; and the dearth
of ' book knowledge ' among the general body of the
Chartists is lamented by their most favourable critic*
A hopeful experiment started by Thomas Cooper at
Leicester ^ went to pieces owing to a depression of

^ Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 111.

* The Shakespearean Association of Leicester Chartists, so-called
from the 'Shakespeare Room' iu which they met (1841). 'I formed,'
writes Cooper, ' an adiilt Sunday school for men and boys, who were at
work on week-days. All the more intelhgent in our ranks gladly assisted
as teachers ; and we soon had the room filled on Sunday mornings
and afternoons. The Old and New Testaments, Channing's Self-CvUure
and other tracts, of which I do not remember the names, formed our
class-books. And we fancifully named our classes, not first, second,
third, etc., but the " Algernon Sydney Class," " Andrew Marvell Class,"
" John Hampden Class," etc.' Among the members were two minor
poets, a stocking- weaver and a ' glove-hand,' whom Cooper induced to
write hymns for the Simday meetings. ' We now usually held two or
three meetings in the Shakespearean Room on week- nights, as well as
on Sunday night. Unless there was some stirring local or pohtical topic,
I lectured on Milton and repeated portions of Paradise Lost, or on Shakes-
peare and repeated portions of Hamlet, or on Burns and repeated Tarn
o' Shanter ; or I recited the History of England, and set the portraits of
great Englishmen before the young Chartists, who listened with intense
interest ; or I took up geology, or even phrenology, and made the young

Q

226 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

trade. ' What care we about reading, if we can get
naught to eat ? '

Lovett had served his political apprenticeship in
the co-operative movement ; and the addresses which
he issued to the public between 1836 and 1845 were
strongly imbued with the spirit of Owen. He con-
trasted the policy of physical force with that of uniting
the working classes * upon principles of knowledge and
temperance, and the management of their own affairs.'
He would have the political leaders proclaim ' un-
palatable truths ' ; and he protested against the atmos-
phere of beer-shops in which meetings were held. The
democracy was to be eminently ' respectable.' Working
men were to meet for mutual instruction and to blend
study with rational amusement. They were to exclude
drimkards and immoral persons from their ranks. They
were to ' quicken the intellects ' of their wives and
children. The scheme of voluntary association which
he published in 1841 is almost certainly borrowed, in
outline, from the socialists. He proposed that halls
should be erected, to be used as schools in the day time ;
that paid missionaries should be appointed ; that there
should be circulating libraries, and a distribution of
tracts ; and that the instruction of adults in physical,
moral, and political science should be combined with
the lighter influences of dance and song. How far the
underlying conception of a change of mind and character
is due to the influence of Owen, it is useless to inquire.
Lovett belonged to a superior class of artisans who
had no recognised leader and were preparing to exercise
an authority of their own. They drew inspiration from
many movements, and were too much in advance of

men acquainted elementally with the knowledge of the time.' Incidentally,
he preached temperance and administered the pledge to several himdreds —
Cooper, Autobiography, 164-9.

EDUCATION BY COLLISION 227

their generation to be complete disciples. The Working
Men's Association had aims suifficiently elastic to
comprehend every phase of radical opinion. It offered
a common platform to men so widely sundered as Owen
and Francis Place ; and its programme betrays the
influence of the middle-class group who were interested
in the diffusion of useful knowledge. It marks the
climax in a series of efforts to organise a 'peaceful
expression of public opinion,' and it goes a step
beyond. Its object was essentially educational ; and
it is the first example of a democratic organisation
whose programme was not wholly or primarily sectarian.
It proposed to collect information on economic condi-
tions, and to found its propaganda on a basis of exact
knowledge.^

^ Programme of the Working Men's Association for benefiting politically,
morally, and socially the tiseful classes (1836) : (1) 'To draw into one
bond of unity the intelligent and influential portion of the working classes
in town and country ' ; (2) political and social equality ; (3) a free press ;
(4) national education ; (5) to collect information on laboxir questions,
e.g. wages, habits and condition of labourers ; (6) to meet and digest this
information, and plan accordingly ; (7) ' To publish their views and
sentiments in such form and manner as shall best serve to create a moral,
reflecting yet energetic pubUc opinion, so as eventually to lead to a gradual
improvement in the condition of the working classes, without violence
or commotion ' ; (8) ' To form a hbrary of reference and useful information,*
and to maintain a place of meeting — Lovett, Autobiography, 92 sq. Lovett
had been induced to found the Association by Dr. James Black of Ken-
tucky, who came to London in 1834 with the idea of promoting Working
Men's Educational Associations ; but the movement had English ante-
cedents. The National Union of the Working Classes and Others (1831),
in which Lovett took a leading part, started with the game general social
and political aims, including that of collecting and organising a ' peaceful
expression of public opinion,' which does not seem to have met with
much success. Another possible influence is suggested by a circular,
among the Place MSS., proposing a ' Society for the Diffusion of Political
and Moral Knowledge,' with the following programme : (1) to publish
works at a suitable cost ; (2) to sanction works published elsewhere ;
(3) to promote educational measures in Parliament. A meeting was
called in Roebuck's rooms for Jan. 14, 1833— Place, Add. MSS. (B.M.),
27827, 39.

i^

CHAPTER VIII

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK

The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was suggestive
of a profound change which had passed over English
society since the eve of the Industrial Revolution.
Agriculture, still the largest industry, had ceased to
govern the poHcy of the nation ; rural life no longer
supplied a recognised model. The agricultural labourer,
at any rate in the South, had scarcely emerged from
a long experience of physical depression and social
displacement. In material condition he was slightly
in advance of the domestic manufacturer, a companion
in misery ;i in intellectual culture, judged by the
ordinary tests of instruction, he stood at a lower level ;
and the percentage of crime was said to be greater, as
a rule, in agricultural than in manufacturing counties.^
Enclosure had, in certain material respects, diminished
his prospects and loosened his social ties. In this
weakened condition there was nothing to resist disruptive
influences which came from without. An education
based on urban models played its part in hastening
the catastrophe, and the rural exodus set in apace.
The neglected state of rural labour in the middle of
the century was among the most ominous features of
English social life. The labourer might retrieve his

* Tuckett, Past and Present State of the Labouring Population, ii. 612.

* Kay-Shuttleworth, Social Condition and Education of the People, i. 391.

228

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 229

position, but the nation has been slow to recover the
balance of its ideals.

A group which in the eighteenth century stood in
the lowest rank had been meanwhile steadily advancing.
The miners were less exposed than any other class to
economic displacement ; and their wages were re-
latively high.i The Tyne Valley in 1852 exhibited a
state of material prosperity which was not easily
rivalled. Housing accommodation in the newer col-
lieries had distinctly improved ; cottages were sub-
stantially furnished ; and food was abundant.* In
Cornwall, where earnings were at a lower rate, many
of the miners had gardens and leisure to cultivate
them, while others practised carpentry or fishing.'
No part of the country had been more completely
civilised by the Methodist Revival. It is as fair to lay
stress on these examples as on the charges of gross
feeding, roughness, and mental lethargy, which were
commonly levelled at the mining population. A claas
which was still emerging from barbarism was an easy
mark for censure ; and the conditions of employment
were fraught with innumerable abuses. But there were
noted exceptions ; the worst forms of intemperance
and brutality were a survival from the past ; crime
in the Tyne Valley was considerably less than in
the manufacturing districts ; and everywhere religious

» Tuckett, op. cit,, ii. 536-41.

» Our Coals and Coal Pits, etc., by a Traveller Underground (1853), 199.
In parts of the agricultural districts precisely the reverse is noticed :
' a cottage erected in the last century will be generally found to be com-
modious and roomy ; very different in the supply of comforts and con-
veniences from the hovels which are now ordinarily appropriated to the
labouring class ' (Rev. H. Worsley, Easton, Suffolk) — Kay-Shuttleworth,
i. 521. Cobbett notices ' in all the really agricultural villages . . . a great
dilapidation and constant pulling down or falling down of hoiises ' —
Rural Rides, Oct. 31, 1822.

» Cornwall, its Mines and Miners, etc., by the author of Our CoaJs
and Coal Pits, 289 sq. (1855).

230 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

influences were at work refining manners and promoting
education. The Commission of 1843 ^ draws a broad
distinction between coal and iron mines and other
branches of the mining industry. In the lead mines
of Alston Moor there were village libraries, and a
superior system of elementary schools attended by
children between the ages of six and eleven, and by
boys in winter up to fourteen. ^ In Cornwall, most of
the children we:e regularly at school until the age of
employment, which was seldom lower than ten or twelve.
Here juvenile labour was comparatively light ; and dis-
tance, rather than fatigue, prevented attendance at even-
ing classes.3 Elementary education was less advanced
in Northumberland and Durham, but not a few of the
colliers had begun to develop the mental capacity which
made this district, in later years, one of the most
remarkable centres of University Extension.* It may
be noticed that in 1847 the Miners' Association petitioned
Parliament for a measure furthering education, after
the manner of the Factory Acts.**

Meanwhile the mass of the population was collect-
ing in the towns, and the general result was by no means
clear. The great centres of commerce and transport
at the present day difier socially from towns of a more
purely industrial type ; whilst the Metropolis stands
almost in a class by itself. The same distinctions

* The Children's Employment Commission.

2 Ibid., Digest of Report, 193-5. ' Ibid., 187-9.

* The author of Cornwall, its Mines and Miners, 228, notices that
Cornwall produced relatively few students of science and mathematics,
studies which were not uncommonly pursued in the North. See Quarterly
Review, No. 220, p. 360 — ' Some (after the day's work) repair to the
Methodist Meeting, some to the Club, some practise in the village band,
some play upon melancholy instruments at home, and some study mathe-
matical books picked up at stalls in the town. The mathematicians
are most to our liking, and we find not a few here and there of very
respectable attainments ' (Northumberland and Durham).

* Nelson Boyd, Coal Pits and Pitmen (second edition), 130.

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 231

appeared in the middle of the last century. In Liver-
pool and Manchester there was a larger proportion of
casual, ill-housed and sweated labour than in Bir-
mingham and some of the manufacturing towns
of the North ; and the worst examples of congestion
and sanitary abuse in the manufacturing districts
were surpassed in the poorer parts of London.^
What underlay these differences was only dimly
perceived.

A treatise which appeared in 1846 classifies the
workers directly dependent on manufactures into three
groups. ' In an average state of trade, about one-
third . . . are plunged in the most extreme misery, and
hovering on the verge of actual starvation. Another
third or perhaps a few more are earning an income
scarcely better than that of the common agricultural
labourer ; but under circumstances directly injurious
to health, morality and domestic comfort, being to a
considerable extent dependent upon the exertions of
their young children ; and the mothers also contributing
to produce this state of comparative independence.
And the other third earning high wages, amply sufficient
to support them in respectability and comfort.' ^ The
factory operatives, who excited most attention, were
not the worst situated. Below them were the hand-
loom weavers ; a class whose condition had steadily
deteriorated, dwelling in cellars, bred to irregular habits,
without power of combination, and, for the most part,
beyond the reach of instruction. The impressions
collected by Francis Place, which have been preserved
in manuscript, deal more generally with social progress
between 1790 and the passing of the Eeform Bill. The
barbarism which he remembered in his youth had

^ Tuckett, <yp. cit, ii. 489 sqq. ; Kay-Shuttleworth, i. 454.
* Tuckett, op. cit., ii. 495.

232 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

steadily declined ; and he notices a general improvement
in habits, cleanliness and intelligence, extending down-
wards indefinitely in the social scale. But the force of
his testimony is weakened by an undisguised and un-
critical optimism. There is no pretence of distinguish-
ing economic tendencies ; and many of his remarks are
difficult to reconcile with other evidence which points
to the growth of a labour-swamp in his immediate
neighbourhood.^ Two points, however, are clearly sug-
gested : there had been a marked improvement in
the higher grades of labour, and some of the cotton
mills were abodes of vice.' What he proves is rather
a gradual process of selection than a imiform advance.
Progress became more rapid during the next thirty
years, and was especially noticeable in the manufac-
turing districts. The large towns established Boards
of Health, and commenced a systematic treatment
of sanitary abuses.^ Free trade, accompanied by a
return of commercial prosperity, lowered prices and
increased employment. Lancashire became the centre
of a remarkable temperance crusade which originated
among the working class.* Co-operation diffused moral
no less than material benefits ; and a shortening of
the hours of labour was accompanied by a development
of the means of recreation and instruction. Factory
laws had begun to tell on the condition of the operatives.
Formerly below the average in morals, intelligence and
physique, they were becoming part of the aristocracy
of labour.* Yet, in Manchester, between 1841 and

^ Kay-Shuttleworth, op. cit., i. 457 ; cf. 462.

* Phce MSS. 27827, 192.

' Kay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods of Edvcation, 42, 94 sq.

* Ludlow and Jones, Progress of the Working Class, 248 sqq.

' Ibid., 110 sqq. In 1843, 19 per cent, factory children attended
National, British and denominational schools, 45 per cent, dame and
private schools ; in 1860, 70 per cent, attended public schools, 14 per cent.

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 233

1860, the rate of infant mortality had not diminished.*
In the midst of an advancing society there was a
residuum that did not improve.

A fresh light has been thrown on the situation by
more recent inquiries which have investigated the
problem at a later stage. In the Booth survey of
London labour, completed in 1902, stress is laid on a
process of selection which is creating a new middle class.
The social groups extend in a continuous series, but the
division between the lower middle and the upper
working class is in a special sense indeterminate. ^ At

private (not dame) schools. Beneficial effect of factory legislation on the
attitude of employers to social reform generally, ibid., 112.

^ Kay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods of Education, 148 sq. 1841, 1M89
per cent. ; 1861, 10-58 per cent. ; 1860, 11-34 per cent.

• ' Closely connected with the vitality and expansion of industry, we
trace the advancement of the individual which in the aggregate is repre-
sented by the vitality and expansion of London. This it is that draws
from the provinces their best blood, and amongst Londoners selects the
most fit. Amongst such it is common for the children to aim at a higher
position than their parents held ; and for the young people when they
marry to move to a new house in a better district. A new middle class
is thus forming which will, perhaps, hold the future in its grasp. Its
advent seems to me the great social fact of to-day. Those who consti-
tute this class are the especial product of the push of industry ; within
their circle religion and education find the greatest response ; amongst
them all popular movements take their rise, and from them draw their
leaders. To them, in proportion as they have ideas, poUtical power will
pass ' — Booth, Life and Labour in London, final vol., 204. As to the
composition of this class, he remarks that the ' organisation of modem
industry finds room for much cheap clerk work for which the elementary
schools ensure a copious supply, and requires also, on the practical side
of the work, men of skill and character who earn higher wages than these
clerks. Thus the financial distinction between clerk and working man
tends to break down, and when for any purpose they consort together
or make common cause, the social distinction is apt to break down too ' —
ibid. ser. 3, vol. 7, 400. It has been observed that in social and educational
movements the term ' working man ' has to be Uberally interpreted ;
it must include the salaried clerk as well as the wage-earner. This does
not necessarily imply, as it might have done in the earUer half of the last
century, that labour movements are losing their hold on labour ; in a
sense it means that the status of labour has advanced. In educational
classes, at the present day, working men study on an equaUty with clerks
and others, who are often members of working-class families, whereas in the
Mechanics' Institutes the entrance of ' middle class ' students generally
led to the withdrawal of the artisans.

234 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the same time there is a distinction between the leaders
and the masses, and in certain respects a growing cleav-
age * between the upper and lower grades of manual
labour.' ^ The Majority Report of the Poor Law Com-
mission introduces a further set of distinctions. Labour
is classified provisionally into two groups, the skilled and
the imskilled, and the latter subdivided into a higher
and a lower grade — the criterion in this case being the
regularity of the wage rather than its amount. ^ This
distinction, which lays no claim to scientific accuracy,
finds a practical justification in the growth of casual
employment since the Poor Law Reform of 1834,
chiefly in dock centres but also in other branches of
industry.^ The witnesses were agreed that the position
of skilled workers had improved, and the same opinion
was expressed, though with less confidence, of the
higher grade of unskilled labour ; but there was
evidence, especially from London and other crowded
industrial centres, that the condition of labourers of
the lower grade had deteriorated. * In London the
number of unskilled labourers would seem to have
doubled within the past fifty years and to have ' in-
creased at a greater rate than the population as a whole,'
whilst one half of them are described as living in an
'overcrowded condition,' and they have as a rule no
access to higher forms of employment.^ Education is

* Booth, op. cit., ser. 3, vol. 7, 400.

' Poor Law Commission, Majority Report, 361.

=« Ibid., 334 sqq. * Ibid., 361.

' Ibid., 328. Mr. Sidney Webb asserts that the skilled grades, in the
London building trade, the most typical London industry, are recruited
from the country ; the proportion of country- born workmen in breweries,
on railways, etc., is 50 per cent, or even 65 per cent. ; the London police
force, fire brigade, elementary teaching profession, city warehouses, etc.,
have a very small percentage of born Londoners. ' So far as we can make
out, the London industry in which there is the highest percentage of bom
Londoners is that of unskilled general labour. This section must comprise

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 235

at once a measure and a cause of social characteristics.
At one end of the scale is a class whose homes are well
governed and whose children respond to the spirit of
improvement. At the other is a submerged and dis-
organised group who lack the natural incentives to
progress. The children, bred in an atmosphere of
neglect, leave school at the earliest opportunity.
Following the example, and impelled by the needs, of
their parents they take to the least satisfactory occupa-
tions, and the vicious circle is complete.^

Before proceeding, it is necessary to repeat a word
of caution which was suggested in the opening chapter.
A classification of social groups which applies to the
country as a whole requires to be supplemented by a
classification of areas, having regard to the relative
preponderance of different groups within the local
community. Social conditions in London and other
crowded centres differ not in degree, but in kind, from
those prevailing in more purely industrial areas where

something like half a million of population in the Administrative County
of London alone. Its social condition may be judged from the fact
that not less than half of it lives in an overcrowded condition' —
Ibid., 328.

^ ' The general features prevailing in the homes of these neglected or
underfed school children are strikingly alike. . . . There is an absolute
lack of organisation in the family Ufe. It seems to be entirely absent
under conditions where careful and minute organisation of the family
resources is more essential than anything else. Existence drags along
anyhow ; the hours of work, leisure and sleep are equally uncertain and
irregular. . . . The imderfeeding of the children is but a pajt of a more
important feature in the hfe of this district. The children's health is
affected by many different evils, overcrowding, want of sleep, dirt, and
general irregularity of life ' (Liverpool dock districts) — Poor Law Com-
mission, Minority Report, 841. ' The elaborate investigation made by
the London County Council into the circumstances of the families whose
children need to be fed at school, brings to light not only that it is very
largely the offspring of the under- em ployed casual labourers who are
thus growing up stunted, under- nourished, and inadequately clothed ;
but also that, in the vast msjority of the cases, the children lack not food
and clothing only, but even a low minimum of home care' — Ibid., 1149.
Cf. Reports of Board of Education on Medical Inspection.

236 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the average of prosperity is higher and the level more
uniform. Well-to-do workers in the manufacturing
districts may earn less individually than the higher
grade of London artisans, but their proportion to the
rest of the population is greater ; they occupy a central
position in social life, and give a tone to the community.
As the ratio of such workers to the population diminishes,
their influence approaches a point at which it disappears
altogether. This conclusion lends support to a principle
which was deduced at an earlier stage of the inquiry.
Social characteristics depend less upon the amount of
income which a class enjoys, than upon its relation
to that of other classes. A class loses its morale, not
where its income is small in the aggregate, but where
it is small in relation to the accumulated wealth of
the neighbourhood. Where the workers are not over-
shadowed by a numerous and wealthier class, they are
more hkely to develop initiative and self-confidence,
and to provide material for educational movements,
than in areas where distinctions in wealth and social
prestige are strongly marked.

Yet the evils which have been noticed as a tendency
of the age, though their incidence may vary with local
conditions, exert an influence more or less direct on
every t3rpe of industrial community. In the earlier
half of the last century large numbers of workers had
not been absorbed in the industrial system, and an old
race of domestic manufacturers was being squeezed
out of existence. To-day it is seen that industrial
changes result in a continuous rejection of the weak and
inefficient,^ while a large part of the labouring class is

^ * As specialisation becomes more marked and definite, those who
have been . . . habituated to the processes that are superseded find it
more difficult to find occupation elsewhere. Trade unions and Employers'
Associations have . . . succeeded, the one in raising the standard of

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 237

permanently under-employed. Commerce has created
nmnerous openings for casual and intermittent labour,
and the number of those competing for this form of
maintenance is periodically increased by a deflux from
the ranks above them. Once out of the ranks of
specialised industry, the position of the labourer is
radically changed. Among the poor, a rise in nominal
earnings does not add to their resources in the same
proportion as a corresponding advance in the higher
grades.^ Competition for the means of subsistence
increases, while occupation and environment bar the
way to recovery.

The analysis may be carried back a stage further.
The same forces have affected the lives of the rising
generation ; and the magnitude of the evil is accentuated
as we approach its source. ' We have,' says Mr.
Sidney Webb, * a great development of employments
for boy^ of a thoroughly bad type, yielding high wages
and no training,' and a positive decrease ' of places
for boys in which they are trained to become competent
men.' " The growth of commerce has developed forms
of juvenile labour which afford no preparation for an
after-career and are often physically and morally
harmful. Specialisation has created openings for boys
and girls in productive trades, in which there is no
chance of their being absorbed in later life, but which
retain their services until they are too old to seek
regular employment.^ The critical period occurs between

wages, the other the standard of industrial efficiency. Those who are not
in the prime of life nor in possession of adequate physical strength or
competency, are apt to fall out of an industrial system which is above
their level ' — Poor Law Commission, Majority Report, 359 ; cf. 334-41.

1 Ibid., 309. » Ibid., 327.

• ' The problem owes its rise in the main to the growth of cities as dis-
tributive centres — chiefly, and most disastrously, London — giving inna-
merable openings for errand boys, milk boys, office and shop boys, bookstall
boys, van, lorry, and trace boys, street sellers, etc. In nearly all these

238 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

the time of leaving school and the age at which apprentice-
ship usually begins ; and it is said that between seventy
and eighty per cent, of the boys who pass through
elementary schools enter unskilled trades.^ At the
same time the growth of large establishments and the
separation of processes which were formerly included
in a single craft have diminished the value of appren-
ticeship as a means of industrial, and still more of
moral, training. ^

The tendency is one which has been noticed at
an earlier period. Economic change is continually
increasing the need of training and self-control, and
undermining influences which formerly controlled and
educated. The higher forms of manufacture suffer
from a dearth of competent artisans ; ^ and the decay
of craftsmanship is seen no less in agriculture than
in urban industry. Rural crafts cease to be trans-
mitted from father to son, and the farmer is generally
not in a position to instruct his labourers. The same
is true of the domestic arts. The home Ufe of the poorest

occupations the training received leads to nothing ; and the occupations
themselves are in most cases destructive to healthy development, owing
to long hours, long periods of standing, walking or merely waiting, and,
morally, are wholly demoraUsing. . . . This particular problem, it will
be noticed, is not a problem of factory industry. But there is another
and even more serious form of the problem, where boys on leaving school
enter, without apprenticeship, into trades where there are no possible
openings for them when grown up ; loom-boys, dofiers, shifters in the
cotton and woollen trades — where, it is said, there is httle possibility of
more than one in ten being ultimately absorbed — rivet boys in shipbuilding,
drawers ofE in saw mills, packers in soap works, etc. In many of these
trades they are tempted by high wages to remain till they are too old to
enter any regular occupation. Here " the work performed by the boyj
instead of being in the natiu-e of training, is a speciahsed compartment for
which his sole quahfication is the fact that as an instrument of production
he is cheaper than a man " ' — ibid., 325 sq.
1 Ibid., 325.

* On the general question of apprenticeship and its decline, see ibid.,
349 sqq. ; Howell, Contemporary Review, Oct. 1877 ; Booth, op. cit., ser.
2, i. 105, v. 127 ; Sadler, Continuation Schools, ch. 13.

* Sadler, I.e. ; Booth, op. cit., v. 123 ; Shadwell, Industrial E§.ciency,\.\i&.

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 239

class is merely an extreme illustration of defects which
extend indefinitely through the higher ranks. Physical
degeneracy is due more often to bad feeding than
to underfeeding, to an ill-prepared and monotonous
diet than to lack of food.^ Economic reactions, other
than the strain of actual poverty, are dissolving the
bonds of family union. The personal authority of the
employer has almost vanished, and the sphere of parental
influence is continually reduced. But the difficulty
is not simply that an old form of training has
deteriorated ; its decay is a sign that old methods
are inadequate to modern needs. The dangers which
beset adolescence have extended beyond the reach
of parental discipUne. Household management and
the care of children demand more knowledge than
sufficed in simpler and more healthy surroundings.
Something more is needed than a better system of
workshop instruction, if the worker is to be capable
of adapting himself to processes which continually
change. His mental interests require to be enlarged,
if he is to reap benefit and not detriment from a life
which grows wider and more complex every decade.
It is necessary not only to rebuild what has broken
down, but to cover ground which has extended in the
interval. Thus it is that the school has come to occupy
a larger place in education than formerly. In schemes
of physical care and domestic instruction, and in
connection with industrial training and the choice of
employments, it has invaded the province of the parent

^ ' Nutrition does not improve. On the contrary, the proportion of
children of sub-normal physique increases. . . . About half the children
representing the healthy — or rather the normal — school population of the
county are not up to a satisfactory level in this respect. This is due to
. . . such removable causes as bad cooking, defective meal planning and
monotony in diet ' — Report of School Medical Officer for Durham County,
1912 {Jojirnal of Education, September 1913).

r

240 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

and the employer, partly because their efiective
influence has diminished, partly because new demands
have arisen and a higher standard is enforced.

^ Though it is not easy to define in precise terms the
position reached at the close of the period with which
this volume deals, it may be said broadly that some-
where in the middle of the nineteenth century a new
stage commenced in the growth of educational move-
ments. The first phase of the education controversy
was concluded. Universal instruction had developed
from an idea into a pohcy; and a decisive step had
been taken in 1839 by the estabhshment of a Com-
mittee of Council to administer pubHc grants. In
1850 Commissions were appointed to inquire into the
management of the universities, which raised the
question of educational endowments. In the follow-
ing year the first International Exhibition aroused
interest in technical training and started a movement
which eventually played a part in the reorganisation
of secondary schools. The division of periods is no
less distinct in those spheres of endeavour, standing
aside from the main currents of national education, of
which a survey has been attempted in the preceding
chapters. Two movements, whose relations to one
another were not yet apparent, developed during the
earlier half of the century ; one consisting in an attempt
to diffuse useful knowledge and to provide for the
higher education of mechanics, the other connected
with the growth of political and trade organisations
which were a product of social unrest, and in which
sections of the working class are found here and there
struggling to evolve their own forms of instruction and
to express their ideals. Both movements were experi-
mental ; and their breakdown, which became evident in

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 241

the forties, formed the starting-point of a fresh series
of developments which produced lasting results. A
new phase of adult education conmienced with the re-
vival of co-operation at Rochdale in 1844, the appear-
ance of an association formed by the Society of Friends
in 1847 which became the pioneer of modern Adult
Schools, the rise of Working Men's Colleges during the
next decade which was followed by the Club and
Institute Union of 1862, and the reform movement
stimulated at the oldest seats of learning by the Com-
missions of 1850, which prepared the way, at least
indirectly, for University Extension.

It does not fall within the scope of this volume to
explore the undercurrents of opinion and sentiment
which made the middle years of the century a critical
period in the history not only of education, but of social
thought ; but there is one issue of primary importance
which has been kept in view at different stages of the
inquiry, and round which the discussion has centred —
the issue which turns on varying conceptions of social
status.

As the Industrial Revolution developed, awakening
latent energies and changing the forms of social Ufe,
the traditional classification of society into well-defined
grades, arranged more or less in a regular series and
duly subordinated one to another, was challenged
with increasing force by a new doctrine which asserted
the rights of the individual and discovered the basis
of social order in freedom of individual enterprise.
While the former conception had disposed men to
identify intellectual with social distinctions, and resulted,
as has been seen, in an attempt to confine popular
instruction within narrow limits, the latter tended to
lay stress on the capacities which different groups
have in common and on the principle that they should

1 1

242 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

start fair in the race of life. James Mill, in an educa-
tional treatise,* aimed frankly at a gradual approach
to ' equality of instruction ' ; and the scheme for
diffusing useful knowledge was designed to compensate
individuals of every class whose opportunities of educa-
tion had been curtailed. But the conception of equal
opportunities had to be adapted to a social system
which was based on inequality, and in which differences
of acquired wealth produced gradations analogous
to those derived from inheritance and social usage.
Liberalism, in dealing with popular movements, rehed
in practice on middle-class leadership and introduced
patronage in a new guise. Insistence on the capacities
common to all classes resulted in the hypothesis of a
standard type of humanity, represented for all practical
purposes by the business man of the period, to whom
education was a means to * advancement in life.' It
would seem almost to follow that the distinctive
characteristics of particular social groups signified little
more than differences in degree of mental develop-
ment ; and the defect of certain forms of education
addressed to adult artisans in the first half of the
century may be explained, in some measure, with
reference to this assumption, which overlooked essential
differences of outlook and experience.

The claim of labour to equality with the higher
ranks in political and legal status was worked out
during a period of middle-class ascendancy.* It was
consistent with the principle entitling individuals to
equal rights, and the support which it received did

^ Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Enei/dopoedia
Britannica, vol. iv. (1824).

• E.g. the Reform Act of 1867 which extended the franchise to tirtisans,
and the Employers' and Workmen's Act of 1875 which altered the relation
of master and servant into that of two ' equal parties to a civil contract. >

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 243

not involve sympathy with the solidarity of labour.
Liberals of an earlier generation had assisted the repeal
of the Combination Laws in deference to principle and
in the hope that labour, when its right was admitted,
would have the prudence not to combine. The reply
came in the form of a movement which regarded equality
between individuals as a step to equality between social
groups, and which in its later phases has defined educa-
tion as a pubHc trust. The individual is to develop his
talents, not that he may rise to a higher position, but
that he may assist in raising the standard of his class. ^
The nucleus of this conception may be traced not only
in the early socialist movement which failed, but also
in small mutual improvement societies and discussion
circles which were a permanent feature in the life of
industrial communities, and which, in virtue of their
spontaneous origin and the spirit of comradeship uniting
their members, differed widely from the Mechanics'
Listitutes. After the collapse of Chartism in the forties,
moderate coimsels prevailed in the organisation of
labour ; but the maxim that knowledge is power was
handed down as a legacy from earlier agitations, and
the conception of education as a social lever reappeared
in the programme of the new co-operative movement.

The Mechanics' Institutes were succeeded in the
second half of the century by the formation of popular
colleges and social clubs ; a twofold movement which
laid it down as a primary condition of success that
working men had as much right as any other class to
have their feelings considered, and renounced the notion
that mental improvement was an avenue to a higher

1 Cf. the aims of Ruskin College at Oxford (founded 1899): the
student ' is taught to regard the education which he receives, not as a
means of personal advancement, but as a trust for the good of others. He
learns in order that he may raise, and not rise out of, the class to which
he belongs.'

aa

t

244 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

social career. The aim of education in the colleges was
precisely the opposite — to secure for each individual, as
one of a corporate body of fellow students, a status
which he would not lightly abandon for selfish ends.
It is useless to attempt reading into this premise any
definite social theory. That a man might become a
cultivated member of society regardless of his employ-
ment and economic position, was a postulate common
to different schools of reform, while it showed a reaction
from the commercial spirit of the age and an advance
beyond earher conceptions of status. The episode of
the Working Men's Colleges, whose fellowship included
both teachers and learners, is chiefly remarkable as an
attempt to promote intercourse between individuals
and social groups differing in class traditions and in
their outlook on life ; and, in so far as the idea of a
college came from the universities, as suggesting a link
of connection between two spheres of corporate activity.
Maurice spoke of a union between ' labour and learning ' ;
and the phrase, which describes the inner life of a college
for working men, gives also a clue to the significance
of later developments. The history of higher popular
education is not that of a single movement, but of
the interaction between two main groups of organised
effort, agreeing in certain social impulses but of inde-
pendent origin and separated by the influence of historic
antecedents ; one of them deriving its inspiration from
the universities and aiming at the extension of university
teaching, the other developing in a series of organisations
which represent the intellectual side of an industrial
movement.

Organisation is one of the chief factors differentiating
modern developments of education in every sphere
from the partial and often isolated experiments of

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 245

an earlier epoch. By the close of the century the State
had asserted in various ways its right of control, and
a large measure of initiative fell within the domain of
pubUc authorities. New sources of financial aid were
placed at the disposal of voluntary efEort; and the
claim of educational movements to pubUc support was
advanced on the general pretext that they contributed
to the solution of a problem in which the interests of
society as a whole were involved.

Yet the charge brought against organised educa-
tion is that, so far from remedying, it has served to
aggravate, social defects ; that it has nourished a dislike
for productive labour and, in stamping out barbarism,
has weakened initiative ; that it has challenged parental
authority and emancipated the yoimg before they
have arrived at years of discretion, giving them a dis-
taste for mental exertion ; that for those who pursue
education in later life the way of advance may be
plainer and the path more secure, but there is not
among adult students the same vigour and self-
dependence that was characteristic of an earlier genera-
tion ; and lastly, that in handing over responsibiUty to
the State organised societies run the risk of forgetting
their ideals.

It is much easier to draw logical inferences than to
weigh the evidence of history. Yet a study of the past
brings consolation ; for many of the evils criticised
are older than the causes alleged to explain them.
For the past hundred years, a series of statements which
suggest a growing desire for knowledge are balanced
by an equal number to the opposite effect.* Parental

* ' Propose to a working man any great measure affecting the whole
body, and he immediately asks himself the question, \Y^** *di I to get by
it ? meaning, what at this instant am I to have in my hand or in my pocket
that I should like to have ? . . . There he sticks '—Place MSS. 27827,
p. 194 (1835). ' Mechanics resist every uovelty and shrink from evury

\

246 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

apathy was lamented in the early reports of govern-
ment inspectors ; and it was complained that educa-
tion failed to reach those who were most in need of it.
On the other hand, there is evidence that the old attitude
of hostility is losing ground among a generation of
parents who have passed through the schools, and
that they are anxious that their children should appear

effort, unless it appear — and appear to their mode of comprehension — that
money will be made out of it on the spot ' — Claxton, Hints to Mechanics on
Self-Education and Mutual Instruction, 89 (1838). ' The great want of our
time I beheve to be — a disposition on the part of our industrial popula-
tion to obtain instruction. This does not at present exist ' — Society of
Arts^ Report on Industrial Instruction, 122 et passim (1853). ' I found the
towns [in Lancashire] vjring with each other in the erection of new town
halls ana in their superior style of erecting houses of business ; I found
also working men had bettered their physical condition considerably.
But I confess with pain, that I saw they had gone back, intellectually and
morally. ... In our old Chartist times, it is true, I,ancashire working
men were in rags by thousands ; and many of them lacked food. But
their intelligence was demonstrated wherever you went. You would see
them in groups discussing the great doctrines of political justice ... or
they were in earnest dispute respecting the teachings of socialism. Now
you will see no buch groups in Lancashire. But you will hear well-dressed
working men talking, as they walk with their hands in their pockets, of
Co-ops . . . and their shares in them or in building societies. And you
will see others, Uke idiots, leading small greyhound dogs, covered with
cloth, in a string ! They are about to race and they are betting money as
they go ! . . . Except in Manchester and Liverpool, ... I gathered no
large audiences in Lancashire. Working men had ceased to think, and
wanted to hear no thoughtful talk ; at least, it was so with the greater
number. From Lancashire I passed into Yorkshire, . . . and then . . .
began to lecture among the Northumberland coUiers. They heard me
eagerly '—Life of Thomas Cooper, by himself, 392 sq. (1869-70). ' The
difficvdty of persuading workmen to Usten to anything which does not
concern pleasure or profit has long been acknowledged, and is, I think, even
stronger than it used to be' — Arnold Toynbee, Co-operative Congress,
1882. ' The people have all been busy getting on, some too busy to think
of anything except their work, some too set on the pleasiu^es now opened
to them to care for knowledge. ... It may be a stage in progress ' —
Toynbee Hall Report, 1899-1900.

On the other hand, the correspondence in the Mechanics' Magazine
(1823-) throws some hght on the attitude of inteUigent workmen in the
early part of the last centiiry ; we find genuine complaints of the diffi-
culties in the way of self-culture, which have been repeated continually
ever since. A citizen of Birmingham, writing to Hume in 1824, describes
the artisans of the town as * rife with that sanguine and independent energy
which naturally results from partial and newly acquired knowledge

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 247

decently clad.* In this respect compulsion may exercise
the same stimulus as the pressure formerly used by
voluntary societies ; and, as instruction is better adapted
to vital needs, its appeal extends. Again, the success
of adult education in former years is liable to be
exaggerated, while its failure is overlooked. Institu-
tions suffered from lack of resources and tried methods,
and from an isolation which made their position in-
secure. Much of the enthusiasm for knowledge arose
from inexperience, and failed when it was put to
a practical test. The heroic self-dependence of the
People's College at Sheffield belongs emphatically to
a stage of transition ; for it is seen that advanced study
cannot be self-supporting. The action of the State,
in promoting elementary education, has at any rate

untempered by experience. They are . . . enthusiastically excited with
the first undisciplined impulse of intellectual power ... a set of intelli-
gent, able and generally meritorious fellows ' — Place MSS. 27827, p. 28.
Master engineers and others, examined before the Select Committee on
Machinery 1824, gave evidence of a general desire for scientific knowledge,
and an improvement in dress, habits and intelligence among the better
class artisans — ibid., p. 70 sq. Cf. a typical passage in the opening number
of the Flint Glass Makers' Magazine (1850), advocating the education of
' every man in our trade beginning at the eldest and coming down to the
youngest. ... If you do not wish to stand as you are and suffer more
oppression, we say to you, get knowledge, and in getting knowledge you
get power. . . . Let us earnestly advise you to educate ; get intelligence
instead of alcohol — it is sweeter and more lasting ' — Webb, TradeUnionistn,
179. The first collective demand for education, so far as I can discover,
belongs to the year 1830, when 700 mechanics of Birmingham signed a
petition, on the reconstitution of King Edward's Grammar School, praying
that part of the endowment might be set apart for the benefit of the poorer
classes.

^ Booth, Final Volume, 202 sq. ' As regards the argument that by
allowing children to attend school at three years of age [instead of five]
the responsibility of the parent is weakened and their control over the
children diminished to the moral detriment both of parents and children,
the Committee are confident that in practice the general result is often the
other way. It is a common experience to find that children who are
attending school are cleaner and better clothed than those who remain
at home, and that there is a marked deterioration in the general appearance
of the children in any district on Saturdays and during the holidays ' —
Report of Consultative Committee {Board of Education) upon school attend-
ance of children below the age of five (1908), 26.

248 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

multiplied the number of students who are competent
to proceed to a higher level ; while increased aid has
reduced the financial difficulty which handicapped the
poor. Whether the growth of opportunity will tend
to weaken idealism and the impulse to self-sacrifice,
remains to be seen. At present the conditions which
the question presupposes do not exist. Difficulties
which hinder systematic study have not ceased, and
many of them are only beginning to attract attention.
Economic hindrances are as numerous in years of
prosperity as in a period of distress. Those who com-
pare the history of recent movements with the efEorts
of individual students in the earher half of the last
century, will have little reason to lament a decay of
enterprise. The amount of personal service rendered
by artisans in the instruction of their own class has
certainly increased. In this, as in other spheres, a
study of history is the ' best cordial for drooping hearts.'
The demand for knowledge has been subject to
fluctuations which are influenced by external circum-
stances and events. One is tempted to seek a con-
nection between educational movements and the
vicissitudes of trade. In some cases a depression of
ttade, reducing the hours of labour, has produced an
increase in the attendance at places of instruction.^ As
the discipline of adversity has marked a turning point
in the career of individual students, so a general dis-
placement of labour may revive the feeling that know-
ledge is power, and that, if the people could imderstand
the problem, they might effect a solution. Conversely,
on the return of prosperity, idealism may yield to the
pursuit of material interests and the most active minds

^ Growth of night schools and adult classes in Lancashire during the
depression caused by the American Civil War, 1861-5. Binns, Century
of Education, 180 ».

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 249

may be absorbed in business routine. So it seemed to
some of the Chartist leaders who had lived through
the hungry forties ; and the same impression has been
recorded in more recent times. But this theory does
not account for all the facts. Commercial depression
may remove the obstacle of * overtime,' but it also
breeds a deadening sense of insecurity. It may inspire
heroism and self-sacrifice, but it diminishes financial
resources and diverts energy from normal pursuits.^
On the other hand, the rise of the Mechanics' Institutes
and the success of University Extension among the
miners of Durham are difficult to explain on the hjrpo-
thesis which has been suggested ; and, if the impulse
which created the Working Men's Colleges was derived
from Chartist imrest, it was during the years of
prosperity which followed that it produced plenteous
results. It is safer to draw a general parallel between
the periodic recurrence of educational movements and
the revivals which occur in the sphere of commerce
when trade is at its lowest ebb. The opportunity for
awakening enthusiasm comes at the moment when
previous efforts have most clearly failed.*

The demand is not constant, but it may be growing

^ E.g. the collapse of a remarkably successful branch of the University
Extension movement, in the Tyne district, owing to the Miners' strike in
1887.

* Complaints of indi£ference come mostly from persons "who are engaged
in awakening interest, and are generally a prelude to some new enterprise.
' Times change rapidly ; the spirit of the eighties, or even of the early
nineties, has already passed away. ... In education there has indeed
been immense progress ; the machinery of schools has developed, and
opportunities are at everyone's doors. But the enthusiasm for education
has gone ; no one to-day would venture to raise the old cry of learning
and culture for the masses with very much hope of an eager response ' —
Toynbee Hall Report, 1900-1 ; cf. account of a meeting at Toynbee Hall, in
which reference was mads* to the enthusiasm aroused among working men
in the North by University Extension in the early eighties, which, it
seemed, no longer existed {Co-operative News, December 19, 1903).
This was on the eve of the Tutorial class movement.

250 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

by degrees more stable and comprehensive. Every
established institution has its remnant of serious
students whose industry varies in direct proportion
to the standard demanded of them.^ Of this, the
history of institutions so various as the Adult Schools,
Ruskin College, and the College in Crowndale Road,
contains ample evidence ; and the same class of artisans
who frequented Huxley's lectures in Jerm}Ti Street
in the fifties* have attended in equal number and with
the same regularity a course at Westminster in recent
years. The spread of organisation in different forms
among the working class has brought forward indi-
viduals keenly alive to the need of education, very
often possessed of original ideas, and ready to assiune
the role of leadership. It is through the influence
of such men that no movement has ceased without
transmitting a heritage to later generations. Certain
localities, again, occupy a central place in the history
of adult education and have exercised a continuous
influence. Thus it is that every new outburst of en-
thusiasm contains some of the force of earlier move-
ments, and that influences which formerly flowed in
separate channels gradually converge. The Workers'

* ' The history of the [University Extension] movement shows that
the number of real students and the seriousness and value of their work
has been in direct proportion to the extent of the demand made by the
University Authority on the intellectual energy and industry of the
student ' — Dr. R. D. Roberts, University Extension under the Old and the
New Conditions (an address at the Cambridge Summer Meeting, 1908), 17.

* Monday evening lectures on science and its applications at the Museum
of Practical Geology, Jermyn Street, during the winter ; six courses of
six lectures each by gentlemen connected with the Museum, fee 6d.
Every man had to obtain a foreman's certificate, stating that he was a
honA fide artisan. Accommodation for 600, applications usually reached
1000 ; 600 would drop to 450 or 420 as the days lengthened, but attend-
ance generally regular. The students, chiefly superior artisans, attended
carefuUy and asked questions at the close of the lecture. ' A more intelli-
gent, more industrious or a more careful set of listeners . . . are rarely to
be met with '—Committee on Public Institutions, 1860, QQ. 165-S5, 547-67,
691-619, 1435, 1487.

THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK 251

Educational Association (1903) has drawn together a
variety of movements, and a common impulse has
elicited their latent powers. In another sense, forces
which have strengthened the demand for knowledge
may have introduced new limitations. The aims of
study have been more clearly defined by industrial
progress and by political changes which have opened
to the industrial classes a larger share in public ad-
ministration ; and the demand has been encouraged
through the application of science to new spheres of
human activity. It is possible that this twofold de-
velopment may exercise, at least temporarily, a narrow-
ing influence. The interest formerly aroused by liberal
culture may have yielded unduly to a demand for
knowledge with a direct bearing on technical efficiency
or political and economic aims. But the value of any
form of study will depend ultimately on the spirit in
which it is pursued. Where time is limited and
specialisation is synonymous with thoroughness, method
rather than subject-matter must be the test of a liberal
education. It is foimd that technical or professional
studies, pursued on scientific lines, possess a much
greater educational value than was formerly admitted ;
and there are akeady signs that, as the idea of citizen-
ship is more clearly appreciated, a broader type of
human culture may be evolved from forms of instruction
which have a reference to definite social needs. ^ It
may be too soon to rely much on the experience of
the Tutorial classes ; but their history suggests that,
where the spirit of learning has been awakened, the
range of intellectual interests naturally extends.

It would be difficult, even with the aid of more

^ Thiis a Tutorial class in ' Civics ' was planned by Professor Geddes in
Battersea (1907) with the definite object of broadening the study of social
and economic questions.

252 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

accurate statistics tlian are generally available, to
measure the extent to which an interest in serious study-
has found expression among different sections of the
working class. The rolls of membership in Working
Men's Colleges and Institutes, and the classification of
attendances at Extension lectiKes and classes pursuing
a continuous course of study, include individuals in
every kind of emplojrment, from miners and highly
skilled artisans to factory hands and labourers. Except
in the mining centres and a few industrial towns, the
most regular and serious students appear to have
belonged generally to the superior grade of artisans,
to whom may be added about an equal number of
school teachers, clerks, small tradesmen and assistants.
There is, throughout, a tendency for movements to
lose hold of the class to whom they originally appealed ;
but working-class institutions during the past sixty
years have not failed in this respect to the same extent
as the Mechanics' Institutes in the earher half of the
last century.

INDEX

AoEicuLTURAL population, 15-39,
130-4, 228; compared with
manufacturing classes, 10, 15,
39, 132-4 ; state of education,
155, 160, 163n., 196, 206n.,
228, 238 ; phases of prosperity,
25-8, 53/1. See also commons,
enclosures, open-field, self-
government, yeomanry

Amusements : rustic, 6, 18, 23, 25,
27, 63, 65, 100 ; suppression of,
30, 34, 109n., 135; 'rational,'
34»., 139 ; connected ^vith edu-
cation, 154, 177, 183, 225 sq.

Apprenticeship, 104, 132, 210n.,
238

Arnold, Matthew, 152n., 163».

Bamford, Samuel, 84»., 99n.,
120n., 155»., 199»., 203 sq., 218,
219ft.

Bell, Dr. Andrew, 150 sq., 154

Bentham, 112, 138, 207

Bible, the EngUsh, 105, 109»., 146

Birkbeck, 142, 169, 172 sq., 181

Birmingham, 9, 42, 44, 231, 246». ;
Artists' Repository, 187 ; Bro-
therly Society, 141 ; Schools and
Institutes, 153ri., 156»., 183,
2477i.; Sunday Society, 141, 155 ;
tracts, 138n.

Book clubs, 141, 193

Booth survey (London labour), 233

British and Foreign School Society,
151, 152n., 158, 162 sq., 169n.,
185, 232».

Brougham, USn., 175, 192, 194,
200

Carri^re aux talents, 67 sq., 71, 75,
82-6, 91, 95n., 104, 113, 147,
242, 247».

Chap-books, 98, 101

Chartism, 183 sq., 198, 201, 210-
14, 217, 219 sq., 224 sq., 243,
24671., 249

Christian Knowledge, Society for
Promoting, 89n., 93, 187, 190,
194, 196ft.

Church, the: mediaeval, 23-5, 81,
89, 118; Roman Catholic, 32 ;
eighteenth century, 17 sq., 114,
117 sq. ; evangelical movement
in, 89n., 117, 119, 138 sq. ; oral
teaching, 17, 25, 100, 148;
catechism, 33»., 82, 109, 112». ;
control of schools, 89, 94, 147, 163

Classics, knowledge of, 67, 68».

Class-teaching (adult), 171, 177

Clubs, Working Men's, 183, 241,
243

Cobbett, 16»., 27n., 191, 199, 219,
229n.

Coffee-houses, 102, 198

Colleges, Working Men's, 183 sq.,
241, 243 sq., 249, 250, 252;
People's College, Sheffield, 113,
184, 247 ; Ruskin College, 243».,
250

Combe, George, 168 sq.

Comenius, 87n., 94

Commerce : effect on social ideals,
4 sq., 28 sq., 127-30; moral and
social effect, 7 sq., 10-14, 69 sq. ;
influence on education, 34, 86,
Sin. ; commercial crises con-
nected with social movements,
209 sq., 248 sq.
253

254

INDEX

' Common School,' the, 87n., 94,

113, 168».
Commons, overcrowding of, 15re.,

26«., 29/1., 128
Composition, popular, 68w,, 75 sq.,

79, 191, 202-5
Cooper, Thomas, 90, 161, 195,203-5,

225, 246».
Co-operation, 38, 212, 232 ; So-
cieties, 187, 220 sq., 246n. ;

education, 201, 216»., 217n.,

221 ; revival at Rochdale, 213,

217, 221, 223, 241
Corn Laws, repeal of, 211, 228, 232;

Anti-Corn-Law League, 206n.,

212, 215?i., 219
Cornwall, 8, lln., 50, 55«., 73, 98,

120 ; miners, 47 sq., 229 sq.
Corporate spirit in education, 142,

150»., 174, 182-4, 243 sq.
Cranmer, 83n., 104w., 146

Debates (and Discussion Circles),
116, 211n., 141, 170, 172, 183,
213h., 216tt.

Defoe, 9, 13, 71, 128

Democratic tendency in education,
ix, 75, 79, 142, 147, 218. See
also — Carriere aux talents. Com-
mon School

Devon, 8, lln., 50, 55»., 73

Districts, comparison of, 8 sq,, 48-
79, 235 sq.

Drama, rehgious and popular, 25,
100

Factory svstem, 4, 46, 53, 72,
129, 131-3, 137, 231 ; Factory
Acts, 135, 164, 230, 232

Family life : rural (eighteenth cen-
tury), 16 sq., 65 sq.; home edu-
cation, 16/1., 140h. ; economic
disturbance to, 46, 131-5, 137,
235, 239; child labour (ob-
stacle to education), 157, 230.
See also Parents

Feudalism, 22-5, 52, 56-9

Folklore, 6, 18, 21?i., 41n., 72 sq.

Foundling Hospital, 96, 153

French peasantry, 63, 124 sq.

French Revolution, 37w., 121-5,
137

Friends, Society of, 155n., 241

Froebel, 167

Gilds, 25, 82n., 106-8, 117;
religious, 109, 116, 118

Governing classes, attitude to edu-
cation, 83rt., 105, 111 sq., 138,
146-50, 199, 241

Government, local : breakdown of,
44, 106-8, 114, 136; vestries,
35, 45, \22n.

Hampden clubs, 198, 218 sq.
Hartlib, 87n., 94
Hoole, 87/1.

Huguenot weavers (Spitalfields), 9,
44 sq., 49/1., 188/1.

Economic stimulus to education,

viii, 11, 48, 104, 238 sq., 251.

See also Industrial Revolution,

SpeciaUsation
Eden (' State of the Poor '), lln.,

13, 34n., 39, 63/i., 65, lOn., 139n.
Eisteddfod, 76, 79/i.
Employers, schools founded by,

164-7 ; ' social betterment,' 46,

156, 164 sq.
Enclosures, agrarian, 4, 6, 8, 20,

28, 29n., 30, 34, 55, 135 sq. ;

social effects of, 14n., 31, 64,

127, 130 sq., 133, 228

India, 8, 37

Industrial Revolution, 1, 8, 15, 52,
61, 71, 74, 115-17, 126-35, 164,
203, 217, 241 ; stimulus to
education, 42, 134 sq., 141, 149,
156, 170

Industrial training, 140, 151-3,
168/1., 239

KiNGSLEY, 196n., 201, 205
Knight, Charles, 98/i., 99/i., 122n.,

153/1., 156/1., 165»., 183, 189,

192-5, 201

INDEX

255

Laissez-fair^ 111, 115 sq., 136,
241-3 ; educational aims, 138,
242

Lake District, the, 8n., 47, 50 ;
social condition, 36, 60, 61-71 ;
education, 67 sq.

Lancashire, 72n.., 203, 232 ; edu-
cation, 120, 189n., 197, 248n. ;
popular movements, 201, 214,
217, 219w., 246».

Lancaster, Joseph, 149-51, 154

Lectures, 122, 141 sq., 170 sq., 177
sq., 180, 183, 225, 250

Leeds, 172

Liberal (opposed to technical)
education, 113, 173, 184,243 sq.

Libraries, 142, 226 ; institutional,
165»., 174, 180, 183, 185, 187,
198n., 216ra., 225 ; school, 153,
185, 187; village, 138w., 187,
189n., 196, 230; public, 186;
collected by working men, 49».,
172, 188 ; Library Acts, 181

Literature, cheap, 76, 97-101, 122,
187, 189-95; propagandist,
138re., 191, 193, 222, 226. See
also Political movements

Liverpool, 231, 235ri., 246». ; edu-
cation, 174 sq., 178, 187

London : social condition, 10,
43, 230 sq., 234 - 6, 237n. ;
libraries, 186 ; Mechanics' In-
stitute, 173-5, 177, 181 ; educa-
tional societies, 172n., 216».,
225 ; schools, 93, 96 sq., 154 sq.,
162 sq., 169, 185, 225; news-
papers and literature, 101, 190w.,
193, 196 sq., 198 ; lectures in
East End, 170 ; London artisans
and political movements, 120,
125, 215-18

Lovett, WUUam, 169, 172»., 214,
216»., 224-6, 227n.

Lyceums, 182, 197

173-5, 178, 181 sq. ; popular
movements, 199, 217n., 218

Mandeville, 33«., 112, 148

Manners, leformation of, 29, 30, 34

Manorial system, decay of, 18, 25,
53»., 107 sq., 124 ; manorial
courts, 19»., 23, 29, 34»., 53n.,
58, 108

Manufacturing classes, 10, 12, 39-
42, 115, 126-35, 216, 230-2,
236 ; state of education, 154 sq.,
160, 170, 196 sq., 199, 218

Marshall (' Rural Economy '), In.,
Un., 12n., 15n., 19n., 20n., 34n.,
35, 37n., 38, 50n., 53n., 59n., 71

Mathematical studies, 48, 67, 68».,
77, 230n.

Maurice, F. D., 182, 244

Mechanics' Institutes, 86n., 141 sq.,
169-83, 185, 187, 189, 197, 202,
233n., 243, 249, 252 ; Unions of,
180, 189».

Methodism, 33, 41, 47 sq., 53, 73 sq.,
79, 116-21, 142, 152n., 155».,
197, 218, 223, 229

Midlands : economic and social de-
velopment, 4, 10, 13, 14»., 43».,
64, 66 ; education, 158, 166».,
170

Mill, James, 13ri., 171»., 242

Mill, John Stuart, 22, 47»., 206 sq.

Milton, 94

Miners, 45-8, 229 sq. ; education,
48, 160, 170, 187, 196, 230, 246».,
249

' Minstrelsy,' 72, 202

Monitorial system, 149, 154, 162

More, Hannah, 38n., 138, 148n.

Mulcaster, 88

Museums, 161, 172, 174, 178;
Museums Act, 186

Music, 6, 21»., 25, 27, 174, 183;
societies, 45, 116, 165».

Mutual Improvement Societies, 171
sq., 187, 216, 243

Maine, Sir H., 19n., 37»., 38».

Manchester, 41/i., 49w., 53w., 71 sq.,
231, 246». ; Chetham Library,
186; Schools, 82, 84n., 154,
I59»., 164, 165». ; Institutes,

National Society, 150, 232n.
Natural history, 45, 49n., 197
Newspapers and magazines, 75,

101 sq., 172»., 186, 188, 191-4,

197-201

256

INDEX

Newsrooms,
North of
condition
lln., 38,
Midlands
52 sq., 57
73 sq., 75
in, 67 sq.

141, 174, 186, 197

England, the : social

(eighteenth century),

70-3 ; compared with

and South, 10, 13n.,

-61, 63-6 ; with West,

77; superior education

See also Lake District

Reading Rooms, 122w., 154n.,
165n., 174, 183

Reformation, the, 24, 29 sq., 32,
34 sq., 108 sq. ; effect on educa-
tion, 81, 85, 145 sq.

Reform Bill (1832), 113, 126, 231 ;
(1867), 242ft.

Rescue work, 7, 91, 113, 139, 152 sq.

Open-field system, 6, 29, 66n.,
127 ; social aspect, 14n., 16 sq.,
31, 34n., 128, 133

Owen, Robert, 166 sq., 212, 213,
218, 220-3, 226 sq. ; Owenite
propaganda, 201, 211, 217 sq.,
220-3, 243. See also Co-oper-
ation

Parents, attitude to education, 48,
69?^., 75, 140ft., 235, 246

Paternal Government, 27-35, 38,
108-12, 114 sq., 124, 210

Pestalozzi, 162, 167

Petty, 94

Place, Francis, 174, 195, 213 sq.,
216n., 227, 231, 245ft.

Political institutions, educational
test of, 22, 206

Political movements, 120, 121-6,
135, see also Chartism, Hamp-
den Clubs ; ' Knowledge is
Power,' 207 sq., 22ln., 243, 248 ;
mental stimulus, 141, 170, 176,
207 sq., 224 ; propagandist litera-
ture, 120, 122, 138n., 188, 192,
197-201

Poor Law, 114, 131, 135, 203n.,
210n., 234 ; education imder,
87n., 96, 187 ; Commission
(1909), 234

Priestley, 115

Puritanism, 87%., 94-6, 109n., 110,
114, 117, 120, 147

Racial influences, 49-51, 65-7,

62, 74-9
Reading Circles, 67, 73, 116, 119 sq.,

141, 188

Schools :

Adult, 141 sq., 155n., 15671.,

241, 250
Charity, 7, 33n., 80, 87 n., 91,

93, 97, 103, 111-13,147,151,
153, 164ft.

Elementary, 81, 88, 151 sq., 157-

69
Grammar, 53, 68, 80-91, 93ft.,

103 sq., 247ft.
Infant, 151ft., 161?i., 167 sq.
Mediaeval, 80 sq., 89
Night (and Evening Classes),

94, 140, 153, 156 sq., 166,
168ft., 172ft., 178, 248ft.

Private Adventure, 89 sq., 160

sq., 232ft.
Ragged, 152ft., 153
Secular, 168 sq.

Sunday, 75, 139-41, 148n., 150».,
153-5, 157, 218, 225

Science, 77, 141 sq., 171, 173 sq.,
178 sq., 180, 250«.

Scotland, 66ft., 132ft. ; education,
16ft., 34, 67, 146

Self-government (rural commimi-
ties), 18ft., 21, 27, 29, 31, 34ft.,
35-9, 58

Sheffield, 187. See also Colleges

Smith, Adam, 8, 39, 112, 115, 131,
137

Smith, Sydney, 138ft., 150ft.

Social divisions, 103, 176, 233 sq. ;
influence on education, 68, 81,
103, 105, 112, 146, 151w., 152,
241

Social ideals : mediaeval, 103-6 ;
sixteenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, 5, 108-13, 129 ; related
to educational ideals, 34, 91,
104 sq., 111-13, 241-4. ^ee also
Laissez-faire

INDEX

257

Socialism. See Owen
Socialism, Christian, 182 sq.
Specialisation, industrial, 63n.,

126 ; mental and moral effects,

8, 39-42, 128-31, 134 sq., 237 ;

argument for education, 8, 15,

239
State intervention, 94-7, 145-7,

161 sq., 245-8 ; Committee of

Council, 151«., 162, 240
Students, poor, 75-7, 98, 99n.,

171, 195-7, 203-5
Swift, 105».

Teachers, 89 sq.^ 165 ; training of,
93, 159, 163 ; working men,
141; 171

Technical instruction, 173, 184,
240

Towns: movement to, 4, 15, 127,
230; self-government, 16, 107
{see Gilds) ; growth of corporate
consciousness, 44, 134 ; mental
stimulus, 44 sq., 134 ; problems,
43 sq., 232-8 ; town and country,
10, 15, 33, 42-4, 100, 165

Toynbee, Arnold, 246n.

Trade Unionism, 111, 113, 116 sq,,
191n., 203»., 211-13, 216 sq.,
221 sq., 236n., 240, 247». ; Com-
bination Laws, 125, 136, 211,
243

Tudor policy : social, 28-30, 106,
108-10, 115, 127, 135 sq.; edu-
cational, 80-2, 85, 104, 146 sq.

Universal instruction, viii, 88,

94, 103, 147, 240
Universities, 68, 69n., 76, 80, 82,

85n., 86n., 96, 240 ; access to,
71, 81»., 84n., 95n. ; Universities
and Labour, 142, 244; Univer-
sity Extension, 230, 241, 244,
249,25071., 252 ; Tutorial Classes,
249?^., 251
Useful Klnowledge, Diffusion of,
181, 192-4, 240, 242

Voluntary effort, 92 sq., 97, 147,
149-51, 162-9, 187, 245

Wales, lln., 64, 66n. ; education,

Z3n., 73-9, 95 sq., 147, 164».,

175
War, American : of Independence,

120, 122 ; Civil, 214, 248n.
Wars, Napoleonic, 123, 137 ; close

of, 126, 198 sq., 203, 210
Wesley, 41n., 43n., 46, 118, 138».,

223
Wilderspin, Samuel, 167 sq.
Workers' Educational Association,

vii, 261
Working Men's Association (1836),

224-7

Yeomanry, 26, 35-9, 59 sq., 83». ;

decline of, 4, 34, 70, 727i., 81n. ;

educational tradition, 53, 68
Yorkshire : social condition, 12,

14»., 36, 62 sq., 55n., 58 sq., 73 ;

education, 72, 91n., 164n., 172,

176, 180 sq., 189n. ; popular

movements, 214
Young, Arthur, 5, In., 12, 13n.,

14n., 16»., 27»., 34»., 36, 128n.,

129

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