ECCE, CONVERTIMUR AD GENTES.'

I CANNOT help asking myself how I come to be standing here to-night. It not unfrequently happens to me, indeed, to be invited to make addresses and to take part in public meetings,—above all in meetings where the matter of interest is education; probably because I was sent, in former days, to acquaint myself with the schools and education of the Continent, and have published reports and books about them. But I make it a general rule to decline the invitation. I am a school-inspector under the Committee of Council on Education, and the Department which I serve would object, and very properly object, to have its inspectors starring it about the country, making speeches on education. An inspector must naturally be prone to speak of that education of which he has particular cognisance, the education which is administered by his own Department, and he might be supposed to let out the views and policy of his Depart

An Address delivered to the Ipswich Working Men's College.

ment.

Whether the inspectors really knew and gave the Department's views or not, their speeches might equally be a cause of embarrassment to their official superiors.

However, I have no intention of compromising my official superiors by talking to you about that branch of education which they are concerned in administering,elementary education. And if I express a desire that they should come to occupy themselves with other branches of education too, branches with which they have at present no concern, you may be quite sure that this is a private wish of my own, not at all prompted by my Department. You may rely upon it, that the very last thing desired by that Department itself, is to invade the provinces of education which are now independent of it. Nobody will ever be able to accuse the Committee of Council of carrying an Afghanistan war into those provinces, when it might have remained quietly within its own borders. There is a Latin law-maxim which tells us that it is the business of a good judge to seek to extend his jurisdiction :—Boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem. That may be characteristic of a good judge, but it is not characteristic of a British Government in domestic affairs generally, certainly not in the concerns of education.

And for this reason: because the British Government

is an aristocratic government. Such a government is entirely free from the faults of what is commonly called a bureaucracy. It is not meddlesome, not fussy, not prone to seek importance for itself by meddling with everybody and everything; it is by nature disposed to leave individuals and localities to settle their own affairs for themselves as much as possible. The action of indi

viduals and of localities, left to themselves, proves insufficient in this point and in that; then the State is forced to intervene. But what I say is, that in all those domestic matters, such as the regulation of workhouses, or of factories, or of schools, where the State has, with us, been forced to intervene, it is not our aristocratic executive which has sought the right of intervention, it is public opinion which has imposed the duty of intervention upon our aristocratic executive. Our aristocratic system may have its faults, but the mania for State-interference everywhere is not one of them. Above all, in regard to education this has been conspicuously the case. Government did not move in the matter while it could avoid moving.

Of course, even when it was at last obliged to move, there were some people to be found who cried out against it for moving. In the early days of the Committee of Council, one clergyman wrote that he was not going to

suffer Lord John Russell, or any other Turkish Bashaw,' to send an inspector into his schools; and Archdeacon Denison threatened, as is well known, to have the poor inspector drowned in a horsepond. But these were

eccentric men, living in a fantastic world of their own. To men who inhabit the real world, it was abundantly apparent that our Government moved in the matter of public education as late as it could, that it moved as slowly as it could, as inoffensively as it could; and that throughout, instead of stimulating public opinion to give it additional powers, it has confined itself to cautiously accepting and discharging the functions which public opinion has insisted on laying upon it.

You may be sure that this will continue to be the case; that if more part in public education comes to be assigned to the Government in this country, it is not that the Government seeks it, it is that the growth of opinion will compel the Government to undertake it. So that if I speak of the desirableness of extending to a further class of schools the action of the State, it is well understood that I am not, as in bureaucratic Prussia I might be, revealing the secret aims and ambitions of the Education Department. All the aims of that Department have been clearly manifested to be the other way.

Well, but why am I here? I am here, in the first

place, because I heard that your Working Men's College, which holds its annual meeting to-night, and which I was asked to address, is the largest body of the kind in England. Bodies of this kind, with their classes, their lectures, their libraries, their aspirations, are a testimony, however poor and imperfect may be the use often made of them, they are, as it seems to me, a testimony, they are a profession of faith, which is both affecting and valuable. They are a profession of belief in the saving power of light and intelligence, a profession of belief in the use and in the practicability of trying to know oneself and the world, to follow, as Dante says, virtue and knowledge.

No one can accuse us English, as a nation, of being too forward with such professions of faith in the things of the mind. No one can accuse us of not showing ourselves enough aware, how little good may in many cases come from professions of this sort, how much they may disappoint us, what a contrast their performance often is to their promise, how much they often bring with them which is hollow and nonsensical. We are very shy, as every one knows, of all public homage to the power of science and letters. We have no National Institute. In a short time there will be held in Paris a reception, as it is called, of one of the most famous men of letters in France, or indeed in all Europe,-M. Renan,-at the French