Christian meekness which they evinced, that out of those 360 clergymen no more than two murmured at the fresh trouble that was imposed upon them; and even those two transmitted the required returns together with their remonstrances? He knew that, in making this allusion to the accident out of which the renewed applications in question originated, he ran the risk of incurring some blame; but he was content rather that blame should be imputed to him, than that he should fail to do justice to a body of men who had so handsomely and so liberally exerted themselves to remedy the loss of their own labors. The same reverend gentlemen had since answered even private letters connected with this subject, and letters written under no Parliamentary authority whatever. He had himself sent private letters, again and again, to them, always making his most humble apologies for the trespass committed on their leisure. Another proof of the good will to the cause which he was embarked in was this: that if any one would look through the digest, he would find, that in many cases a foundation was supported entirely by the charity and exertions of the incumbent himself. When he said this he spoke of the working parish priests, of those meritorious individuals who had given up a portion of their money and their time, to their great honor. He did not speak of the more dignified prelate, who could not, of course, be expected to reside upon the one particular spot; nor of the pluralist, who could not, if he would, reside there (a laugh); but he meant the working parish minister, the true and effective labourer in the vineyard. He had said thus much in order to make out his case for intrusting the Protestant clergymen of the Establishment with the execution of the plan, rather than those of any other church. (Hear, hear) The digest was at length prepared, and in stating its principal features, its object, its character, many words would be necessary. In order to apply it to Scotland and Ireland, he had felt it to be his duty to preface it with certain keys or guides, explanatory and illustrative of its nature and contents. Two of those keys had already appeared. The digest itself consisted of an abstract of the informations obtained, and in some parts recapitulated the very words of those informations. His late lamented and honorable friend, the member for Bedford (Mr. Whitbread), had proposed a plan upon a similar subject, but of a very different nature; Mr. Perceval objected to it; not as to its principle, but because he thought previous inquiry necessary: he said, "Have a commission first, and then see whether, from the information to be derived under it, a new and better plan may not be the result." Such a plan was now ready, and it was founded on the basis Mr. Perceval had recommended. He held in his hand a calculation clearly proving how wide of the mark writers upon

these subjects had been in former years, and how very ignorant they were of satistics. It was extracted from a book written in 1806 by Dr. Colquhoun—a man who had been always considered, both here and on the Continent, of great authority upon matters. connected with political economy. For himself he would own, that. he had always been doubtful of the infallibility of such sweeping. calculations as the Doctor was accustomed to indulge in; nor could he ever reconcile to himself the absolute truth of a numerical calculation, which went to ascertain, even to the fraction of a single woman of the town, how many were the females in London living by prostitution. He thought that Dr. Colquhoun had been much mistaken in many respects, but he was never so wide of the mark, by one half, as in this calculation. It was-that there were two millions of poor children in England and Wales who were in want of education, and 50,000 in London alone. Now it did so hap-. pen that there were not two millions of poor children at any one time in existence in England and Wales; because the number of children, of an age capable of education, was reckoned at one-ninth part of the whole population of a country at any time. He (Mr. Brougham) estimated them at one-tenth, although he knew that his opinion was contrary to that of almost every foreign writer on these subjects. At this rate, however, the population of England and Wales ought to be 20 millions; and if the children of the rich. were added in an equal proportion (and he should be sorry if every other man were a pauper), the population should be 40 millions.. The next position of this author was, that there were 1,750,000. individuals in Great Britain and Ireland, who grew up without, education; and it was one of which he would say, without troubling the House further on the subject, that it was equally absurd with the other. Here they had one calculation which omitted the children of the rich altogether, and another which made the number of poor children greater in amount than the total number of children in the country. He went on, however, to hazard another › calculation, which was yet more untenable; it was rather a proposition indeed; for he said, let there be built a school in each parish, capable of containing 800 poor children. Now he (Mr.. Brougham) had looked into this matter, and he found that there were only 50 parishes in the kingdom which did contain 800 such children; and that 700 parishes only contained even so many as 400 children. What was yet more, the average amount, taken upon all the parishes of England and Wales, was only 85 and not 800 children. (A laugh.) So that, in fact, if Dr. Colquhoun had been talking about the empire of China, he could not have arrived at conclusions much more erroneous. It only. served to show how surely, and how fatally, false deductions were

derived from false premises. There was one difficulty which had formerly stood in the way of such a plan as that he had now to submit, which no longer existed: it was one which had not, in fact, been often attempted to be urged against the progress of knowledge, even in a time of general ignorance-he meant the objection that education would prove a detriment to the poor. He purposely avoided using the term "lower orders," not from any deference to those who had so strenuously objected to it, and whose counsels and evil courses, if they had been followed, would have made them low indeed; but he should call them poor in contradistinction to the rich, upon much the same principle as this House was called the Lower House. He meant to cast no reflection on them, but rather to consider them as derived from the same common forefathers: he meant not any thing like reproach, for what would the rich be without the poor? where would the pyramid be without its base? In France, in the year 1582, under the reign of Henry III., the States-General met, and the noblesse of the day presented a petition to the Sovereign, praying that pains and penalties might be imposed upon those who would not send their children to school; and nearly at the same time, the Scotch Parliament (perhaps the most aristocratical body then in existence) passed a law that every gentleman should send his eldest son at least, to school, in order to learn grammar. He had also seen a charter of King David, in 1241, in which mention was made of public schools in Roxburgh; another charter dated 1163, spoke of the schools of Stirling; another, in 1244, noticed the number of schools at Ayr; and a fourth, dated in 1256, made honorable mention of the praiseworthy manner in which the schools of other districts were conducted. Shortly before the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1680, the most intolerant period of French history, was founded the first society in the world, and, for a long time, the only one for the advancement of education: its founder was the celebrated Père de la Salle, and the order was denominated Les Frères des Ignorants, and their vow was the foundation of schools. In 1724, which was also a most intolerant period, Pope Benedict issued his celebrated bull, authorising and encouraging the extensive establishment of places of education. [Here the honorable and learned gentleman read a long extract from the bull.] He would mention another authority in favour of the point :-La Salle's system went on prosperously for some time, and so effectual was it, that the Lieutenant of the police of the Pope, in the Fauxbourg St. Antoine, at Paris, reported that his department, in consequence of the good order introduced, cost 30,000 francs a-year less than formerly. About the same time a remarkable circumstance happened in this country; in 1714, Mandeville

and

published his "Fable of the Bees," which, in 1723, was presented by the grand jury of Middlesex, for irreligion, for decrying the universities, and for reprobating the instruction of youth; letter was addressed to Lord C- in which an attempt was made to confute Mandeville; thus, strange as it might seem, an impious man and an atheist at that time was occupying the ground since mistakenly filled (though only for a moment) by the pious and religious, who, in our own day, worked upon by the false philosophy and evil consequences of the French revolution, had endeavoured to discourage the progress of knowledge. Mande ville charged the educators of his time with instilling principles of disloyalty, and his antagonist defied him to the proof: in the same way, he (Mr. Brougham) defied those few who still opposed his endeavours, to show the evils resulting from the extension of knowledge. The last authority he quoted was that of the present Pope, who, in a letter to his Legate, in Ireland, recommended the establishment of Roman Catholic schools, for the promulgation of the true faith, as the surest method of repelling the attempts of unbelieving Protestants, and the designs of the adversary. The whole of this branch of his argument might be summed up in the memorable words of the great Lord Bacon-Lucis enim naturam puram, &c.—that the light of knowledge was in itself pure and bright, unless perverted and polluted by wickedness or imperfect instruction; and that the channels by which it poured in upon the human species ought to be ever kept open and undefiled. (Cheers.) It had been objected, that he (Mr. Brougham) wished the poorer classes to be taught Greek, Latin, and languages, which, indeed, would draw them from the cultivation of the soil, He agreed, however, with one of the wisest men that had ever lived, that to one of the rank to which he alluded a knowledge of all the languages of the globe could not, in point of utility, be put in competition with an acquaintance with a single mechanical art. Milton, the most learned man of a learned age, endowed with many rare accomplishments of genius and of acquisition, had maintained something like this species of heresy, in his "Small Tractate of Education:" his words were these-"And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he had not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only." However, without dwelling upon theoretical opinions, he would quote a practical authority of a remarkable nature, in a letter from Gilbert Burns, the brother to that genius. whose name would be handed down to posterity as a striking proof of the advantages of early education in his native country, improved.

by that love of reading and study which youthful habits had pro duced. The letter was addressed to Dr. Currie, and it was written by a hand that perhaps only half an hour before had held the plough:- "I can say (observed Gilbert Burns) from my own experience, that there is no sort of farm-labour inconsistent with the most refined and pleasurable state of the mind that I am acquainted with from reading, thrashing alone excepted; that, indeed, I always considered an insupportable drudgery, and I think the ingenious mechanic, who invented the thrashing-machine, ought to have a statue among the benefactors of his country in a corresponding niche with the first introducer and cultivator of potatoes. I maintain, moreover, that as the sort of dim religious awe is wearing off, which used hitherto to guard the morals of the people in this part of the world, from a great variety of causes, men will go suddeniy into an an opposite extreme, if they be not so educated as to enable them to see the separation between the es ence of true religion and the gross systems so often confounded with it."-Such remarks surely did great credit to a mere peasant. (Hear.) He would now call the attention of the House to the result of the inquiries that had been made upon this subject. There were now educated at unendowed schools 490,000 children, and to these were to be added about 11,000 for 150 parishes from which no returns had yet been made. In the endowed schools 165,432 children were educated; making a total (exclusive of the 11,000) of 655,432. In England it appeared that on the average one-fourteenth or one-fifteenth of the whole population was educated. The Breslaw tables, on which the calculations were made in France, included children between the ages of 7 and 13 years; but he (Mr. Brougham) had gone through the laborious task of checking those tables by the digests now before the House, which digests were made up from the actual statements of clergymen, from the personal knowledge of their own parishes; and the result was, that instead of one-ninth being the ratio of children requiring education, as compared with the whole mass of the population, he found that it was nearer one-tenth. Now in England the proportion of those actually receiving education was only one-fourteenth or one-fifteenth, so that there appeared to be a considerable deficiency. Another deduction ought, however, to be made for the unendowed dame-schools, where 53,000 were edu cated, or rather not educated, for it amounted to no education at all, since the children were generally sent too young, and taken away just when they were competent to learn. He admitted, notwithstanding, that these dame-schools were most useful, on account of the regularity and discipline they inculcated. The average means of mere education, therefore, was only in fact one-sixteenth in England: yet even this scanty means had only existed since