foundations.  I saw a good deal of the industrial life of Birmingham, and had a sight of the Black Country by day and by night.  Joseph Chamberlain was then a young man; I believe he was a Sunday school teacher.  The Unitarian Sunday Schools taught writing and arithmetic as well as reading.  In the terrible lack of national day schools many of the poor had no teaching at all but what was given on Sundays, and no time on other days of the week to learn anything.  I could not help contrasting the provision made by the parish schools of Scotland out of the beggarly funds or tithes given for church and schools out of the spoils of the Ancient Church by the Lords of the Congregation.  Education was not free, but it was cheap, and it was general.  Scotchmen made their way all over the world better than Englishmen mainly because they were better educated.  The Sunday school was not so much needed, and was much later in establishing itself in Scotland.  Good Hannah More taught girls to read the Bible under a spreading tree in her garden because no church would give her a place to teach in.  “If girls were taught to read where would we get servants?” It was an early cry.

CHAPTER IX.

MEETING WITH J. S. MILL AND GEORGE ELIOT.

I leave to the last of my experiences in the old world in 1865-6 my interviews with John Stuart Mill and George Eliot.  Stuart Mill’s wife was the sister of Arthur and of Alfred Hardy, of Adelaide, and the former had given to me a copy of the first edition of Mill’s “Political Economy,” with the original dedication to Mrs. John Taylor, who afterwards became Mill’s wife, which did not appear in subsequent editions; but, as he had two gift copies of the same edition, Mr. Hardy sent it on to me with his almost illegible handwriting:—­“To Miss Spence from the author, not, indeed, directly, but in the confidence felt by the presenter that in so doing he is fulfilling the wish of the author—­viz., circulating his opinions, more especially in such quarters as the present, where they will be accurately considered and tested.”  I had also seen the dedication to Harriet Mill’s beloved memory of the noble book on “Liberty.”  Of her own individual work there was only one specimen extant—­an article on the “Enfranchisement of women,” included in Mill’s collected essays—­very good, certainly, but not so overpoweringly excellent as I expected.  Of course, it was an early advocacy of the rights of women, or rather a revival of Mary Wollstoneeraft’s grand vindication of the rights of the sex; and this was a reform which Mill himself took up more warmly than proportional representation, and advocated for years before Mr. Hare’s revelation.  For myself, I considered electoral reform on the Hare system of more value than the enfranchisement of women, and was not eager for the doubling of the electors in number, especially as the new voters would probably be more ignorant and more apathetic than the old.