The duty of man is to see that not a grain is piled
upon that load beyond what Nature imposes; that injustice
is not added to inequality.
A LIBERAL EDUCATION; AND WHERE TO FIND IT
[1868.]
The business which the South London Working Men’s
College has undertaken is a great work; indeed, I
might say, that Education, with which that college
proposes to grapple, is the greatest work of all those
which lie ready to a man’s hand just at present.
And, at length, this fact is becoming generally recognised.
You cannot go anywhere without hearing a buzz of more
or less confused and contradictory talk on this subject—nor
can you fail to notice that, in one point at any rate,
there is a very decided advance upon like discussions
in former days. Nobody outside the agricultural
interest now dares to say that education is a bad
thing. If any representative of the once large
and powerful party, which, in former days, proclaimed
this opinion, still exists in a semi-fossil state,
he keeps his thoughts to himself. In fact, there
is a chorus of voices, almost distressing in their
harmony, raised in favour of the doctrine that education
is the great panacea for human troubles, and that,
if the country is not shortly to go to the dogs, everybody
must be educated.
The politicians tells us, “You must educate
the masses because they are going to be masters.”
The clergy join in the cry for education, for they
affirm that the people are drifting away from church
and chapel into the broadest infidelity. The
manufacturers and the capitalists swell the chorus
lustily. They declare that ignorance makes bad
workmen; that England will soon be unable to turn out
cotton goods, or steam engines, cheaper than other
people; and then, Ichabod! Ichabod! the glory
will be departed from us. And a few voices are
lifted up in favour of the doctrine that the masses
should be educated because they are men and women
with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and suffering,
and that it is as true now, as ever it was, that the
people perish for lack of knowledge.
These members of the minority, with whom I confess
I have a good deal of sympathy, are doubtful whether
any of the other reasons urged in favour of the education
of the people are of much value—whether,
indeed, some of them are based upon either wise or
noble grounds of action. They question if it
be wise to tell people that you will do for them,
out of fear of their power, what you have left undone,
so long as your only motive was compassion for their
weakness and their sorrows. And, if ignorance
of everything which it is needful a ruler should know
is likely to do so much harm in the governing classes
of the future, why is it, they ask reasonably enough,
that such ignorance in the governing classes of the
past has not been viewed with equal horror?
