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    S*»^Bi^B^a^iPi8^Sl_ TIE[^i<i^E-^;D^Bl.-B...

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    Leabnin Q Andworked Learning And Working...

    " n -, i *«*« - * riato «>** axm * em * W >* te & slawof * be -wilL But nphotmrn axe ^ SJ vKJrSK ^ SSSwSigt . o ^ rkers , Who , Mr . Maurice deejay fi £ v ££% 3 tt £ ^ varfce ^ i ^ ai ^ euce , however , hayetald ^ nVbWfc . tfTL ^ mrir in ' Set strives , by patient ; experiments to emulate Afkwright ' s SvS £ ?^ ' ^ ith ihe - iaL ^ rem ^ atmg also his Wealth ? Hdw * Ve MecWb / tnstitutes succeeded ? In every town the last place to seekfora mSSc ii thelnstitute , which falls to the share of young tradesmen , clerks , * m « l others better pleased by entertainments than by lectures , and ; profoundly indifferent , for the most part , to the higher studies of politics and history . The Institute is usually a concert or newspaper-room ; though the influence ^ the Society of Arts is effecting a gradu alch ange . 1 rivohty , or ^ omethin ^ Worse * is the source of Englishlndifference , wherever avarice ; = «« f * hft rtdnfroHina : passion . We have seen with gladness , that the war , that of

    whatever evil it has produced , has evolved some feeling better than cupidity : for the English nation , credulously persuaded that it fights for a principle , has ' offeredin the clearest terms to pay ( partly by loans ) the ransom of liberty . StiH , if only to enable him to be magnanimous , the Englishman yearns for money . From the axiom that " learning is the minister of freedom and order , " the reader is not to suppose that Mr . Maurice loves " order " in the imperial sense . Probably , there is nowhere so much order as in a P ? n , except in a lunatic asylum ; but the peace desirable in a state is that in which men are self-poised , restrained by conscience or by discretion , and actuated by motives of mutual sympathy- A man gagged and manacled is at rest j but , in this sense , a toad in a stone is tie realisation of that calm socialism in which every one comprehends his part in the natural drama , and is contented with it . Stating , therefore , that education is nothing if it do not prepare men for the harmonious order of a free society , Mr . Maurice explains the deficiencies of our actual system .

    " We have stated the case to ourselves thus : — " These boys will hereafter have to toil in some profession or other , as statesmen , as soldiers , as sailors , as landlords , as cultivators of the land , as lawyers , as physicians , as divines . God forbid that they should not toil ! God forbid that they should become idlers in the land ! But they may become drudges instead of workers . They will , unless they are men as well as workers . Then their work will be freef brave , intelligent . The practice of their professions will be honourable , the science of them will be expanded . If they are swallowed up in their work *—if they think of themselves only as landlords , as soldiers , as sailors , as physicians , —the profession will sink into a craft ; its mercenary ends will be chiefly regarded . It will lose its old dignity , it will conquer no new regions of thought and experience . Therefore , for the sake of Work , let us have an education which has not merely a reference to Work . " We have been so vehement in these assertions , that we have even exaggerated the application of them , and so have weakened tleir effect . We have so much dreaded to make the Education of our Schools and Universities professional , that we have kept it

    at a wide , almost hopeless , distance from professional life . So those effects have followed Which I spoke of in my first Lecture . The higher adult Education , that which our ancestors described by the word Faculties , that from which our Universities started , and which ; id their proper characteristic , has been buried under the mere school education . The teaching of boys has given the tone and form to the discipline which should direct the thoughts of men , when they are about to plunge into the business of the world . Hence that business has become , unhappily , divorced from the previous study . It is in danger of becoming a mere absorbing practice . The springs which should have fed it have been choked up or diverted elsewhere . I rejoice to think that we have suffered less from these causes than we might reasonably have expected . There is , I am-sure , among the professional men of England a manliness and nobleness that are scarcely to be found anywhere . Every one of us must have had proofs inius intercourse with physicians of ttieir freedom from sordid feelings—proofs to be recollected with silent gratitude and humiliation .

    The endeavour to impregnate the working classes with a sympathy for music has been the most successful movement of our time . In Manchester the numerous operatives who have evinced a capacity for science prove that itis not the kind of Work , but the condition of the worker , that degrades . Moreover , in the oratory of this class ethics and metaphysics appear through the cloud of language as distinctly as political speculations . Even ttie mistakes of the industrious classes often arise from their attempts to applyto the solution of their doubts and sufferings higher methods of reasoning than their experience enables them to wield . But the theory here explained supposes that it ia essential for working ' men to receive that sort of instruction which , instead of distinguishing them according to their occupations , addresses their common humanity , and leads them from the ramifications of society to the confluence of human thoughts and feelings . It should be regarded as the great end of their studies to raise their human

    qualities , and not arbitrarily to separate the useful from the entertaining . It should allow them to select those branches of pursuit which are most in conformity with the original bias of their minds . It should never allure them to devote more time to general study than is compatible with their social occupations ; though the truth should never be forgotten , that between all studies there ai-o proper relations , so that hours devoted to the acquisition of knowledge are not lost , oven in the most worldly point of view . The discourses on the Religion of Rome deal as largely with ancient as with modern history . It is here that the idea rises of that fatherly government which Mr . Maurice exalts as the Hope of the world . The state of Rome was composed of a thousand families in one . Children , in relation to their . parents , lived as slaves ; men , in relation to the state , had no capacity tnatot obedienceisut i

    except , Dy me jungiy , ns wuu ua vy mo «» - «» period , the principle was condemned : —the first impeded the growth of the commonwealth ) the second reduced it to corruption . To this simple theory of government , in faftt , young nations resort , in their ignorance , and old nations in their degeneracy . V oltairo wrote a theatrical eulogy of China as a -country ruled by pioty ; he has been imitated by others who have descanted on the , golden age of Peru ; but is there an affinity between those artificial syBtemuwhich sacrificed the individual life to » the hfo of the state , nnd the natural Union of man with man in the earlier days of Rome ? At all events the fatherly principle , wherever it has been established in its pure form , has ohanged , in the course of time , into an artificial system , with a parental executive , and a people not filial , but servile . Wo scarcely know what the original patriarchs were , but wo know what emperors have been , and that they have chiefly cultivated the equivocal virtue of the Roman and the RuBaimv ^ hich compelled them , in the unmo of disci p line , to kill their sons . Wo know , also , that u populous state , where individuals have

    com-Iplex relations and interests , cannot long . preserve'the form of a patriarchal [ society * but must choose between representative and despotic institutioas . The short duration of a system , it is true , does not impugn Us excellence ; ifpr , by this-test , liberty itself is disgraced by the superior permanence of tyranny . The Hebrews had nearly a thousand years of national life * . bu $ only three centuries of civil freedom .. The historic independence of Greece had vanished in six hundred years ; Athens fell under Philip within two centuries and a half from the rule of her first archon .. How soon the pDorian and ^ Stolian colonies withered in the Eastern waste . How soon Cyrene , Syracuse , and Massilia perished in the West . How few ages passed before Rome was contented with bread and games . Not one of the Italian

    republics survived three hundred years . Not one of the Slavonian states that aspired to be an example of liberty could hold its own against imperial aggression . In Germany , and the Netherlands also , free states have been unsuccessful experiments . But what is to be the practical result of Mr . Maurice ' s theory ? Is all regular government to be superseded by a vague consciousness in men ' s hearts that a paternal Providence controls the worfd ? Or does he ask for a Theocracy vested in human hands ? We scarcely know , for the writer appeal's at times to argue with himself . We have , at least , no glimpse of the moral which Mr . Congreve and Mr . Tennyson enforce , that " a simple great one" is needed to silence the cabals of faction , and to impel the policy of empires along an unswerving line . " Simple great ones" have , in most instances , ruled by virtue of their contempt for the human species , and always by an unjustifiable assumption of fatherly attributes . An extract will prove that Mr . Maurice invites no Asiatic absolutism to throw its purple shadows over England : —

    There probably never was a society so brilliant as that in France before the Revolution ; none in which so many schemes of social life were discussed with so much lightness and gracefulness . There probably never was a time in which theorists dwelt so little upon the human relationships , in which the practical indifference to them was greater . Yet when the earthquake came which shook France and all the Latin nations , far more than the Revolution of the sixteenth century had shaken the German , the first word that one hears is the word Brotherhood ; all men of all classes are to embrace each other as brothers . How they were to do so , no one could tell them ; how brotherhood could be prevented from leading to mutual destruction , was a lesson which statesmen and philosophers had not learnt . The very name seemed to terrify them , as if it was one which they had never heard before , as if all disorder and destruction were involved in it . Still it did burst out of the hearts of the very lowest people . They had been taught other , phrases and symbols which they could repeat and use occasionally ; this was the one they clung to habitually ; this lived on

    amidst the death of constitutions , lived on through the fires which it seemed itself to have kindled . It terrified us in England and Scotland , often perhaps frightened us ottt Of all propriety and wisdom . But it did not exactly frighten us in the same manner as it did the people on the Continent . For by degrees the impression on our minds became stronger , that fraternity was not a bad thing in itself , that it was bad only because there needed something else to be'joined with it . Brotherhood seemed to us a poor and miserable thing if it was separated from Fatherhood . Our old Roman doctors had taught us that ; we had found from a higher oracle what their dim and mysterious utterances signified , to what they were pointing . It did not , therefore , cause us ' delight to see this belief of fraternity trampled under foot by a military tyrant ; that might be necessary , might be beneficial on the whole for the world ; at least it implied that there must be a universal society somehow , and that a great Will must rule it . But this kind of universal government , this kind of Will , looked to us very unsightty ; this we thought we were bound to struggle with and put

    down . That this obligation is still laid upon us , that we ought to encounter the evil principle which substitutes mere sovereignty for fatherly authority , in whatever form it embodies itself , against whatever persons it puts forth its proud and godless pretensions , we are all , I trust , convinced . We feel that we ought to show all the tribes of the earth , that the true fatherly principle , instead of involving abject slavery , ia the ground of all morality , of reciprocal rights and duties , of justice , of freedom . Thence , passing to another question- — It has been difficult , while I have been speaking of the perpetuity of the Roman dominion under its different phases , not to think of prophecy , a prophecy in the more usual and modern sense of the word , which went out from your city , and which has awakened some speculations , possibly also some searchings of hoart , on both sides of the Tweed , if not on the banks of the Tiber . You will easily suppose that I allude to an oracle which is stamped with the high authority of your representative . He

    looks forward to a time when an artist shall be sketching the ruins of St . Paul s from a broken arch of London Bridge . In that time he expects that the Vatican may still be standing in all its glory . There are those who have complained of this sentence , ns unpatriotic , and as offering encouragement to those who hate us . I cannot join in that censure . I cannot conceive that a patriot has any higher duty than to remind his countrymen of the instability of thoir mere material greatness , to tell them that the buildings which bear witness of the extent and mightiness of their commerce may fall along with those in which they and their fathers have worshipped . Would to God that the image of that future painter rose oftcner before us , to remind ua that every single person in the crowds which aro passing every hour and moment over London Bridge , —that every man who has knelt in St . Paul ' s before or since the fire , — has an immortality which does not belong to ships , or towers , or temples 1 The objection to Mr . Macaulay ' s words might have taken and may still take another form . If posterity does not deal more gently with that which our ago loaves behind it , than wo have dealt with the works of our forofathere , the critic of some distant period may

    nfllrm that one of our most illustrious cotemporarios was so misled by his prejudices against the men of another nation and another faith , that ho fancied ho could persuade thorn , —with all the momorials of ruin before their eyes , with words that intimate the periahablenoss of all mortal things continually on their lips , —that tho houses which they wow inhabit have some special exemption from tho general law , and that tho palaces of popes will have a duration which has boon denied to tho palaces of emperors . Wo may bo sure that there was no such uncharitable judgment or purpose in the mind of tho eloquent writer when ho gave forth those sentiments . Wo may take it for granted that ho only wished to impress us , by a contrast wiuoii would strike us as more vivid and startling than any other , with a losaon r « fl ij *\""*» ourselves which wo lmvo all need to lay deeply to hoart . You would not icoJ " »™ _"" diminished his claims upon your esteem—you would foci that ho migmonroa im « ^ ho told you . -porhaps ho has told you already , in words ™ f y ?" Z ™ filature that oven your city , notwithstanding its grand associi ^ ona vrltht no o and w ^ th tho recorda of history , though every old and mot ° ™ ™ " ^ ffer that / _ of warriors with sword and pen who have fought your butties , mty » tenco which tho greatest cities of tho world huvo auflbrod . Avinon The Lectures on tho Religion of Borne , though vogue m purpose , evinco tho high and masterly intellect of tho writer .

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• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Sept. 22, 1855, page 19, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_22091855/page/19/