usefulness which lies stretched out before it. My first
strong impulse still would be to exchange congratulations with you,
as the members of one united family, on the thriving vigour of this
strongest child of a strong race. My first strong impulse still
would be, though everybody here had twice as many hundreds of hands
as there are hundreds of persons present, to shake them in the
spirit, everyone, always, allow me to say, excepting those hands
(and there are a few such here), which, with the constitutional
infirmity of human nature, I would rather salute in some more
tender fashion.
When I first had the honour of communicating with your Committee
with reference to this celebration, I had some selfish hopes that
the visit proposed to me might turn out to be one of
congratulation, or, at least, of solicitous inquiry; for they who
receive a visitor in any season of distress are easily touched and
moved by what he says, and I entertained some confident expectation
of making a mighty strong impression on you. But, when I came to
look over the printed documents which were forwarded to me at the
same time, and with which you are all tolerably familiar, these
anticipations very speedily vanished, and left me bereft of all
consolation, but the triumphant feeling to which I have referred.
For what do I find, on looking over those brief chronicles of this
swift conquest over ignorance and prejudice, in which no blood has
been poured out, and no treaty signed but that one sacred compact
which recognises the just right of every man, whatever his belief,
or however humble his degree, to aspire, and to have some means of
aspiring, to be a better and a wiser man? I find that, in 1825,
certain misguided and turbulent persons proposed to erect in
Liverpool an unpopular, dangerous, irreligious, and revolutionary
establishment, called a Mechanics’ Institution; that, in 1835,
Liverpool having, somehow or other, got on pretty comfortably in
the meantime, in spite of it, the first stone of a new and spacious
edifice was laid; that, in 1837, it was opened; that, it was
afterwards, at different periods, considerably enlarged; that, in
1844, conspicuous amongst the public beauties of a beautiful town,
here it stands triumphant, its enemies lived down, its former
students attesting, in their various useful callings and pursuits,
the sound, practical information it afforded them; its members
numbering considerably more than 3,000, and setting in rapidly for
6,000 at least; its library comprehending 11,000 volumes, and daily
sending forth its hundreds of books into private homes; its staff
of masters and officers, amounting to half-a-hundred in themselves;
its schools, conveying every sort of instruction, high and low,
adapted to the labour, means, exigencies, and convenience of nearly
every class and grade of persons. I was here this morning, and in
its spacious halls I found stores of the wonders worked by nature
in the air, in the forest, in the cavern, and in the sea – stores
of the surpassing engines devised by science for the better
knowledge of other worlds, and the greater happiness of this –
stores of those gentler works of art, which, though achieved in
perishable stone, by yet more perishable hands of dust, are in
their influence immortal. With such means at their command, so
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
well-directed, so cheaply shared, and so extensively diffused, well
may your Committee say, as they have done in one of their Reports,
that the success of this establishment has far exceeded their most
sanguine expectations.
But, ladies and gentlemen, as that same philosopher whose words
they quote, as Bacon tells us, instancing the wonderful effects of
little things and small beginnings, that the influence of the
loadstone was first discovered in particles of iron, and not in
iron bars, so they may lay it to their hearts, that when they
combined together to form the institution which has risen to this
majestic height, they issued on a field of enterprise, the glorious
end of which they cannot even now discern. Every man who has felt
the advantages of, or has received improvement in this place,