your institution should have educated those who are now its
teachers. That would be a very remarkable fact. Supposing,
besides, it should, so to speak, have educated education all around
it, by sending forth numerous and efficient teachers into many and
divers schools. Suppose the young student, reared exclusively in
its laboratory, should be presently snapped up for the laboratory
of the great and famous hospitals. Suppose that in nine years its
industrial students should have carried off a round dozen of the
much competed for prizes awarded by the Society of Arts and the
Government department, besides two local prizes originating in the
generosity of a Birmingham man. Suppose that the Town Council,
having it in trust to find an artisan well fit to receive the
Whitworth prizes, should find him here. Suppose that one of the
industrial students should turn his chemical studies to the
practical account of extracting gold from waste colour water, and
of taking it into custody, in the very act of running away with
hundreds of pounds down the town drains. Suppose another should
perceive in his books, in his studious evenings, what was amiss
with his master’s until then inscrutably defective furnace, and
should go straight – to the great annual saving of that master –
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
and put it right. Supposing another should puzzle out the means,
until then quite unknown in England, of making a certain
description of coloured glass. Supposing another should qualify
himself to vanquish one by one, as they daily arise, all the little
difficulties incidental to his calling as an electro-plater, and
should be applied to by his companions in the shop in all
emergencies under the name of the “Encyclopaedia.” Suppose a long
procession of such cases, and then consider that these are not
suppositions at all, but are plain, unvarnished facts, culminating
in the one special and significant fact that, with a single
solitary exception, every one of the institution’s industrial
students who have taken its prizes within ten years, have since
climbed to higher situations in their way of life.
As to the extent to which the institution encourages the artisan to
think, and so, for instance, to rise superior to the little
shackling prejudices and observances perchance existing in his
trade when they will not bear the test of inquiry, that is only to
be equalled by the extent to which it encourages him to feel.
There is a certain tone of modest manliness pervading all the
little facts which I have looked through which I found remarkably
impressive. The decided objection on the part of industrial
students to attend classes in their working clothes, breathes this
tone, as being a graceful and at the same time perfectly
independent recognition of the place and of one another. And this
tone is admirably illustrated in a different way, in the case of a
poor bricklayer, who, being in temporary reverses through the
illness of his family, and having consequently been obliged to part
with his best clothes, and being therefore missed from his classes,
in which he had been noticed as a very hard worker, was persuaded
to attend them in his working clothes. He replied, “No, it was not
possible. It must not be thought of. It must not come into
question for a moment. It would be supposed, or it might be
thought, that he did it to attract attention.” And the same man
being offered by one of the officers a loan of money to enable him
to rehabilitate his appearance, positively declined it, on the
ground that he came to the institution to learn and to know better
how to help himself, not otherwise to ask help, or to receive help
from any man. Now, I am justified in calling this the tone of the
institution, because it is no isolated instance, but is a fair and
honourable sample of the spirit of the place, and as such I put it
at the conclusion – though last certainly not least – of my
references to what your institution has indubitably done.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I come at length to what, in the humble