society. In this town there is ignorance, dense and dark; in that
town, education – the best of education; that which the grown man
from day to day and year to year furnishes for himself and
maintains for himself, and in right of which his education goes on
all his life, instead of leaving off, complacently, just when he
begins to live in the social system. Now, which of these two towns
has a good man, or a good cause, reason to distrust and dread?
“The educated one,” does some timid politician, with a marvellously
weak sight, say (as I have heard such politicians say), “because
knowledge is power, and because it won’t do to have too much power
abroad.” Why, ladies and gentlemen, reflect whether ignorance be
not power, and a very dreadful power. Look where we will, do we
not find it powerful for every kind of wrong and evil? Powerful to
take its enemies to its heart, and strike its best friends down –
powerful to fill the prisons, the hospitals, and the graves –
powerful for blind violence, prejudice, and error, in all their
gloomy and destructive shapes. Whereas the power of knowledge, if
I understand it, is, to bear and forbear; to learn the path of duty
and to tread it; to engender that self-respect which does not stop
at self, but cherishes the best respect for the best objects – to
turn an always enlarging acquaintance with the joys and sorrows,
capabilities and imperfections of our race to daily account in
mildness of life and gentleness of construction and humble efforts
for the improvement, stone by stone, of the whole social fabric.
I never heard but one tangible position taken against educational
establishments for the people, and that was, that in this or that
instance, or in these or those instances, education for the people
has failed. And I have never traced even this to its source but I
have found that the term education, so employed, meant anything but
education – implied the mere imperfect application of old,
ignorant, preposterous spelling-book lessons to the meanest
purposes – as if you should teach a child that there is no higher
end in electricity, for example, than expressly to strike a muttonpie
out of the hand of a greedy boy – and on which it is as
unreasonable to found an objection to education in a comprehensive
sense, as it would be to object altogether to the combing of
youthful hair, because in a certain charity school they had a
practice of combing it into the pupils’ eyes.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I turn to the report of this
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Institution, on whose behalf we are met; and I start with the
education given there, and I find that it really is an education
that is deserving of the name. I find that there are papers read
and lectures delivered, on a variety of subjects of interest and
importance. I find that there are evening classes formed for the
acquisition of sound, useful English information, and for the study
of those two important languages, daily becoming more important in
the business of life, – the French and German. I find that there
is a class for drawing, a chemical class, subdivided into the
elementary branch and the manufacturing branch, most important
here. I find that there is a day-school at twelve shillings a
quarter, which small cost, besides including instruction in all
that is useful to the merchant and the man of business, admits to
all the advantages of the parent institution. I find that there is
a School of Design established in connexion with the Government
School; and that there was in January this year, a library of
between six and seven thousand books. Ladies and gentlemen, if any
man would tell me that anything but good could come of such
knowledge as this, all I can say is, that I should consider him a
new and most lamentable proof of the necessity of such
institutions, and should regard him in his own person as a
melancholy instance of what a man may come to by never having