to, or are decried on the ground that in the views of the
objectors, education among the people has not succeeded, the term
education is used with not the least reference to its real meaning,
and is wholly misunderstood. Mere reading and writing is not
education; it would be quite as reasonable to call bricks and
mortar architecture – oils and colours art – reeds and cat-gut
music – or the child’s spelling-books the works of Shakespeare,
Milton, or Bacon – as to call the lowest rudiments of education,
education, and to visit on that most abused and slandered word
their failure in any instance; and precisely because they were not
education; because, generally speaking, the word has been
understood in that sense a great deal too long; because education
for the business of life, and for the due cultivation of domestic
virtues, is at least as important from day to day to the grown
person as to the child; because real education, in the strife and
contention for a livelihood, and the consequent necessity incumbent
on a great number of young persons to go into the world when they
are very young, is extremely difficult. It is because of these
things that I look upon mechanics’ institutions and athenaeums as
vitally important to the well-being of society. It is because the
rudiments of education may there be turned to good account in the
acquisition of sound principles, and of the great virtues, hope,
faith, and charity, to which all our knowledge tends; it is because
of that, I take it, that you have met in education’s name to-night.
It is a great satisfaction to me to occupy the place I do in behalf
of an infant institution; a remarkably fine child enough, of a
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vigorous constitution, but an infant still. I esteem myself
singularly fortunate in knowing it before its prime, in the hope
that I may have the pleasure of remembering in its prime, and when
it has attained to its lusty maturity, that I was a friend of its
youth. It has already passed through some of the disorders to
which children are liable; it succeeded to an elder brother of a
very meritorious character, but of rather a weak constitution, and
which expired when about twelve months old, from, it is said, a
destructive habit of getting up early in the morning: it succeeded
this elder brother, and has fought manfully through a sea of
troubles. Its friends have often been much concerned for it; its
pulse has been exceedingly low, being only 1250, when it was
expected to have been 10,000; several relations and friends have
even gone so far as to walk off once or twice in the melancholy
belief that it was dead. Through all that, assisted by the
indomitable energy of one or two nurses, to whom it can never be
sufficiently grateful, it came triumphantly, and now, of all the
youthful members of its family I ever saw, it has the strongest
attitude, the healthiest look, the brightest and most cheerful air.
I find the institution nobly lodged; I find it with a reading-room,
a coffee-room, and a news-room; I find it with lectures given and
in progress, in sound, useful and well-selected subjects; I find it
with morning and evening classes for mathematics, logic, grammar,
music, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, attended by upwards of
five hundred persons; but, best and first of all and what is to me
more satisfactory than anything else in the history of the
institution, I find that all, this has been mainly achieved by the
young men of Glasgow themselves, with very little assistance. And,
ladies and gentlemen, as the axiom, “Heaven helps those who help
themselves,” is truer in no case than it is in this, I look to the
young men of Glasgow, from such a past and such a present, to a
noble future. Everything that has been done in any other
athenaeum, I confidently expect to see done here; and when that
shall be the case, and when there shall be great cheap schools in
connexion with the institution, and when it has bound together for