1837] EDUCATIONAL SCHEMES 41 about 50,000, of which 40,000 were voluntary without endowment. Since 1820 the number of children attending school had grown from 600,000 to 1,120,000-730,000 of whom were paying for their education. He in no sense wished to acknowledge the right of every individual to education. His plan was the establishment of an Education Board of commissioners, among whom should be some of the Ministers of the Crown. To them should be intrusted the duty of distributing Parliamentary grants and charitable funds. All grants were to be refused to schools of an exclusive character, where no churchman or no dissenter, as the case might be, could act as teacher. Any parish might form for itself a school committee, composed of ratepayers, with the right to levy a rate for school purposes. Religious teaching, while unsectarian, was to be maintained. The shortness of the session prevented the full consideration of the Bill. In June Mr. Wise, Chairman of the Central Society for Education, moved in the Lower House for an address to the Queen, asking plan. her to appoint commissioners, with the same sort of 1838. powers as those above mentioned. The debate brought out the inefficiency of the existing system. In five towns of Lancashire, in a population of 841,000, only 27,000 children went to school. In Bethnal Green, where there were 14,000 children between five and fourteen, only 2000 received any education. Lord John Russell did not consider the time arrived for any general scheme, and therefore opposed Mr. Wise. The motion was negatived, but by a majority of four only. Mr. Wise's Lord John 1839. So close a division induced Lord John Russell himself in the next session to produce a scheme. Although it came definitely before the House only when an increase of £10,000 to Russell's plan. the education grant was demanded, the plan had already been explained in Parliament, and formulated in an order of Council to which publicity had been given, and which had already roused the opposition of the Church, and called forth very numerous adverse petitions. The plan consisted in the first place, like Brougham's, of the establishment of a Committee of Council, consisting of members of the Government, who were to be an Education Board. The Board was to be intrusted with the distribution of the Parliamentary grant. Of this £10,000 was confined to the two Societies which had already received it; but in the distribution of the residue the hands of the Committee were not tied. They were neither compelled to follow the existing custom of making grants only to meet local subscriptions, nor to give only through the medium of the two great Societies. No school was to receive any share unless it submitted to inspection. For the supply of teachers a Normal School, under Government, was to be established, where children and teachers were to be trained in the principles of Christianity, but the rights of conscience were to be respected. Opposition to it in both Houses. When the matter came before the House it at once encountered a storm of opposition. It placed, it was urged, control over the religious education of the people in the hands of a political Board. It allowed that Board to give grants to all sorts of schools; it withdrew from the Church what had been something like a monopoly, for the grants to meet subscriptions had naturally fallen principally to the wealthiest body. Lord Stanley, though he had himself originated a similar plan in Ireland, led the Opposition. According to him (and he supported it by statistics), the present system was working extraordinarily well. Even Lord Ashley, actuated by Protestant enthusiasm, opposed the scheme. It was well supported by Ministers and their followers, and the need of education was placed in a very glaring light. The statistics of ignorance were gloomy, and a great proportion of the returned scholars proved on inquiry to be Sunday scholars only. At Newcastle 49 out of every 100 children received no instruction. At Gateshead 13 per cent. only attended schools, and in seventeen large towns the average was only 1 in 12. In Manchester it was only 1 in 35. Of the 3,000,000 children in England half were in a state of complete ignorance. But the dread of touching the monopoly of the Church was such that it was only by a majority of five that the Government was allowed to bring in its Bill. When £30,000 was demanded for education a fresh opposition was raised, and Lord Mahon went so far as to attempt to prove that education out of the hands of the clergy was a direct cause of crime. A division showed a majority of only two in favour of the grant. Of course the Opposition in the Lords was still more decided. It was led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who produced resolutions of great length stating that the ministerial scheme was open to objections with reference to the arrangements made for the religious instruction of children and other important details, and that the House of Lords therefore found itself obliged to present a humble address to the Queen to put an end to all immediate steps with respect to the establishment of general education. One Bishop alone, the Bishop of Norwich, supported the Bill. As usual in the Upper House, the Conservatives had it all their own way; the resolutions of the Archbishop were carried by a majority of 111. 1839] IGNORANCE OF THE PEOPLE 43 The Ministry, however, did not quite give way. They dropped their Normal School, but retained their Committee of Council; induced the Queen to express her disapproval of the Lords' address; and proceeded to carry out their system of grants. The indignant clergy at first refused to accept any share, but the process of self-denial did not long continue; they shortly contrived to absorb nearly the whole of it, and the dissenters were still left unprovided for. Small though this beginning of national education is, it at least shows the advance of social interest in the country, at the same time that it reveals the mass of ignorance which was ready to Illustration of of the people. He lend itself to the plausible harangues of discontented the ignorance demagogues. It is difficult to find a more complete proof of ignorance, at all events in the case of the agricultural poor, than an incident which occurred at Boughton, near Canterbury, in the spring of 1838. A certain John Thom, a Cornishmau, had some years before made himself notorious by marching about in rich dresses, and calling himself Sir William Courtney, Knight of Malta. His personal presence, which was striking, and a certain gift of eloquence had given him some influence in the neighbourhood. He was subsequently found to be mad, and was placed in confinement, but on proving harmless had been intrusted to the care of his own family. escaped from them and reappeared in Kent, resumed his old position, persuaded the farmers that he was by right a very wealthy man, that he would shortly enter into his property and give them their land rent free. He proceeded to inveigh against all laws, more particularly the new Poor Law, collected a band of followers, and marched about asking the labourers to join him. He then went a step further, and declared that he was the Messiah. His strange pretensions received a certain support, and the increase of his fanatical followers appeared so dangerous that it was thought necessary to attempt his apprehension. He shot the constable who tried to take him. Soldiers were summoned from Canterbury. He called upon his followers to behave like men, and at once stepped before them and shot the officer in command. The soldiers then fired, and eight or ten of the rioters, with Thom among them, were killed. The legal proceedings which followed this little riot exhibit the most extraordinary credulity on the part of the people, who had believed in the miracles of Thom, had received the Eucharist from his hands, had worshipped him, and fully believed that he and they were rendered invulnerable. Suffering, ignorant, organised for definite opposition to their capi Rise of talist masters, irritated by the unavoidable harshness which attended the honest working of the new Poor Law, driven to despair by a system of competition which seemed to demand from them all the toil while the capitalists got all the profits,—the people listened willingly to pictures of an ideal state of society, freed alike from restrictive corn-laws, over competition and grasping capitalists. Previous events had led them to believe that political power was the road by which they might reach such a happy state, and the result was Chartism. In the course of 1838 the discontent began to assume dangerous proportions, and found means to express itself in a formula known as the People's Charter, which claimed five political pointsuniversal suffrage, vote by ballot, annual Parliaments, abolition of a property qualification for a seat in Parliament, and payment of members. The Legislature was thus to be at once under the immediate supervision of the constituencies, and open to working men. The movement, composite in character, was very widespread and very threatening. It found local leaders in all parts of England. The more prominent were a Dissenting minister of the name of Stephens; Vincent, a working man; Oastler, who confined his attacks chiefly to the Poor Law; and Feargus O'Connor, a man of fine gifts and presence, but with a taint of madness which ultimately destroyed his mind. Riotous meetings were held in all directions, and their effect was heightened by their being frequently held at night with torchlight processions. The speeches made at them were marked by wild assertions of the objects and advantages of the Charter, and scarcely veiled suggestions of an appeal to physical force. "Universal suffrage," said Mr. Stephens at one of these meetings, a great assembly of 200,000 men on Kersal Moor, near Manchester-"“the meaning of universal suffrage is that every working man in the land has a right to a good coat, a good hat, a good roof, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty. If," he went on to say, "the authorities in Manchester had not declared confidence in the peaceable character of the people, he would have brought 10,000 armed men with him, and would have exhorted every man capable of bearing arms to flock to the standard and fight the battles of the Constitution." It was not in the north country only that the disturbances made their appearance. Devizes, Llanidloes, Sheffield, Bolton, Newcastle, the Potteries, and London itself, were all disturbed, more or less, with riots; and it was not only in tumultuous assemblies that the claims of the Chartists were heard. In 1839 delegates were chosen, and a national Convention 1839] THE PEOPLE'S CHARTER 45 usually holding its sittings in London was formed; and the People's Charter grew into a great national petition, signed by The People's 1,200,000 men. When it was brought into the House Charter rejected. of Commons by Mr. Attwood (June 14), it was at once rejected. On the 12th of July Mr. Attwood moved that the petition should be referred to a Select Committee. As a matter of course his motion was lost by a large majority. Riots at and Newport. The petition had been already discredited by a riot which had taken place on the 4th of July in Birmingham, and which had only been suppressed with difficulty by the military. The temper of the organisation had been displayed in a proclamation in which the Convention spoke of the action of the police as an unjust and wanton outrage committed by a bloodthirsty and unconstitutional force from London." The rejection of the petition was Birmingham followed by a still worse riot (July 15). For some hours, almost unchecked by the police, the populace held possession of Birmingham, and employed themselves in the wanton destruction of property. The Duke of Wellington declared he had never seen a stormed and sacked town in so bad a plight. This great outbreak was followed almost immediately by an even more open outrage at Newport, in Monmouthshire. It was the centre of a hilly district occupied by a mining population. The Chartist doctrines had been disseminated among the miners principally through the agency of a Mr. Frost, a linen-draper in Newport. Created a magistrate of the town at the recommendation of the townsfolk, he had continued his seditious behaviour, and had been removed from the magistracy by Lord John Russell. In conjunction with Zephaniah Williams, who kept a beershop in Colebrookdale, and William Jones, a watchmaker of Pontypool, he seems to have determined to assault Newport on the night of Sunday, the 4th of November. The insurgents were to march on the town in three divisions, break down the bridge over the Usk, attack the troops stationed in the town, and stop the mail, the non-arrival of which at Birmingham was to be a signal for some sort of general rising in the north of England. The junction of the three parties failed, and Frost with his division marched single-handed upon the town. He was there encountered with great courage and skill by Mr. Philips, the Mayor, who garrisoned the chief inn in the place, and beat off the assailants not without some loss of life. The three leaders were captured and brought to trial, while Philips, who had been wounded in the encounter, was invited to Windsor, treated with all honour, and made a knight. These disorders were of necessity |