[Footnote *:  Leonard, Henry Courtney (Lord Courtney of Penwith), died May 11, 1918, in his eighty-sixth year.]

V

EDUCATION

I

EDUCATION AND THE JUDGE

Not long ago a Judge of the High Court (who was also a Liberal) made what struck me as an eminently wise observation.  While trying a couple of Elementary School-teachers whose obscenity was too gross for even an Old Bailey audience, and who themselves were products of Elementary Schools, the Judge said:  “It almost makes one hesitate to think that elementary education is the blessing which we had hoped it was.”  Of course, all the prigs of the educational world, and they are not few, were aghast at this robust declaration of common sense; and the Judge thought it well to explain (not, I am thankful to say, to explain away) a remark which had been sedulously misconstrued.

Long years ago Queen Victoria recording the conversation at her dinner-table, said:  “Lord Melbourne made us laugh very much with his opinions about Schools and Public Education; the latter he don’t like, and when I asked him if he did he said, ’I daren’t say in these times that I’m against it—­but I am against it.’”

There is a pleasantly human touch in that confession of a Whig Prime Minister, that he was afraid to avow his mistrust of a great social policy to which the Liberal party was committing itself.  The arch-charlatan, Lord Brougham, was raging up and down the kingdom extolling the unmixed blessings of education.  The University of London, which was to make all things new, had just been set up.  “The school-master was abroad.”  Lord John Russell was making some tentative steps towards a system of national education.  Societies, Congresses, and Institutes were springing up like mushrooms; and all enlightened people agreed that extension of knowledge was the one and all-sufficient remedy for the obvious disorders of the body politic.  The Victorian Age was, in brief, the age of Education; and the one dogma which no one ventured to question was that the extension of knowledge was necessarily, and in itself, a blessing.

When I say “no one” I should perhaps say “hardly anyone”; for the wisest and wittiest man of the time saw the crack in the foundation on which his friends were laboriously erecting the temple of their new divinity.  “Reading and writing,” said Sydney Smith, “are mere increase of power.  They may be turned, I admit, to a good or a bad purpose; but for several years of his life the child is in your hands, and you may give to that power what bias you please.  I believe the arm of the assassin may be often stayed by the lessons of his early life.  When I see the village school, and the tattered scholars, and the aged master or mistress teaching the mechanical art of reading or writing, and thinking that they are teaching that alone, I feel that the aged instructor is protecting life, insuring property, fencing the Altar, guarding the Throne, giving space and liberty to all the fine powers of man, and lifting him up to his own place in the order of Creation.”