of education would be yet more scanty.  As it is, the State Church manages its national schools and the various sects their sectarian schools for the sole purpose of keeping the children of the brethren of the faith within the congregation, and of winning away a poor childish soul here and there from some other sect.  The consequence is that religion, and precisely the most unprofitable side of religion, polemical discussion, is made the principal subject of instruction, and the memory of the children overburdened with incomprehensible dogmas and theological distinctions; that sectarian hatred and bigotry are awakened as early as possible, and all rational mental and moral training shamefully neglected.  The working class has repeatedly demanded of Parliament a system of strictly secular public education, leaving religion to the ministers of the sects; but, thus far, no Ministry has been induced to grant it.  The Minister is the obedient servant of the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie is divided into countless sects; but each would gladly grant the workers the otherwise dangerous education on the sole condition of their accepting, as an antidote, the dogmas peculiar to the especial sect in question.  And as these sects are still quarrelling among themselves for supremacy, the workers remain for the present without education.  It is true that the manufacturers boast of having enabled the majority to read, but the quality of the reading is appropriate to the source of the instruction, as the Children’s Employment Commission proves.  According to this report, he who knows his letters can read enough to satisfy the conscience of the manufacturers.  And when one reflects upon the confused orthography of the English language which makes reading one of the arts, learned only under long instruction, this ignorance is readily understood.  Very few working-people write readily; and writing orthographically is beyond the powers even of many “educated” persons.  The Sunday schools of the State Church, of the Quakers, and, I think, of several other sects, do not teach writing, “because it is too worldly an employment for Sunday.”  The quality of the instruction offered the workers in other directions may be judged from a specimen or two, taken from the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report, which unfortunately does not embrace mill-work proper: 

“In Birmingham,” says Commissioner Grainger, “the children examined by me are, as a whole, utterly wanting in all that could be in the remotest degree called a useful education.  Although in almost all the schools religious instruction alone is furnished, the profoundest ignorance even upon that subject prevailed.”—­“In Wolverhampton,” says Commissioner Horne, “I found, among others, the following example:  A girl of eleven years had attended both day and Sunday school, ’had never heard of another world, of Heaven, or another life.’  A boy, seventeen years old, did not know that twice two