One predominant talker I met at Mr. Edwin Hill’s—­William Ellis, a special friend of the Hills, and a noteworthy man.  One needs to look back 60 years to become conscious of how much English education was in the hands of the church.  Not only the public schools and the university were overshadowed by the Established Church, but what schools were accessible to the poor were a sort of appanage to the rectory, and the teachers were bound to work for the good of the church and the convenience of the incumbent.  The commercial schools, which were independent of the church, to which Non-conformists sent their boys, were satirised by Dickens, and they deserved the satire.  The masters were generally incompetent, and the assistant teachers or ushers were the most miserable in regard to payment and status.  William Ellis expended large sums of money, and almost all his leisure, in establishing secular schools that were good for something.  He called them Birkbeck schools, thus doing honour to the founder of mechanics’ institutes, and perhaps the founder of the first of these schools; and he taught what he called social science in them himself.  He was the Senor Ferrer of England; and, though he escaped martyrdom in the more enlightened country he was looked on suspiciously by those who considered education that was not founded on revealed religion and permeated by its doctrines as dangerous and revolutionary.

But there was one great personage who saw the value of those teachings on things that make for human happiness and intellectual freedom. and that was the Prince Consort.  He asked William Ellis to give some lessons to the eldest of the Royal children—­the Princess Victoria, Prince Edward (our present King), and Prince Alfred, afterwards Duke of Saxe-Coburg.  Mr. Ellis said all three were intelligent, and Princess Victoria exceptionally so.  What a tragedy it was—­more so than that of many an epic or drama—­that the Princess Royal and the husband of her choice, who had educated themselves and each other to take the reins of the German Empire, and had drawn up so many Plans for the betterment of the general conditions of the people, should, on their accession to power, have met death standing on the steps of the throne; and that only a powerless widow should have been left without much authority over her masterful son.  But my firm belief is that in many of the excellent things that the Kaiser William has done for his people, he is working on the plans that had been committed to writing by the Crown Prince and Princess.  Her father’s memory was so dear to the Crown Princess that anything he had suggested to her was cherished all her life; and I do not doubt that these early lessons on the right relation of human beings to each other—­the social science which regards human happiness as depending on justice and toleration—­is even now bearing fruit in the Fatherland.  Shortsighted mortals see the immediate failures, but in the larger eye of the Infinite and the Eternal there is always progress towards better things from every honest attempt to remedy injustice, and to increase knowledge.