he is charged in having drawn his conclusions from the inspection of the schools of only two provincial towns; but the candour with which he admits the scantiness of his inductions does not excuse the hastiness of his conclusions. Some angry discussions in Parliament on the Report led to the appointment of a Special Committee to inquire into the Education of Destitute Children. The committee was appointed when the session was far advanced, and their inquiries, they complain, were very much restricted by the want of time. The minutes of evidence taken by them contain much interesting matter; the Report itself, as is usual with Parliamentary reports, says but little. It is on the whole a plea for the status quo; and, considering the present state of the question, the disagreement of the managers of ragged schools among themselves as to the propriety of receiving assistance from the State, their disagreements with the Privy Council, and the general ignorance of the public as to the condition and management of ragged schools, no other conclusion could safely be arrived at for the present. But in one respect the Report is most valuable. It establishes the fact which is the pith of the whole question. It admits that, when every deduction is made for the children who ought to be at other schools, 'Still such a residue exists which has not yet been reached by any other machinery.' But we should do wrong to admit these deductions to the extent for which the Commissioners contend. They admit, on the evidence of Miss Carpenter, that there are parents too poor to pay for their children's schooling, and it is a mockery to suppose all these cases can be relieved by the national schools, even if they were able to meet this large and sudden demand for gratuitous admissions. How few parents labouring under the pressure of this extreme penury, and all the helplessness and recklessness it entails, would care for the schooling of their famishing children, or, if they did, would know where to look for good Samaritans, or benevolent managers of national schools! No doubt the greater part of the Ragged scholars are, as the Report asserts, the children of vicious parents, whose poverty is of their own making, and who let their children wander in rags while they are getting drunk at the gin-shop. But by what coercion are the children to be brought to school, or the parents made to pay? It is difficult enough to induce parents or children to avail themselves of the education which is gratuitously offered them. In America, where an education at the expense of the State is provided for all who will accept it, there are complaints as loud as in this country of the total ignorance of the lowest classes of the population. If, indeed, the instruction of the ragged schools were what is Vol. 110.-No. 220. described 2 L described by the Assistant Commissioner, if the children who are encouraged to come ragged, dirty, and unruly, were encouraged to remain as filthy in person and as depraved in mind as they came, there would be no need to prolong the discussion. But the whole scheme is of a missionary character. The object of the self-denying persons who attend gratuitously to the instruction of the little savages, is to civilize and Christianize. No doubt great difficulty is often experienced from the influence of vicious parents over their children, but, on the other hand, the instances are numberless where the children have been the instruments of bringing the parents to a better state of feeling. Let those who doubt this visit one of the ragged school-rooms, filled, as they often may be seen for evening service, with crowds of the pupils' parents. Unquestionably great vigilance is needed to prevent abuses; and, in spite of all possible vigilance, abuses will creep in. It must necessarily be that some of the pupils would be fitter inmates of reformatories, some would be better placed in industrial schools, and some ought to be sent to the ordinary schools as soon as they have been cleansed in the temporary quarantine of the ragged school. But the Commissioners speak as if there were an unlimited number of paying, reformatory, and industrial schools to receive all who may be sent, and an absolute power in the law to send all who ought to go. Nevertheless on the whole we agree with what we believe is meant by the Privy Council Circular of January, 1858, in which Mr. Lingen calls these provisional institutions, which are constantly tending to become elementary schools of the ordinary kind, or industrial schools certified under Act of Parliament.' Bearing ever in mind that the Ragged Schools' Union is the drag-net which brings up from the muddy depths of society what can be reached by no other means, we would have the miscellaneous fry sorted and separately disposed of; and if the ragged schools could be made to stand in the relation of purveyor (though but to a limited extent) to the other educational institutions of the country, they would hold a place of the greatest importance in our scheme of national education. We believe the same thing is more or less distinctly indicated by those of the witnesses who speak of dividing ragged schools into two classes, the more and less advanced in civilization, and also of establishing cheap ordinary schools in connexion with the ragged schools. The latter we think a most valuable suggestion, which, if adopted, will defer indefinitely the evil day, when our voluntary system will no longer work. What is to be done, asks Mr. Senior, in the poor or apathetic districts, where people cannot or will not pay for schools? And in reply he proposes that where Voluntary effort ends, State compulsion should begin.* That is to say, that a system entirely opposed to the present system should be tacked on to it. And to solder the two together, he can see no expedient but more machinery, more expense, more inspection. Inspectors are to be sent, with despotic and inquisitorial powers, to form districts at their pleasure, to ascertain the number of children requiring instruction, to report on the extent of the present school accommodation, and the nature of the instruction, and to inquire the proportion borne by the incomes. of the higher and middle classes to the number of persons belonging to the poorer class, in order to ascertain whether the deficiencies arise from poverty or from apathy, or from both, to fix the amount of the rate' (p. 58), and then again, to sink an enormous sum in buildings; and having thus taxed the district at their pleasure, they are to establish 'undenominational schools,' in which none of the subscribers will take any interest; for, as a matter of fact, it is positively laid down by the Report that it is from religious feelings almost exclusively the public interest in schools arises. When a man of Mr. Senior's ability and experience can propose no better means than this, it is a proof that there is something wrong in the original conception of the end. The two things cannot co-exist. Why should charitable people exert themselves to subscribe for education, when, by turning apathetic,' they may compel their less liberal neighbours to bear their share of the burden, and they themselves. can reserve their own resources for other objects? Mr. Senior dismisses Sir J. K. Shuttleworth's proposal that the Privy Council should relax its requirements, with the simple assertion that children brought from wretched homes must have the best masters and the best schools. But the most highly paid 'certificated teachers' are not always in the true sense the best; and by many ingenious contrivances which are easily hit on when people are not spending public money, good ventilation may be secured in mean rooms. The ancients are sneered at by many of our modern tourists for supposing that to carry water from one height to another it is necessary to span the intermediate valley with gigantic masses of masonry; and do the Privy Council really think that ventilation cannot be obtained in a room less than eighteen or twenty feet high? Mr. Senior mentions a very poor London parish in which, by intrepid begging and by the aid of enormous grants from the Privy Council, the incumbent contrived to spend first 80007., and then 10,0007., in the erection of schools. We do not mean to express any opinion on this particular case, of the details of which we know nothing; but, taking the fact as we find it in Mr. Senior's pages, we think the sums thus spent a prodigious waste of public and private funds. The first intention of the Privy Council was by liberal public grants to induce individuals to spend as much as possible in school-buildings and in education. On the former object not less than 3,000,0007. have been spent, of which a large portion has been, we will not say wasted, though it has certainly been spent without absolute necessity. But in dealing with the poor and apathetic districts' the direction first given to the Privy Council's efforts must be changed; the object is then to ascertain at how small an expense the substantial objects of education can be attained; and if an earnest desire on the part of the Privy Council were shown to disregard appearances and aim only at realitiesto forbear making onerous requisitions, and to give an useful education at little cost, we will venture to say that much of the apathy of which they complain would disappear. We wish it were possible for the promoters of education to understand how much of the passive resistance, the vis inertiæ, which obstructs their progress, is to be attributed to a strong disapprobation of their proceedings; a disapprobation which, though perhaps not very precisely defined nor carefully considered, is nevertheless, as we have shown, far from unreasonable. We are unable to pursue further this important subject at present; we can only indicate the direction which we believe improvement must take. In treating these subjects of combined charity and political economy, it is impossible to satisfy the aspirations of the benevolent on the one hand, or to silence all the objections of the prudent on the other. Want of space, and our desire to spare the reader the fatigue of minute details, have obliged us to omit many suggestions for obviating difficulties or improving the efficiency of pauper schools which we had marked for notice. We refer the reader to the evidence collected by the Commissioners on this subject, as the most interesting part of their Report. Their recommendation to establish district and separate schools is one which can raise little difference of opinion among the friends of education, and we trust it will engage the attention of the Legislature before other more doubtful matters are brought into discussion. We venture confidently to point it out as the next stage in advance, which, when gained, will open to our view a clearer prospect of the course of our further labours. ART. VIII. ART. VIII.-Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, Translated from the French by the Translator of Napoleon's Correspondence with King Joseph. London. 1861. IN N the winter of 1858-9 there were residing in one salubrious spot on the shores of the Mediterranean three remarkable representatives of the intelligence of the great nations of Europe. There was Lord Brougham, the chief citizen and host of the pleasant town of Cannes, and the two visitors seeking for renewed health under that genial sky were Baron de Bunsen and Alexis de Tocqueville. Of these, our countryman alone retains his vitality of thought and action in a wonderful old age. Ere many months had gone by, the abundant heart and unsatiated spirit of the German scholar and diplomatist whom we knew so well, and, amid many differences, so justly esteemed, had ceased to beat and to aspire. A few weeks of struggle and of suffering were sufficient to exhaust what yet remained of the physical energies of the French philosopher and statesman, who, of all his notable contemporaries, perhaps best deserves the interest and admiration of Englishmen. It is to this aspect of the character of M. de Tocqueville that we would mainly direct the attention of our readers, deriving from the work of M. de Beaumont and other accessible materials whatever may seem conducive to this object. A word as to M. de Beaumont's original work: it consists of a short memoir, of three fragments of travels, of two chapters of the unfinished second volume of the Ancien Régime et la Révolution,' and of selected letters. To these the translator has added Mr. John Mill's accurate version of a remarkable article in the London and Westminster Review' on 'France before the Revolution,' which may be regarded as the foundation of the later edifice-many letters and parts of letters omitted by M. de Beaumont, either as uninteresting to French readers in their references to English politics or as touching too immediately on the present condition of affairs in France-and several reports of conversations between M. de Tocqueville and Mr. Senior. It is now no secret that the ex-Master in Chancery has taken advantage of the many opportunities he has had of intimate acquaintance with French statesmen and men of letters, to record the most interesting and definite portions of what has fallen from them in the social interchange of thoughts and feelings. In this there has been no breach of confidence, for the dialogues have in most cases been submitted to the criticisms and corrections of the interlocutors, who have gladly availed themselves of an occasion through which they might offer to the world, in a form of auto-biography, the |