well under his management that they were imitated in all parts of the kingdom, and eventually in many other parts of the world. Spelling bees were, I believe, an American invention, and had a very lively but brief career. The recent courses of popular scientific lectures arose out of the very successful experiment instituted by Professor Roscoe at Manchester. Many attempts are just now being made to provide attractive and harmless amusements for the people, and this must, of course, be done in a tentative manner.
It is curious, indeed, to observe how evanescent many social inventions prove themselves to be; growth and change have been so rapid of late that there is constant need of new inventions. The Royal Institution in Albemarle Street was a notable invention of its time, chiefly due to Count Rumford, and its brilliant success led to early imitation in Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, and perhaps elsewhere. But the provincial institutions have with difficulty maintained their raison d'être. After the Royal Institutions came a series of Mechanics' Institutions, which, as regards the mechanics element, were thoroughly unsuccessful, but proved themselves useful in the form of popular colleges or middle-class schools. Now, the great and genuine success of Owens College, as a teaching body, is leading to the creation of numerous local colleges of similar type. This is the age, again, of free public libraries, the practicability and extreme usefulness of which were first established in Manchester. When once possessed of local habitations, such institutions will, it may be hoped, have long careers; but bricks and mortar are usually requisite to give perpetuity to a social experiment. When thus perpetuated, each kind of institution marks its own age with almost geologic certainty. From the times of the Saxons and the Normans we can trace a series of strata of institutions superposed in order of time—the ancient Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the mediæval guilds surviving in the city companies, the grammar-schools of the Elizabethan age, the almshouses of the Stuart period, the commercial institutions of Queen Anne's reign, and so on down to the free libraries and recreation palaces of the present day. Even styles of architecture are evolved by successful innovation, that is, experiment followed by imitation, and this was never more apparent than in the imitation which has followed upon Sir Joseph Paxton's grand experiment at the Exhibition of 1851.[1]
Now, my contention is that legislators ought, in many branches of legislation, to adopt confessedly this tentative procedure, which is the very method of social growth. Parliament must give up the pretension that it can enact the creation of certain social institutions to be carried on as specified in the "hereinafter contained" clauses. No
- ↑ I do not remember to have seen the importance of this imitative tendency in social affairs described by any writer, except the French engineer and economist Dupuit, who fully describes it in one of his remarkable memoirs, printed in the "Annales des Ponts et Chaussées."
