rank who can obtain the advantage. Let any or everybody learn Latin; but then, what became of other studies in those grammar-schools? How many of all those hundreds of boys knew anything at sixteen of his own language and its literature,—or of the history of his own or any other country,—or any modern language,—or of mathematics, or science, or the arts of life?
Some parents, therefore, chose to send their boys to a boarding-school,—often at the cost of much domestic self-denial. Perhaps it was a great and eminent sectarian establishment, such as every large religious denomination has been accustomed to support;—the Quaker institution in one county,—^the Baptist in another,—the flourishing colleges of the Independents, or the humble retreat of the Moravians. These schools have been, at any time, just what the masters of the day have been.
There must always have been a vast number left over, with no choice but between neglect of learning and a private boarding-school. Any journey that we may have taken across the kingdom on the top of a coach, in the old coach days, must have satisfied us of the prodigious number of “classical and commercial academies” scattered over the country. Fiction and satire have sufficiently laid them open to the view of the existing generation. We all know the pedagogues, and their wives and daughters; and the ushers, and the ways of the establishment, and the letters home, and the bad boys, and the miserable boys. We know, too, the best sort of select private school, where the very selectness deprives the training of some of the most desirable elements, and sends out prigs rather than manly youths. These last schools are also out of the line of my thought at this moment, when the question is of the fate of ordinary middle-class children.
From the “classical and commercial academies” lads are apt to come forth with as little real and available knowledge as from a grammar-school,—with a more profuse smattering, no doubt, but less of grammar, and of the intellectual discipline which grammar involves.
The proof of the social dissatisfaction which existed under this régime appeared in the rise of Preparatory Schools on the one hand, and Proprietary Schools on the other. It seems to me that I remember the first, or nearly the first Preparatory School we had. There was quite a stir and sensation at the idea of ladies undertaking to teach Latin, even to little boys just breeched. (Tunics had not come in then.) There was staring in the road when the little fellows, from four to nine or ten, walked two and two to the common where they were to play. In a little while, the masters of public schools began to stare at what the ladies had done. Here were children, not whimpering over a page of hieroglyphics (as the Eton grammar was to infants) but conjugating glibly, and construing intelligently, as far as they went, and well started in reading and writing and arithmetic. The masters at Cheltenham College at this hour will bear testimony what an institution the Preparatory School there has been;—what it is to themselves to receive pupils trained to their hand, and what it is to any public school to be replenished by a purer and brighter element from below.
Next, we arrived at the Proprietary Schools to which so many of our grandsons owe their training. Every sort of risk inherent in the old plans seemed to be avoided in this. In large towns there would be numbers sufficient to afford much of the advantage of a public school, while the proprietary would keep it select. The master would not be, as in a private academy, a solicitor of custom, setting up on his own account among strangers, who must take him on trust for a time: he would be a candidate bearing testimonials, guaranteed by trustworthy authority, proved by examination, and elected by the parents. Great things were hoped, on these and other grounds: and there has been, on the whole, a justification of the hope. I need not enter upon the drawbacks,—the conflicting aims and tastes of the proprietors, the complaints of exclusiveness or vulgarity, the mishaps about teachers, the jealousies among the boys. Such things were sure to happen in a new institution of this nature; but they have damaged the success of some of these schools, and have perhaps impeded their spread. From some cause or other the rising generation is still much in want of good middle-class schools.
From some Proprietary Schools of fifteen or twenty years’ standing, lads come forth able to read and write French and German, and Italian, Our manufacturers and merchants nod approbation at this. It has been the plague of their life that they could not choose their own clerks in some of the most important departments of their business. If they transacted business with Germany, they must have a clerk from Germany, whom they had to instruct in English ways of business; if with France, they must import a Frenchman; and so on. I have often heard remarkable statements of the embarrassment in Manchester and Belfast warehouses, and Liverpool and Bristol, and Cork counting-houses, when concerns of great importance depended on the presence or quality of a young man who could interpret between foreign and British methods of doing business; and hitherto the supply of competent clerks for the foreign department has been mischievously scanty. The Commercial Academies have not met the difficulty; and the Proprietary Schools go but a very little way.
One of the incidents which, as I said, have suggested to me the topic of to-day is the opening of our trade with France, and the difficulty which attends the transaction of the new business. Here is an opening which the embryo British merchant of former centuries would have rejoiced and gloried in, but which our grandsons and nephews are unprepared to avail themselves of. The French public are eager to buy our linens and woollens, our hardware and earthenware, and almost everything we can produce. We have been exulting in the prospect of selling in this new market: but, now that it is thrown open, neither party can in most of the markets, get on at all. The French shopkeeper is imposed upon by rogues, or he cannot undertand the terms of honest men: and the English manufacturer and merchant know no other method of proceeding than