waiting for orders, executing them, and forwarding the invoice, made out in regular course. Neither party knows the money and weights and measures of any country but his own, nor the technical descriptions of goods outside his own beat. As the public on either side the Channel will not abstain from demanding foreign articles for such a reason as this, there will certainly arise a class of middlemen, in whose hands all parties will be helpless. There is scarcely any kind of business in which the intervention of the middleman is not a misfortune: and in this case, his profits must be derived from the loss of his two employers or the public, or all the three; and the amount of his profit will be limited only by what the public can be induced to pay. If our young men had had a sound liberal commercial education, there would now be, in every commercial house, some member qualified to undertake the management of the French branch,—writing letters correctly in French, and using French terms, measures, and denominations of money. If it would answer to carry on the transactions at Paris or Lyons, he would be fit to go at once, and open a wholesale warehouse, precluding the middleman altogether. Where Mr. Cobden learned his admirable French, I do not know; but he has got it; and I do not see why other English manufacturers should not have the instrument as much at command as he, nor why it should not be required as a qualification of every mercantile clerk who wishes to rise in life.
As our foreign intercourses become extended, our young men must acquire more languages, and in a better way. How ludicrous it is to hear the jabber of some countrymen of our own on a steamboat in Italy, or a railway train in Germany, or among the mines in Russia! If we had had good middle-class schools, these fine fellows would have been not only employed as engineers, but looked up to as men of education, and would have held a higher position altogether. They have found it at first a dreadful drawback to their prosperity to be dumb—deaf and dumb in regard to society,—and to labour under imperfect speech for the rest of their lives. Why does this happen? And how long do we mean it to go on?
Other incidents, also recent, seem to show that the middle-classes are no longer acquiescent in their disadvantages of education, and that several kinds of remedy are in contemplation.
A mere reference is enough for the great event of the descent of the Universities upon the public, to do the nation good. The general stir of the spirit of inquiry has done vast good already. The inquiry into the Universities, besides expanding them, has brought alter it inquiry into our schools; and Oxford itself is using that high method of inquiry in regard to our middle-class schools, of inducing them to prove their capacity. I need not describe the first exhibition,—the bad reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic. Parents knew but top well that it was so; and they now rejoice in the introduction of competition into a department in “which they could not order or affect the influences tinder which their children must pass. From one examination to another, the pupils now manifest an improvement which shows that things are not so bad as they were.
But a mere repairing of the worst deficiencies of an order of schools which are in their character simply a commercial adventure will not suffice, and other recent incidents again illustrate this.
Stimulus is at present administered to middle-class schoolmasters,—(perhaps I may add mistresses) from so many quarters, as to impress them with a sense of having arrived at a crisis in their profession and their lives. The inquiry into our public schools must not only fix general attention on the results obtainable from a certain amount of schooling, but will doubtless hasten the day when neglected endowments will be applied to rendering a high order of education accessible to the greatest number. When that happens, Classical and Commercial Academies can exist only by a quality of teaching very far superior to anything that has been hitherto demanded of them.
Then there is the vast spread of the Government system of promoting the education of the poor. In Ireland, as I said before, there are a multitude of pupils in the National Schools who have no business there, and who would not condescend to appear there as poor children, if there was any other school within reach which they could attend. In England, the quality of the teaching in some of the best schools under inspection affords the same temptation. The abilities of the teachers who issue from the Training Schools are so superior to those of many private masters and ushers, that it is no wonder if parents look wistfully at the scholars who carry pence, and think them better off than their own children, for whom they pay half-yearly bills out of careful domestic saving. This must operate in two ways. It must stimulate the private tutors to keep up with the educational demands of the time: and it must transfer a certain number of the students of the Training Colleges to the field of middle-class school-keeping. To those of us who know how the demand is advancing, it is wonderful that the teachers can raise the outcry with which they are stunning us about the destruction which the new code issued by the Council of Education will bring upon them. If it really was as ruinous as they would have us think in regard to the inspected schools (which it is already proved not to be), there would be nothing for qualified teachers to apprehend, as long as there is an advancing demand for their kind of service, in the middle classes, from year to year. As many of them as can prove their fitness for the work will be eagerly retained for it, as the impostors who have traded on the past state of things drop off. They will find, however, that when once the principle of paying for results is established in regard to schools for the labouring classes, it will find its way into the private profession.
Stimulus is afforded, again, by the new energy shown in regard to Common Things, as the phrase is. The old droning way of sitting six hours a-day, repeating out of a book, or copying words or forms not understood, must go down before the new phenomenon of children being bright and gay over their studies. More oral teaching, fewer hours in school; more pleasant reading, and less