worth the sacrifice of their own lives was, though highly criminal, not altogether unnatural!

But

We perfectly understand Her Majesty's contempt for the lives of others where her own pleasure was concerned; but what pleasure she can have found in having Miss Burney about her, it is not so easy to comprehend. That Miss Burney was an eminently skillful keeper of the robes is not very probable. Few women, indeed, had paid less attention to dress. Now and then, in the course of five years, she had been asked to read aloud or to write a copy of verses. better readers might easily have been found; and her verses were worse than even the poet laureate's "Birthday Odes." Perhaps that economy which was among Her Majesty's most conspicuous virtues had something to do with her conduct on this occasion. Miss Burney had never hinted that she expected a retiring pension; and, indeed, would gladly have given the little that she had for freedom. But Her Majesty knew what the public thought, and what became her own dignity. She could not for very shame suffer a woman of distinguished genius, who had quitted a lucrative career to wait on her, who had served her faithfully for a pittance during five years, and whose constitution had been impaired by labor and watching, to leave the court without some mark of royal liberality. George the Third, who on all occasions, where Miss Burney was concerned, seems to have behaved like an honest, good-natured gentleman, felt this, and said plainly that she was entitled to a provision. At length, in return for all the misery which she had undergone, and for the health which she had sacrificed, an annuity of one hundred pounds was granted to her, dependent on the queen's pleasure.

Then the prison was opened, and Frances was free once more. Johnson, as Burke observed, might have added a striking page to his poem on the "Vanity of Human Wishes," if he had lived to see his little Burney as she went into the palace and as she came out of it.

THE DUTY OF THE STATE WITH REGARD TO EDUCATION.

[In the year 1847, the Government asked from the House of Commons a grant of one hundred thousand pounds for the education of the people. Macaulay spoke in favor of the grant, which was approved by 372 votes to 47.]

I BELIEVE, sir, that it is the right and the duty of the State to provide means of education for the common people. This proposition seems to me to be implied in every definition that has ever yet been given of the functions of a government. About the extent of those functions there has been much difference of opinion among ingenious men. There are some who hold that it is the business of a government to meddle with every part of the system of human life to regulate trade by bounties and prohibitions, to regulate expenditure by sumptuary laws, to regulate literature by a censorship, to regulate religion by an inquisition. Others go to the opposite extreme, and assign to government a very narrow sphere of action; but the very narrowest sphere that ever was assigned to governments by any school of political philosophy is quite wide enough for my purpose. On one point all the disputants are agreed. They unanimously acknowledge that it is the duty of every government to take order for giving security to the persons and property of the members of the community.

This being admitted, can it be denied that the education. of the common people is a most effectual means of securing our persons and our property? Let Adam Smith answer that question for me. His authority, always high, is on this subject entitled to peculiar respect, because he extremely disliked busy, prying, interfering governments. He was for leaving literature, arts, sciences, to take care of themselves. He was not friendly to ecclesiastical establishments. He was of opinion that the State ought not to meddle with the edu

cation of the rich. But he has expressly told us that a distinction is to be made, particularly in a commercial and highly civilized society, between the education of the rich and the education of the poor. The education of the poor, he says, is a matter which deeply concerns the commonwealth. Just as the magistrate ought to interfere for the purpose of preventing the leprosy from spreading among the people, he ought to interfere for the purpose of stopping the progress of the moral distempers which are inseparable from ignorance. Nor can this duty be neglected without danger to the public peace. If you leave the multitude uninstructed, there is a serious risk that religious animosities may produce the most dreadful disorders. The most dreadful disorders! Those are Adam Smith's own words; and prophetic words they were. Scarcely had he given this warning to our rulers when his prediction was fulfilled in a manner never to be forgotten. I speak of the No Popery riots of 1780. I do not know that I could find in all history a stronger proof of the proposition, that the ignorance of the common people makes the property, the limbs, the lives of all classes insecure. Without a shadow of a grievance, at the summons of a madman, a hundred thousand people rise in insurrection. During a whole week there is anarchy in the greatest and wealthiest of European cities. The Parliament is besieged. Your predecessor sits trembling in his chair, and expects every moment to see the door beaten in by the ruffians whose roar he hears all round the house. The peers are pulled out of their coaches. The bishops in their lawn are forced to fly over the tiles. The chapels of foreign embassadors, buildings made sacred by the law of nations, are destroyed. The house of the chief-justice is demolished. The little children of the prime minister are taken out of their beds, and laid, in their night-clothes, on the table of the Horse Guards, the only safe asylum from the fury of the rabble. The prisons are opened. Highwaymen, housebreakers, murderers, come forth to swell the mob by which they have been set free. Thirty-six fires are blazing at once in London. Then comes the retribution. Count up all the wretches who were shot, who were hanged, who were crushed,

who drank themselves to death at the rivers of gin which ran down Holborn Hill, and you will find that battles have been lost and won with a smaller sacrifice of life. And what was the cause of this calamity-a calamity which, in the history of London, ranks with the Great Plague and the Great Fire? The cause was the ignorance of a population which had been suffered, in the neighborhood of palaces, theatres, temples, to grow up as rude and stupid as any tribe of tattooed cannibals in New Zealand, I might say as any drove of beasts in Smithfield Market.

The instance is striking; but it is not solitary. To the same cause are to be ascribed the riots of Nottingham, the sack of Bristol, all the outrages of Ludd, and Swing, and Rebecca, beautiful and costly machinery broken to pieces in Yorkshire, barns and hay-stacks blazing in Kent, fences and buildings pulled down in Wales.(') Could such things have been done in a country in which the mind of a laborer had been opened by education, in which he had been taught to find pleasure in the exercise of his intellect, taught to revere his Maker, taught to respect legitimate authority, and taught at the same time to seek redress of real wrongs by peaceful and constitutional means?

This, then, is my argument. It is the duty of Government to protect our persons and property from danger. The gross ignorance of the common people is a principal cause of danger to our persons and property. Therefore, it is the duty of the Government to take care that the common people shall not be grossly ignorant.

And what is the alternative? It is universally allowed that, by some means, Government must protect our persons and property. If you take away education, what means do you leave? You leave means such as only necessity can justify,

(2) The burning of Nottingham Castle and the riots at Bristol occurred in the latter part of 1831, in consequence of the rejection of the Reform Bill by the House of Lords. The Luddites destroyed machinery in the earlier years of this century. "Swing" was the cant name for the incendiaries who burned stacks and barns in 1830, and "Rebecca" was the cant name for the rioters who pulled down the Welsh turnpike-gates in 1843.

means which inflict a fearful amount of pain, not only on the guilty, but on the innocent who are connected with the guilty. You leave guns and bayonets, stocks and whipping - posts, tread - mills, solitary cells, penal colonies, gibbets. See, then, how the case stands. Here is an end which, as we all agree, governments are bound to attain. There are only two ways of attaining it. One of those ways is by making men better, and wiser, and happier. The other way is by making them infamous and miserable. Can it be doubted which we ought to prefer? Is it not strange, is it not almost incredible, that pious and benevolent men should gravely propound the doctrine that the magistrate is bound to punish and at the same time bound not to teach? To me it seems quite clear that whoever had a right to hang has a right to educate. Can we think without shame and remorse that more than half of those wretches who have been tied up at Newgate in our time might have been living happily, that more than half of those who are now in our jails might have been enjoying liberty and using that liberty well, that such a hell on earth as Norfolk Island need never have existed, if we had expended in training honest men but a small part of what we have expended in hunting and torturing rogues?

I would earnestly entreat every gentleman to look at a report which is contained in the Appendix to the first volume of the "Minutes of the Committee of Council." I speak of the report made by Mr. Seymour Tremenheere on the state of that part of Monmouthshire which is inhabited by a population chiefly employed in mining. He found that, in this district, toward the close of 1839, out of eleven thousand children who were of an age to attend school, eight thousand never went to any school at all; and that most of the remaining three thousand might almost as well have gone to no school as to the squalid hovels in which men who ought themselves to have been learners pretended to teach. In general these men had only one qualification for their employment; and that was their utter unfitness for every other employment. They were disabled miners, or broken hucksters. In their schools all was stench, and noise, and confusion. Now