the disposal of the Bishop of Asaph for educational purposes by the Welsh Committee of the National Society. The funds of the training school for the year ending Midsummer 1852 arose as follows: By annual subscriptions and donations £ s. d. 52 4 0 300 0 0 By grant from the Welsh Committee of the National By exhibitions for four students from the Bishop of 10 0 0 362 4 0 £ s. d. 150 0 0 Allowances to students for board Fuel and lights Books, apparatus, stationery, &c. Other current expenses 100 11 6 4 16 O 10 13 0 20 0 0 1 17 4 322 17 10 During the first day of our inspection, the business of the institution went on in its usual course. The teaching is chiefly oral. It devolves almost wholly upon the principal, whose labours, by reason of the variety of subjects which he is obliged to teach, and the hours he has to occupy in teaching, are excessive. He is occupied, chiefly in oral teaching, six hours daily. It is the more to be regretted that so valuable a teacher should be charged with this amount of labour, as his health has obviously suffered from it. The subjects of instruction are those usually taught in elementary schools, together with geometry, algebra, and mechanics, and the art of teaching. The teaching of a Welsh training school acquires, however, a distinctive character, from the fact that English is to the great majority of the students a foreign tongue, which they are occupied in learning with everything else which they learn, and which must be taught them with everything else. The principal combines with many other qualifications for the important office he fills, this, that he is a good Welsh scholar. He can explain to them in Welsh what they are unable to comprehend in English. All his lectures have thus, in many respects, the characteristics of teaching a tongue foreign to his audience. The institution is well supplied with books, and the lecture-room contains all the ordinary apparatus of instruction. On the second day of our inspection we examined the students orally, and inspected the model school. In recording an opinion of the attainments of the students, it is but just to take into account the great amount of labour with which the principal, who may be considered almost the single teacher of this institution, is charged. Taking this into my view, I cannot but bear testimony to the evidence our examination afforded of the faithful, zealous, and able way in which his duties have been performed. He has a faith in education, and he labours in its cause in an enlightened, an enterprising, and a devoted spirit. In conjunction with the master of the model school, he has conceived a good practical idea of what belongs to a training school; and in this remote spot, with little sympathy, and but a small measure of support, 'these gentlemen have made great progress towards realizing that idea, Special Report on the South Staffordshire Iron and Coal Masters' Prize Scheme for the year 1852; by the Rev. J. P. NORRIS, Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools. 10 June 1852. SIR, I HAVE the honor to present to you, for the information of the Committee of Council on Education, a Report on the examination of candidates and award of prizes which I undertook, with their Lordships' sanction, at the request of The Iron and Coal Masters' Association for the Encouragement of Education in the Mining Districts of South Staffordshire, in the months of February and March of this year. The establishment of this Association may be regarded as an epoch of no little interest in the history of South Staffordshire. More than ten years have elapsed since the Reports of the Children's Employment Commissioners, disclosing the demoralized condition of this and other mining districts, led to the enactment of the 5 & 6 Vict. c. 99. Some of the more tangible causes of evil were arrested by this Act. Among other restrictions, the employment of children under 10 years of age, and the payment of wages in public-houses, were prohibited. Still the Reports of the School Inspectors, and more particularly those of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the operation of this Act, showed too plainly that the root of the evil had not been reached. The Rev. H. Moseley, Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools, who visited this neighbourhood in 1846, a period of great commercial prosperity in the iron trade, thus writes: * * "The earnings of these men were, at the time of my visit, probably greater than those of any equally large body of workmen in the kingdom These men and their families, notwithstanding, live in more squalid and miserably dirty and worse furnished abodes, their children appear worse clad and more neglected, their wives more slatternly and poverty stricken, and about each of them fewer appliances of comfort and fewer sources of happiness have been collected, than I have observed in respect to any other labouring population. The country, not less in it's moral than in it's physical aspect, seems to be scorched up; and as I have stood at night on some of the surrounding eminences, and seen it extending beneath my feet like one vast and multitudinous city, lighted up by unearthly flames, and sending up from all parts great volumes of smoke and other than earthly sounds, I have been unable to separate in my mind this prospect from the impression I have received of the condition of the people who inhabit it."-(Minutes of Committee of Council on Education for 1846, vol. i. p. 177.) In Mr. Tremenheere's Report for 1850 to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the state of society in this district is thus characterized : "The distinguishing feature at the present moment unquestionably is, that, as regards the labouring classes, the half savage manners of the last generation have been exchanged for a deep and almost universally pervading sensuality." My own experience entirely confirms this statement. My duties have led me to spend some portion of each of the three last years among the village towns which lie between Stourbridge and Wolverhampton. I have visited the colliers and iron-workers both at their homes and at their work, whether in the pits or at the forges, and have at the same time been careful to put myself into communication with those who seemed best to know the real condition of the people. I know that generalizations in these matters are for the most part untrustworthy; and with regard to other classes of operatives, I have found it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to sum up in one word their distinctive character; but in respect of the miners and iron-workers of South Staffordshire I have no such difficulty. Improvidence is too tame a word; it is recklessness. Elsewhere improvidence and sensuality exist to a lamentable extent, but qualified, and, as it were, under protest. Among the mill operatives of the cotton and silk districts these faults are beginning to be redeemed by a thoughtful and almost reflective cast of countenance which convinces the visitor that counteracting influences are at work. In the agricultural parts of my district, alongside of the notorious incontinency of the farm-servants, one may often observe in the improved dwellings and neatly kept gardens of the married labourer evidence that these vices are very generally giving way to sobriety and thrift in later life; but here young and old, men and women, married and unmarried, are uniformly and almost avowedly self-indulgent spendthrifts. One sees this reckless character marring and vitiating the nobler traits of their nature: their gallantry in the face of danger is akin to foolhardiness; their power of intense labour is seldom exerted except to compensate for time lost in idleness and revelry; their readiness to make "gatherings" for their sick and maimed comrades seems only to obviate the necessity of previous saving; their very creed-and, after their sort, they are a curiously devotional people, holding frequent prayer meetings in the pits-often degenerates into a fanatical fatalism. But it is seen far more painfully and unmistakably in the alternate plethora and destitution between which, from year's end to year's end, the whole population seems to oscillate. The prodigal revelry of the reckoning night, the drunkenness of Sunday, the refusal to work on Monday, and perhaps Tuesday; and then the wretchedness of their homes towards the latter part of the two or three weeks which intervene before the next pay-day, their children kept from school, their wives and daughters on the pit-bank, their furniture in the pawn-shop; the crowded courts and miry lanes in which they live, their houses often cracked from top to bottom by the "crowning in of the ground, without drainage or ventilation or due supply of water-such a state of things as this, co-existing with earnings which might ensure comfort and even prosperity, seems to prove that no legislation can cure the evil. The whole character of the people must be changed, and they must be taught early in life habits of forecast and self-control. Happily the cause and the remedy are no less patent than the evil itself. The cause may be found in the reckless habits of the people; the remedy is to be sought in improvement of the home and of the school. The same admirable series of Reports which have opened our eyes to the real state of this district have pourtrayed also in sharp contrast the condition of other mining districts, where improved homes and improved education have taught the people to be thrifty and temperate instead of prodigal and sensual. I need only refer to Mr. Tremenheere's description of the Duke of Portland's collieries in Ayrshire, and those of Lord Fitzwilliam and Mr. Milnes Stansfeld in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The picture there given (Report for 1845, page 25) of the daily life of the colliers, their detached cottages, neat flowerpots, pigsties, schools, and village libraries, choral societies, and manly sports, present a striking example of what may be the condition of a mining population. Of all the results that may be gathered from Mr. Tremenheere's evidence, that which is to me most interesting is the growing conclusion which may be traced through his several Reports, that it is not from without but from within that improvement is to be looked for. It is not from legislative enactment, from restrictions of age or apprenticeship, or the abolition of this system or that system, that we are to expect any general amelioration, but from the local energy and enlightened efforts of those upon whom, after all, rests the heavy responsibility of the continuance of the present state of things. These efforts, as I said before, are chiefly needed in behalf of the home and the school of the operative. It may, perhaps, be considered beyond my province to inquire how far it would be possible for the leading firms of South Staffordshire to improve the dwellings of their men. There can, however, be no doubt that much might be done by drainage, sewerage, metalling of the bye-roads and small streets, and the introduction of water, either by placing the village towns under the Board of Health, or by the efforts of individuals. Of the need of improved schooling, and of the existing means of promoting it, I can speak with more confidence. The evidence which Mr. Tremenheere has multiplied from all parts of the country shows that the increase of immorality with the increase of wages, so notoriously the case in these parts, is attributable to the low tastes and desires of the people, that the obstinate refusal of the men to exert more than two thirds of their fair powers of work, by which the cost of production is largely enhanced, capital crippled, and the public mulcted, is due to the same cause,-that their readiness to become the prey of unionists and agitators is traceable to their want of the most elementary principles of thought†,-that most of the accidents, which are of weekly occurrence, are occasioned by their stupidity and ignorance ‡,-that wherever they have advanced in intelligence they have become more skilful, more subordinate, and more industrious§. These facts have convinced the more thoughtful and farsighted masters of South Staffordshire that the only sure means of maintaining their ground under increasing foreign competition, and averting a social crisis, is to reform the character of the rising generation of operatives by education. It was due, I believe, to the prevalence of this feeling, as well as to a growing sense of their responsibility before God, that Mr. Tremenheere's appeal to the Iron and Coal Masters at the beginning of last year was so readily and liberally responded to. He represented to them, that although the school accommodation of the district had been largely increased during late years, and the race of teachers remarkably improved by the measures adopted by Government in 1846, yet that all would be of no avail unless the children could be retained for a longer period at school. It appeared from my own careful examination of the schools in the district between Wolverhampton and Dudley (including these towns) that the average stay at school was only fifteen months, and that half of the children were under eight, and very few above ten years old! It may be very possible in this brief interval of a boy's life to cram some little knowledge into his memory, but it is impossible to do what the Iron and Coal Masters, and all right-minded people, most desire, viz., to produce a lasting impression upon a boy's Report for 1847, p. 10. † Report for 1844, p. 61. Report for 847, p. 7. § Report for 1844, p. 61, and Report for 1845, p. 15, and passim. |