of the people; and that when it is converted from the original purpose, the compact is broken, and the right is to be resumed;-that principle which tells him that resistance to power usurped is not merely a duty which he owes to himself and to his neighbour, but a duty which he owes to his God, in asserting and maintaining the rank which He gave him in creation; to that common God, who, where He gives the form of man, whatever may be the complexion, gives also the feelings and the rights of man;-that principle which neither the rudeness of ignorance can stifle, nor the enervation of refinement extinguish ;-that principle which makes it base for a man to suffer when he ought to act; which, tending to preserve to the species the original designations of Providence, spurns at the arrogant distinctions of man, and vindicates the independent quality of his race!

LESSON 55.

FAMOUS SPEECHES.

V. MACAULAY: ON EDUCATION AND THE

I believe 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 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. He has expressly told us that a distinction is to be made, particularly in a commercial and highly civilised 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 serious risk that their 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 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 the 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 (the Speaker of the House of Commons) 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 ambassadors, 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. 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. The Government is paralysed ; the very foundations of the empire are shaken.

Then came 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 neighbourhood 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 ignorance is striking; but it is not solitary. To the same causes are to be ascribed the riots of

Nottingham, the sack of Bristol, all the outrages of Lud, and Swing, and Rebecca;-beautiful and costly machinery broken to pieces in Yorkshire, barns and haystacks blazing in Kent, fences and buildings pulled down in Wales. Could such things have been done in a country in which the mind of the labourer. 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 the 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,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?