Perhaps it may not be out of place if, in the heart of this great city, the metropolis of England, and, therefore, the metropolis of the world, I say a few words on certain aspects of education which are not often adverted to, but which are notwithstanding worthy of your serious consideration. When you offer facilities such as these to every man in the community, when you throw open every office in the state to well-directed talent, continuous perseverance, and high integrity, what follows? Why, you cut up sedition by the roots. Aspiring and ambitious men have no longer any ground of complaint against the institutions of their country. If it be as open to A to rise by his talents, his industry, and his integrity as it is to B, then A, however he may lament his own failure, and complain of " circumstances over which he had no control," as the phrase goes, cannot find fault with the law which afforded him as good a chance as it did to B. And is not this view borne out by facts? Has not sedition actually died out amongst us? Compare the state of this country now with that of forty years ago. Where are the Burdetts, the Cobbetts, and the Hunts of radical notoriety? Contrast our social position with that of Naples, Austria, Germany, or Russia. Therefore to throw open to the widest competition all employments of honour and emolument is the true conservative principle of society, because everybody in the community endowed with natural power is interested in maintaining it.* How much better and safer is it that men should

* The new system of appointment to public posts by examination is probably the greatest reform of our own time. It has been called pedantic, Chinese, and Prussian; failure has been predicted by many who see in it the destruction of an old and gainful abuse. But there can be little doubt that, if followed with perseverance, the path now entered on will lead to a revolution in our parliamentary and educational systems of perhaps greater importance to posterity than even the questions of free trade and a Russian war. The Indian service is now open to general competition; relationship to a director is no longer the best title to advancement in the East. Woolwich was formerly closed except to the few who had powerful or pertinacious friends in the military world; now any youth of good character may gain by his own attainments admission to its advantages, But it must be admitted that the new institutions are by no means out of danger. They have been at work long enough for difficulties to be exposed, and not long enough for a remedy to be applied. They have not yet created the class which is to profit by them. For the Indian Service, for the Engineers and Artillery, men of some

labour to raise themselves to the level of those above them, rather than strive to drag down their superiors to their own level. Is it not a wise and conservative policy that promotion in the state should be sought by science rather than sedition, by competition rather than conspiracy? That men should endeavour to pass muster at the gate, rather than clamber surreptitiously over the wall?

But now some of you who hear me may raise this objection. All who work, all who read, cannot be successful; some must fail. All cannot secure prizes; we cannot all be first in the race. There is no value whatever in this objection. Do not men crowd into business, open shops, take warehouses, invest all their capital; and this with the broad fact staring them in the face, that men do fail in business, lose all their capital, become bankrupt, and throw away their labour apparently in vain. Yet men are not thereby deterred. Why should they? Life is but a succession of probabilities, and it is our part to turn them into certainties. We are surrounded by difficulties that we may strengthen our habits of patient endurance by overcoming them :

"Out of this nettle danger we pluck this flower safety."

what high attainments are necessary, and the inducements are sufficient to attract sufficient talents. But the home Civil Service cannot offer high remuneration, except to a few who have passed through the lower grades and earned the experience of years. It is also that part of the administration which has been most infected by the corruptions of our electioneering system. A clerkship, or a place in the Excise, has always been the reward sought for by the independent elector who is somewhat above a £10 note. The son or nephew of the local politician is not in general distinguished for his accomplishments. The youth who is fit for nothing else has always been considered by his friends the proper recipient of government bounty. The idle, the unaspiring, the incapable, seek the haven of official routine and a safe salary; while the sharper or more hardworking brother recruits the ranks of the law, trade, or emigration. It may, therefore, be understood that the Civil Service Commission has had no easy task.

The commission, therefore, has at least effected one thing. It has shown that by far the greatest number of those who have hitherto received appointments are unable to read and write their own language, or keep the simplest accounts. The discovery is almost incredible, but it is beyond a doubt. Political support has been purchased by an organized system of patronage, hurtful to the efficiency of the service, and unjust to the classes which might, under better conditions, furnish useful men to the State. * It is to competition in the various branches of knowledge that we must look for efficiency in public servants.-Times, 19th December, 1855.

* *

That man is scarcely to be envied who has never met with a difficulty, nor resigned himself to a disappointment.

Now let me reply to one or two popular objections against this system. It may be said examinations are not education. Undoubtedly this is true. They are only means to an end. Though they teach nothing they supply men with cogent motives to learn. They point out too the direction in which the learner ought to proceed. They enforce industry, temperance, regularity, energy, and perseverance. It is a very long time ago since these results of competition were pointed out. "Know ye not," says the apostle, speaking of the games of Greece," that they which run in a race, run all, but one receiveth the prize; and every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things."

But to a young man entering into business and commercial employment, it may be said by his master, true! this certificate of the Society of Arts bears testimony to your knowledge of mathematics, or chemistry, or English literature, or modern languages. But what of that; these things are of no value in my office. I want only very common-place information. But is not the acquisition of those branches of knowledge, in the face of privation, poverty, and hourly occupation, a test of the possession of industry, patience, energy, and perseverance? Are these qualities of no value? Though an employer may not want mathematics in his clerk, he may need the clear head which enabled the clerk to obtain that knowledge. May not fertility of resource, presence of mind, and an aptitude to grapple with difficulties on an emergency be thus acquired; in the same way as an early familiarity with fire-arms acquired in the sports of the field, qualifies men to become soldiers with but little extra preparation?

Again, it often has been said, the hope of a prize, a reward, or even a certificate, is a low motive to hold out to men. You ought to dilate upon the intellectual pleasures of study, the refinement which a love of learning is apt to produce in its votaries. We should tell them that learning is its own best reward, as the old heathens used to say of virtue, and that to make the hope of appointments, or employment, or position, a motive to exertion, is to degrade the dignity of learning. That such things as offices, places, and snug berths should be left for

the consolation of those young gentlemen who have good connections but no vocation for study.*

Now let me give you a homely but a pertinent illustration. You know some of those, I have no doubt, who smoke tobacco. If I were to ask a smoker what he gains by this practice of smoking, he would tell me that so far from gaining by it, he loses by it, but that he continues the practice now for its own sake; that it calms him in trouble, soothes him when excited, assuages his bodily pain, and spreads a grateful languor over his weary limbs. If I were then further to ask him, were these pleasures the motives which induced him to take to smoking, he would reply, "Not at all. When I began to "smoke I found it very nauseous; it made me sick, but I saw "all the big fellows smoke, and I wished to copy them." Thus you see that one continues to smoke, on grounds altogether different from those on which he commenced the practice. I will leave yourselves to supply the application. But, independently of this, we find that the Almighty, even in this life, has made temporal rewards to wait upon integrity and well-doing, and punishment upon offence. Why has he not left them to carry only their own rewards and punishments with them?

And now let me not trespass further on your attention, but bring these lengthened observations to a close by saying that idleness and ignorance are so costly that we cannot continue to pay for them. Just consider the annual amount of our national poor rates. Are they expended on the well-taught artizan or the industrious mechanic? Are not your paupers notoriously the handless, the headless, and the thriftless? If by some miraculous interposition they could be transformed into moral and industrious workmen, what an accession to the wealth and well-being of the country! Yet ninety-nine in the hundred

*The year will be remembered as the first in which the principle of ascertaining the fitness of candidates for public offices by examination was fairly tested. The medicine has produced an effect far more violent than was anticipated. Instead of securing a better class of candidates, the examination has proved that it is impossible for the present corrupt system of patronage and the most leniently applied test of qualification to co-exist, and that we must either go back to the practice of nominating persons, however incapable, or forward to free and unrestricted competition.-Times, 1st January, 1856.

of those paupers might have been trained to this. Again, take our convict population, our ticket-of-leave system, our swindlers, garotters, and bullion robbers. Does not crime prevail in this country to an extent elsewhere unknown. With all our wealth and wide dominion, all our religion and civilization, all our science and art, all our victories and triumphs, this is our vulnerable point. When a Roman general rode in triumph to the Capitol, he was obliged to take a slave with him in his triumphal car to remind him of the weakness of humanity and the degradation to which man might descend. In Britannia's triumphal procession to commemorate a long list of victories achieved, she too might take her ticket-of-leave man in her car. Let us, then, set our house in order; there is a lull at present in the political horizon. Now is the time to strengthen its walls and to repair its bulwarks. We cannot afford to waste our population. We are too few in number for the gigantic work we have undertaken, even if the faculties of every man in the kingdom, rich and poor, were fully developed. Meetings are held, speeches made, societies formed, money subscribed, and rewards offered for improving the stock of our domestic animals; but man is looked upon too often as one of those worthless animals that are beneath our care. Whether man physically deteriorates or not we give ourselves but little concern. Yet it is a subject worthy of our most serious consideration, when we know that to crowd men into vast, overgrown cities, to shut them up in huge mills, factories, and workshops, breathing cotton-flue, and pernicious fumes and deleterious gases, has a tendency not only to shorten life, but to embody it, while it does last, in a feeble ricketty frame. This is too wide and too serious a subject to be treated of at the close of a lecture. For conquest and for victory have we not done enough? We can well afford to put up with the petty insults of petty princes. Let us rather direct our thoughts to moral and social improvements at home. Abroad let us consolidate and Christianize. Although our path might hitherto have been tracked by blood and human suffering, unavoidable, perhaps, let us now exhibit power, not under the aspects of rapacity and cruelty, as it ever has been exhibited by Europeans to the subject nations and tribes of the East, but rather under those of justice and benevolence, announcing the glad tidings of the