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CHAPTER XIX

AFTER NIAGARA- -THE TWO PROBLEMS

Primary and Classical Education.-An Address delivered before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, Friday, November 1, 1867, by the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, M.P.

Middle Class and Primary Education.-Two Speeches by the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, M.P., delivered at the Annual Dinner of the Liverpool Philomathic Society, and at the Conference on Education at the Town Hall, on January 22 and 23, 1868.

Middle Class Education. Endowment or Free Trade.-By the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, M.P. 1868.

What shall we do for Ireland?-The Quarterly Review, No. 247. January 1868.

THE great conflict with democracy seems to have cemented a lasting regard and friendship between Robert Lowe and the Earl of Shaftesbury, whose characters and ideals were in some respects diametrically opposed.

Robert Lowe to Lord Shaftesbury.

34 Lowndes Square: November 12, 1867. My dear Lord Shaftesbury,-I am much obliged to you for your noble speech, which delighted me not more from the commanding ability it displayed, than from the honesty and courage which led you to tell the exact truth about classes to whom you have devoted your life, and whom everyone but you has combined to flatter with a fulsome hypocrisy. Cairns borrowed his hobgoblin argument from Gibson, who took it from Cobden, who took it from Benthamnice Tory pedigree! At any rate, he is not afraid of hobgoblins, for the ghosts of his two speeches must have confronted him and cried: 'Hold! Hold!'

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On October 6 of the preceding month, Robert Lowe and Benjamin Disraeli were made LL.D.'s of Edinburgh University.

Robert Lowe to Mrs. Billyard.

November 17, 1867.

I was on the wing all October in Westmoreland and Scotland, from which I have only just returned. I made a very satisfactory campaign in Edinburgh, where they made me an LL.D. the same day as Disraeli. I was better received than he, which must have annoyed him very much, as he went down there in the full blaze of his ill-earned success to receive the homage of Tories and Radicals united. My speech was one of the most successful I ever made. It has indeed created a perfect furore, and is regarded with the utmost horror by schoolmasters and all persons who make their living by Latin and Greek.

Robert Jamieson has just come home-a most unwelcome apparition; he served in the Colonial Force in New Zealand, during the war, then for a year in the British artillery. He was discharged, and has now come back to me apparently unfit for anything. What evil that I have done has ever been visited upon me like this one good action ?

I. THE PROBLEM OF EDUCATION.

Mr. R. A. Macfie of Dreghorn,' an old and valued parliamentary friend of Lord Sherbrooke, who, I am proud to think, has taken a keen personal interest in this work, writes (within three weeks of his eighty-second year): 'I regard Lord Sherbrooke's words: "We must educate our masters" as among the finest (uninspired) words ever uttered.'

En passant, it may be noted that Robert Lowe's words were to compel our future masters to learn their letters; '

As these pages were passing through the press, the news arrived of Mr. Macfie's death (February 17, 1893). Mr. R. A. Macfie, of Dreghorn, Colinton, near Edinburgh, died yesterday at the age of 82. He was a son of Mr. John Macfie, Provost of Leith, who welcomed George IV. when he landed at that port on his visit to Scotland in 1822. He was for a number of years head of the firm of Messrs. Macfie and Sons, sugar refiners, Liverpool, but retired from business in 1871. He represented the Leith Burghs in Parliament in the Liberal interest from 1868 to 1874. Sir Thomas M'Clure, who died recently at Colinton, was a son-in-law of Mr. Mactie.'-Times.

but the phrase as Mr. Macfie gives it, educate our masters,' has become proverbial, and comes more trippingly from the tongue. In fact, Disraeli's 'I had to educate our party,' and Lowe'sWe must educate our masters,' are perhaps two of the most oft-quoted parliamentary phrases of our time. The meaning was, of course, that Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli had handed over the governing power in the State to vast masses of men who were destitute of even the most elementary education, and that some immediate steps, on a large national scale, would have to be taken to bring the new voters at least within the pale of the non-illiterate.

But when Robert Lowe opened what I may call his educational campaign at the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, he had made up his mind that there should be reform at the top as well as at the bottom. In fact, his addresses at Edinburgh and Liverpool comprise a remodelled scheme of education for all classes of English society-upper, middle, and lower-compelled after 1867 to live under a democracy. The fact that he considered the education of the upper and middle classes would need remodelling, if those classes were to continue to have any political influence or even be enabled to maintain their social position, has been largely overlooked. It was this, as well as his increasing love of science, which induced him to take so decided a stand against the classics. He believed that after the road to manhood suffrage had been definitively taken, it was suicidal for any class in the community to devote the best years of the life of its young men to the study of two dead languages and to analytical mathematics.

It was not that he did not value and even love these pursuits, just as he loved the state of society of which they were the outcome and the ornament. But he thought that with the democratisation of our institutions must come the democratisation of our education. Numbers had now won the day, and, armed with political power, the wage-earning millions

would demand of the men of his own class, sons of the landed gentry educated at vast expense at the public schools and universities, Wherein consists your superiority?' Everything and everybody would be brought to the test of absolute utility. Napoleon, he reminded his Scottish hearers, had made Laplace, the greatest of mathematicians, one of his ministers, and had afterwards declared that the geometer's only idea of transacting the business of his department was with reference to the differential and integral calculus.

Lowe then passed on to Latin and Greek, and, as we know, declared that it were wiser for us to thoroughly master our own and the French language, paying at the same time a splendid tribute to modern French prose, which, as a form of speech and expression, and as an instrument of thought, might well take the place even of Greek. In a sternly utilitarian fashion he discussed, one by one, all the branches of education bestowed on men of his own class. Much of it was useless and obsolete, while the whole ground plan and scheme was adapted to an aristocratic, not a democratic, society. Unless they wished to abrogate their position, it was necessary they should be taught something about the Lords of the Treasury in London, as well as the Archons of Athens; they must devote their school-days to modern rather than to ancient geography. It was rare to find a person who knew where the various colonies of Australia are situated. Lord Castlereagh was said to have given Java to the Dutch because he could not find it in the map and was ashamed to confess his ignorHe himself heard an eminent member of the House of Commons make a speech in which it was manifest that he thought Upper Canada was nearest the mouth of the St. Lawrence and Lower Canada higher up the river. With the keen touch of humour which was one of his characteristics, he greatly amused his Edinburgh audience by an allusion to the prevailing Biblical ignorance of his educated friends. You will remember that Mr. Bright, in last session of Parliament,

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denominated certain gentlemen by a name derived from a cave. Well, I assure you, gentlemen, there was not one person in twenty whom I met who knew anything about the Cave of Adullam, and I was under the melancholy and cruel necessity of explaining it to them, and of pointing the arrow that was aimed against my own breast.'

He then proceeded to give the 'catalogue of things,' of which the average highly-educated Oxford man was completely ignorant, but all of which were more or less essential in a democratic community. Mr. David Douglas, the well-known Edinburgh publisher, who had been introduced to Lord Sherbrooke after this lecture, as a friend of Lord Acton, met him in 1890 at one of Lady Pender's receptions at Arlington Street, and reminded him of his strictures on the ignorance of the educated classes, and how he had expressed a doubt if half-adozen people in the room could tell him the name of the county in which the borough he represented was situated. Lord Sherbrooke, says Mr. Douglas, laughed and said, ‘Ah, I dare say I was very impertinent in those days.'

'I am most anxious to educate the lower classes of this country,' said Lowe in conclusion, in order to qualify them for the power that has passed, and perhaps will pass in a still greater degree, into their hands. I am also anxious to educate, in a manner very different from the present, the higher classes of this country, and also for a political reason.

'I confess, for myself, that, whenever I talk with an intelligent workman, so far from being able to assert any superiority, I am always tormented with the conception, "what a fool the man must think me when he finds me, upon whose education thousands of pounds have been spent, utterly ignorant of the matters which experience teaches him, and which, he naturally thinks, every educated man ought to know."'

At Liverpool he took up the parable of middle-class educa