Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 04.djvu/154

Bell choosing a clever boy of eight placed him in charge of the lowest class to teach by writing on sand. The experiment succeeded, and its success opened out to Dr. Bell the value of the system of mutual instruction. From the alphabet he extended it to other subjects. Soon almost every boy was alternately a master and a scholar; and so far as possible even the arrangements of the school were carried out by the boys. Increased rapidity of acquisition and a healthier moral tone convinced him that he had discovered a new method of education. 'I think,' he said, 'I have made a great progress in a very difficult attempt, and almost wrought a complete change in the morals and character of a generation of boys.' (For details of his labours in the Madras school see, besides his own account, vol. i. of his Life by Southey; see also Miss Edgeworth's Lame Jervas.)

His health breaking down. Bell determined to give up his work for a time, and sailed for England in 1796. Though he had gone out nine years before with only 128l. 10s., he had prospered so greatly and invested so judiciously that on his return he was possessed of more than 25,000l. Soon after arriving in England he abandoned his intention of returning to India, and received from the East India Company a pension of 200l. a year. Before leaving India he had drawn up a final report for the directors of the school, in which he summed up its history and gave an account of his method of education. In order, as he said, to fix the authenticity of his system and to establish its originality, he published this report in 1797, together with some other documents relating to the school, under the title, 'An Experiment in Education made at the Male Asylum of Madras; suggesting a system by which a school or family may teach itself under the superintendence of the master or parent.' Of this pamphlet his other works, which appeared at intervals during the rest of his life, are but wearisome expansions. In 1798 the new system was introduced into the protestant charity school of St. Botolph's, Aldgate, and next year into the industrial schools at Kendal. Bell himself pushed it in several places; but it had made comparatively little way before a young quaker, Joseph Lancaster, published in 1803 a pamphlet describing a plan of education which he had followed in his own school in the Borough Road, London, in which the employment of monitors formed a principal part. He had read Bell's report, and in his pamphlet acknowledges that he had derived many useful hints from it, though he had already thought out, independently, a scheme of mutual instruction. And Bell, in 1804, admitted that his rival had displayed much originality in applying and amending the system. The tone of both soon changed. Influenced by Mrs. Trimmer, who pointed out that the church of England would suffer by the success of Lancaster, who, she said, had been building on Bell's foundation, he began to speak ungenerously of Lancaster's work. Lancaster retaliated by proclaiming himself the inventor of the system. Their friends took up this quarrel of 'Bel and the Dragon,' as it was called in a caricature of the time, the church party taking Bell's side, and Lancaster receiving the support of those who wished to make education religious but not sectarian. In form the question at issue was which of the two had been the originator of the common system, but in substance it was whether the church should thenceforth control the education of the people; and consequently no settlement was possible. To show the manner in which the controversy was carried on, it will suffice to quote what Southey thought of Lancaster: 'The good which he has done,' he says, 'is very great, but it is pretty much in the way that the devil has been the cause of Redemption' (Letters, ii. 255. See article in favour of Lancaster, Edin. Rev. November 1810; and article by Southey in favour of Bell, Quar. Rev. October 1811, afterwards published under the title, 'Origin, Nature, and Object of the New System of Education'). At the first cry of the church in danger. Bell had taken up in earnest the work of education. He was rector of Swanage, in Dorset, a living which he had obtained in 1801; but he left his parish pretty much to itself, while he gave his assistance in organising schools on the new system. His work lay chiefly among the elementary schools; but in some cases, as in Christ's Hospital, the mutual method was adopted with apparently satisfactory results in teaching the rudiments of the classical languages—a new field which henceforth engrossed much of his attention (see his Ludus Literarius). The establishment of technical schools was also within his plan, and he was not deterred by the favourite objection that the training of tailors and shoemakers would injure trade (Life by, ii. 202). Not satisfied with mere isolated efforts, he advocated a scheme of national education (Sketch of a National Institution, 1808), which, as he conceived it, could be carried out most speedily and economically by means of the existing organisation of the church, the schools to be under the direction of the parochial clergy. But people were not ready for such a step. In