Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/691

Rh from the stigma of purchase, did Parliament shrink from paying the bill? Whatever the cost, sooner or later, the schools will have to be redeemed. England, in time of war, can bear an income-tax of eighteenpence, and call it a flea-bite; the duties of peace, of peace granted to this country by a kind Providence, are as sacred as the duties of war; and if Englishmen have once made up their mind that national education is a national duty, they will think as little of repudiating that national duty as of repudiating the national debt.

It may take some years before all this is realized; but the higher your ideal of national education the better. A man without ideals is a poor creature; a nation without national ideals is poorer still.

I hear it often said that England should do for national education what Germany has done; what Italy is doing. No; that is not enough. We have done our best in Germany, but our best is but poor work. Our difficulties are enormous. Who is to pay for schools and schoolmasters, such as they ought to be? The soil of the greater part of Germany is poor, and therefore the country will never be rich. Besides, we may do what we like, we shall always live between two Symplegades — between France on one side, and Russia on the other; and we shall always have to spend our best energies in self-defence. There is the strongest feeling among the statesmen of Germany that the greatest efforts will have to be made for improving our national education: only what we want for it is, what we are not likely to get, a long peace, and a Bismarck and Moltke rolled up into one minister of public instruction. In England you have everything, and there is no reason why your national education should not be as much ahead of that of Germany, as the education of Germany is of that of China. You have money, you have peace, you have public spirit, and you have, what is best of all, practical religion — I mean you still do a thing, however much you may dislike it, because you believe it is the will of God. Well, then, invest your money, utilize your peace, rouse your public spirit, and convince the world that one-half, three-fourths, nine-tenths of real practical religion is — education, national education, compulsory, and, it may be, gratuitous education.

 

 From Blackwood's Magazine.

 

first experience of the place which he had looked to make his home while in England, did not tempt him to a speedy renewal of it. When the London season came to an end, he took advantage of numerous invitations for shooting in the country to remain away from Wiltonbury, and the days were growing short when he paid his next visit, determined, if he could, to make his mother's house more of a home than he had done before. But whether it was that he had scowled so at them on previous occasions, or that matters had so far advanced that their visits could no longer be made with ease in his presence, at any rate on his arrival there was a general abstention of male visitors from their customary attentions, and his mother was evidently so ill at ease from the cessation of the mild pleasures which made up the business of her life, that her son felt that it would be only kind to shorten his stay; and while casting about for an excuse for going away, Yorke bethought him that he had not attempted as yet to make the acquaintance of the sister of his late friend Braddon. With this lady, who was married to a gentleman named Peevor, he had had some correspondence at the time of her brother's death, which had ended with a warm invitation to pay herself and her husband a visit whenever he should come to England; and it was with rather a lame apology for not having done so before, since they lived only a few miles from London, that he wrote to Mrs. Peevor, proposing to run down from town some afternoon and pay his respects. By return of post came her reply, and also a separate letter from her husband pressing him in such warm terms to spend at least a few days at "The Beeches," that he at once accepted the invitation, and passing through London started for his destination.

It was an afternoon train, filled with business men returning to dinner, who all settled down at once for their naps, leaving him free to speculate on the drollness of the situation, in thus starting off in mere restlessness of mood on a visit to persons not only personally unknown to him, but of whose antecedents and position he was totally ignorant. Braddon had told him that he had not seen his sister since she was a little girl, and knew nothing about her husband beyond the