Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/276

272 Newton and certain university developments (such as the foundation of various chairs) destined to bear fruit in later days—was asleep, while primary education was poor indeed. It was, however, living and awake and so led on to the great revival of the nineteenth century.

Three new causes united with the new foundations and the charity schools to produce this revival. The first was the Sunday School system, tried by John Wesley in Savannah in 1737, but only introduced into England in 1763, made a national system by Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, in 1780 and brought to London about 1785, when the Sunday School Society was founded. In 183-1 there were about 1,500,000 children with 160,000 voluntary teachers in the Sunday Schools of England and Wales. The secular work done by these schools was most valuable. In Manchester we find that in 1831 Sunday Schools were open for secular instruction for five and a half hours on Sunday and for two evenings in the week, and that the ages of the scholars varied from five to twenty-five years. Manchester in those days was still writhing under the scourge of universal child labor, and the Sunday Schools did work that secured the social salvation of thousands. In Mr. Benjamin Braidley's Manchester Sunday School there were 2,700 scholars, taught by 120 unsalaried teachers, all, save two or three, former scholars. The self-sacrifice to be found in the Manchester of those days perhaps more than balanced the sorrows involved in the policy of the Manchester school and David Ricardo. The second cause to which I have referred was the introduction of the monitorial system between 1798 and 1803, by Andrew Bell, a clergyman of the established church (who subsequently founded in 1811 the National School Society), and Joseph Lancaster, who received the close support of King George III., and from whose work sprang in 1814 the British and Foreign School Society. These two men worked with immense vigor at their task and quarreled with no less energy. Their quarrel for precedence as the discoverer of the monitorial system was taken up by the political parties of the day. The tories or church party supported the claims of Dr. Bell, while the whigs and dissenters rallied round Mr. Lancaster. The system was in itself a bad one. It was the parent of the modern pupil-teacher system and gave permanence to the lamentable practice of employing untrained teachers. We may, therefore, believe that the quarrel for precedence was unimportant. It had, however, two vast issues. It created the modern religious or denominational controversy which has had such a marked influence on the development of primary education in England, and it also brought education into modern politics.

The third cause to which I have referred above is this connection between education and politics, a relationship which has evolved the elaborate educational system that found its completion in the education act of 1902. The earliest legislation on the subject of national