Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/77

65 results of general ignorance among the people, but will only express the conviction that education is the key of nearly all the social questions of our day. Pauperism, for example, is the evil with which we have next to do valiant battle. Pauperism can only be killed by education. Education alone can in the end extinguish the race of either London casuals or Dorset labourers, for education will lead paupers to paid industry or emigration. Reform, again, is the question of the hour. Educate the working classes, and they will at once command political influence, and the reason for grudging it to them will be removed. But my argument here is this: the ignorance of large portions of the working classes in England (alas! it is not confined to them) is frightful. The religious difficulty is a bar to the removal of that ignorance; first, by diverting the minds of teachers from the great object of a school—the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic, the indispensable starting-points of all mental cultivation, and occupying the time of teachers and scholars with often worthless so-called religious instruction from teachers incompetent to give it, which might be far better given by separate teachers at a separate time and place; second, by preventing the hearty co-operation of all who are interested in this primary need of a neighbourhood or parish, and the concentration of that interest upon a single school, instead of its being broken up and directed upon many isolated sectarian schools. This religious difficulty the Conscience Clause is designed to cope with. I believe it does so satisfactorily. I have proved that it need not interfere with the religious teaching of a single school. That teaching may still be given under it by the same teachers in the same rooms at the same time with other lessons. But I shall not be deterred by the fear of seeming to concede some part of my adversary's ground from advocating it in this place on the ground that it will also admit of a clearer separation between the secular and religious instruction than is commonly practised in England,