Education is a depressing subject for a speech, but Mr.
Glad. stone contrived to make it amusing on Thursday night at Green- wich, when distributing the prizes to the successful students of the Science and Art Classes. He apologised for not writing his ,t1dress on account of engagements—the number of letters he .‹.-nsiteived by post last Saturday morning only was just forty- two—but he need not have done that, since Mr. Gladstone is always much more attractive as a speaker than as a writer. He said that the success of the French as a manufac- turing people is chiefly due to 'the skill with which they intertwine the beautiful with the useful ; and Mr. Gladstone
thought that the London Companies, which were established as " crafts " or "mysteries " on purpose to secure the most intelli- gent and beautiful applications of human industry to the work of the world, ought to put themselves at the head of the movement for bringing Science and Art to converge on human labour. Further he admitted that in the higher classes the love and appre- ciation of the beautiful has in many cases become hereditary, but genius, he said, came not less, if not more often, out of the people, and he showed an engraving of a screen in an obscure Monmouth- shire church (the Church of Llangwm), which must have been the work of some village artist in the middle-ages, at a time when there were no appliances like Science and Art schools to help struggling genius on its way. Mr. Gladstone also read part of a very interesting letter from a young carpenter, Mr. Francis Moore, who had expostulated with him for having, apparently at least, in a recent speech drawn a hard-and-fast line between head-work and handiwork, and who maintained, on the contrary, that as ma- chinery supplants the mechanic in the easy parts of his duty, fresh demands for educated and thoughtful handiwork, which machinery cannot do, follow in its track. No speech on education has for a long time been so readable as Mr. Gladstone's.
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