MR. GOSCHEN'S GIFT. L ORD HARTINGTON, who was among the first
to recognise the possibilities contained in Mr. Gosehen's grant of three-quarters of a million in aid of technical education in the counties, has continued his support of that sensible measure by writing a preface to a new magazine, the Record of Technical and Secondary Education, in which he reiterates his approval of the new movement. The instruction to be given is not that precise and emphatic preparation for a particular trade in the narrow sense of the phrase " technical education "—such as is covered by apprenticeship—for the Act expressly forbids the teaching of a trade, but rather aims, so far as manual instruction is concerned, at producing what Lord Hartington calls the "intellectual hand," by which he probably wishes to be understood, not that deftness and dexterity which comes from constant practice in one particular form of production, but capability and aptitude for producing good work in more than one direction when the theory which guides and limits it is explained and appreciated. Any form of encouragement to the natural and inborn taste of Englishmen for mechanical work in all forms, a taste to which our countrymen owe their pre- dominance in manufacture as much as the Jew owes his position in finance to his inbred instinct for the manage- ment of capital, is matter for satisfaction. But the scheme which the country owes to the present Government pro- mises, so far as it is possible to judge from the results so early shown, not only to offer practical encouragement to a national aptitude, but to meet a particular want for which neither private good-will nor the most interested political scheming has yet found a satisfactory remedy. It will go far to solve the " village problem," and if it succeeds in this, the most pressing of immediate social questions, it deserves to be quoted among the best instances of the success in detail of a measure in itself highly general, and left in its working to the practical good sense of local bodies. The powers left to the County Councils in dealing with their share of the grant were very wide. They might either apply it to technical education, or to the relief of the rates. In England and Wales, forty-eight of the Councils have so far decided to devote the whole sum to education, ten to devote a part to education, and only two to appro- priate the whole to relieving the rates. In some cases the money was handed over to the towns to deal with as they pleased ; but in many of the rural counties, the whole fund has been retained by the County Councils, and a great part of it devoted to the " education " in the widest sense of the villages in such knowledge as will aid them not only to live, but to " live well," in a sense which the recently awakened sympathy with the drawbacks of village life will be quick to detect and foster. Unsound and un- wholesome cottages ; bad water ; food badly cooked, and unwholesome because it is badly cooked ; unskilful labour, or rather, labour unskilled in the new conditions of agri- culture, when mechanism of many kinds is in daily use on the farm, and in daily disrepair owing to the unhandiness of the workmen,—have been the uniform complaints of men and masters to those who have made it their business to inquire into the village problem. Some of these, like the Daily New8' Commissioner, when suddenly confronted with the problem, lost their heads, and ended in a fine confusion between the encouragement of a spirit of self-help on the part of the men, and a passionate demand that the landlords or local authorities should be compelled to set matters right from above. No doubt a compromise of some kind will be the practical issue, but meantime it is clear that much might be done by the initiative of the labourer himself. If the main conditions of sanitation were understood by the men as they are now generally understood by educated people, it is probable that where a few hours' work with a spade and pick would make a drain, or divert pollution from a spring, the will to do so would not be wanting ; and the cottage sick-room would not be the place of horror it now is, if the women had mastered a few lectures from the local medical officer of health. Cottage meals are, as a rule, unwholesome not because the material is bad, but because it is monotonous, ill-cooked, and arranged with total ignorance of the propor- tion of meat, bread, and green vegetables necessary for health. If labourers were as clever at mending expensive reaping-machines, seed-drills, winnowers, and chaff-cutters, as they are at breaking them, they would command, not the wages of unskilled labour, but something more nearly approaching those of a mechanic; and if a farm-hand could be relied on to repair a gate or a waggon-shaft, and set up a line of posts and rails, or his wife to help in the dairy, or the farm-house, or rectory kitchen, the cottage income would be sensibly increased. Want of knowledge, not want of will, is the main reason why these conditions do not obtain ; and this want the use made of Mr. Gosch en's grant by many of the County Councils is in a fair way to remedy. Take, for instance, the scheme, so far as it has been developed, of the purely agricultural county of Hamp- shire, containing hardly any large towns except the county boroughs of Southampton and Portsmouth, which have their own fund to use. Arrangements have been made to give instruction, not only in the towns, but in remote and isolated districts, in the drainage of cottages, measurement of timber and of stacks ; in ironwork, woodwork, and masonry ; in the drainage of land, and irrigation—a most important point in a county of water-meadows, and an art almost unknown in many counties where irrigation might often secure a double crop of meadow-grass—and in the mechanism, structure, and repair of farm machinery. Voluntary poisoning of the cottage water-supply by out- side sewage should diminish after such instruction, and efficiency in the use of modern farm implements increase, with a corresponding claim to a better wage. One of the great disadvantages to a labourer's success when setting up for himself as a small farmer, is his want of skill as a buyer. The County Council scheme will aid him, at least in buying hay and straw " in the rick." Gardening both for fruit and vegetables will also be taught, and the best places and methods for growing tomatoes, mushrooms, and other valuable produce, as well as orchard-planting, and the methods of grafting, pruning, preserving, and packing the fruit. For the womer, there will be lectures on laundry- work, needlework, and dress-cutting, and on the far more important subject of cookery, and of the weight and kind of food required for a family. The dishes which form the staple of these cookery-classes are good, plain, and sensible, and show an advance on Cobbett's views of cottage fare, without an advance in cost. Bread, mutton, bacon, pork, and beer in plenty, was the food prescribed by the greatest of all Hampshire village reformers. Potatoes were a. " base root," and he would none of them. The " County Council " bill-of-fare is as cheap, and more varied ; and the labourer's wife will be shown how to cook potato-soup, fried fish, liver and bacon, cottage-pie, Irish stew—a recipe for Irish stew taught to the labourers by a West-Country Member of Parliament with his own hand, is said to have secured his seat for his life—beef-steak pudding, and rabbit-pie, cornflour and cakes. To the present genera- tion, all these forms of " betterment " must be taught on their merits, and without any previous training,—in spite, in many cases no doubt, of a rooted preference for old and evil ways. But for the future, there is some guarantee that the disposition to learn may be acquired early. To use existing means of instruction is clearly a quicker and more economical way than to provide special teachers from a distance ; and this end is in process of being secured by providing central classes which all the elementary-school teachers in a county may attend, with a view to making the subjects there learnt part of the teaching of the village school. It is said that in Hamp- shire between four hundred and five hundred of these schoolmasters and schoolmistresses are already learning the subjects which they will afterwards teach in the villages, and there is little doubt that in many other counties this sensible use of the existing organisation is or will be adopted with equally hopeful results. If it is sup- plemented by the efforts of the local doctors, such as the medical officers of health, who would probably be willing to urge formally, as they do now in the daily exercise of their profession, the common rules and conditions of the sanitation of the cottage and sick-room, the existing material wants of the village household, so far as oppor- tunities of knowledge can remedy them, will be fairly and fully considered. But the drawbacks of village life are not limited by the want of material comfort. Its. lack of new and fresh interests, no less than of comfort and convenience, has been very much before the mind of the public. Something is done even to meet this less material, but not less human want, by the working of the new Act, especially in its in- struction in that manual dexterity on which Lord Hartington lays so much stress. By the limitations of the Act, the trade of the carpenter, joiner, or wheelwright may not be taught. That would be an interference with private enterprise, and an overlapping of existing opportunities for self-instruction. But the use of tools in general for working in wood, and not only the production but also the art of designing woodwork, or of carving and ornamenting it, is within the subjects allowed by law. No form of technical instruction as yet attempted by the County Councils seems more popular than this. It is exactly suited, not only to the possibilities of the case, but to meet the want of congenial and useful occupation felt in the long winter evenings in the villages. Where instruction in woodwork has been made part of the local scheme, there is immense competi- tion to secure the grant of benches, tools, and instructors, and no difficulty whatever is made in providing suitable rooms, light, and firing, a condition very sensibly insisted on before aid is granted to local applications. It is said that in one case, where the accommodation required had been provided in one village before a neighbouring country town had completed its arrangements for the reception of the demonstrator and his tools, a consignment of the latter which was waiting for use by the less prepared community, was lawlessly annexed and carried off to the rival village, and a triumphant telegram despatched to announce that they were " ready,"—when would the lecturer come ? It is easy to see that, if the instructors are clever and competent, such teaching might revive a lost art, and give an interest and life to village thought, in a form which could. hardly have been hoped for. Starting as it must from the rude and necessary beginnings of the woodworker's craft, it might develop in any village into the higher and nobler forms which stamped with grace and beauty the household woodwork of three hundred years ago. There are hundreds of villages in which the carved cornices and corbels of the old houses have stood. for centuries in all men's sight, the unheeded. records of a lost craft, seen daily, and yet not seen, because the eye of understanding was blind. Once begun, the conditions of village life favour progress in such work, because the workers remain, or should remain, in the same district, and so are able to profit by continued instruction. Technical in- struction, thus treated and limited, will tend to make not only the material but the mental surroundings of village life healthy, happy, and harmonious. It forms the rational complement to the elementary education already given by law, and to the political education which it is the aim of those who advocate the establishment of Village Councils to introduce, and, unlike higher education, it does not unfit the labourer for his special work, and drive him dissatisfied to other occupations, but should in the end mate his own life fuller, better paid, and better worth living. If it does, the present Government may fairly urge a claim on his gratitude for the share contributed by it to such a result.
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