Lord Salisbury, in an able speech on education delivered on
Friday week at Manchester, took occasion to point out one danger which accompanies it, the notion that it is not "genteel" for an educated man or woman to work with the hands. So strong, he said, was this feeling everywhere, that already artisans in England were better paid than clerks—or than curates—and in Germany than Professors, while for women the only endurable occupation seemed to be tuition. They would, he plainly hinted, go on the streets sooner than be housemaids. The caution is not ungraceful from a Marquis who has been a working journalist, and is, no doubt, fully needed. "Mucky pride," as Curses Bell used to call the spirit of gentility, is the curse of our society ; but there is a word to be said upon the other side. Is it quite certain that healthy pride would not content itself with a pound a week and intellectual work in preference to 1.3 a week and monotonous manual labour? Would it have been well in the highest sense for the Marquis to have taken 110 a week as a puddler, instead of half that sum, say, as political writer ? We do not feel sure ; but we do feel sure that with a very considerable novelist a market. gardener, and a still more considerable poet an upholsterer, opinion is very slowly becoming healthier on the subject.
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