EDUCATION OF CHILDREN.
London, 17th August 1853.
Sin—Lord Shaftesbury has solved the only practical difficulty in the ex- tirpation of thieves,—catchingthem in their nests before they are full-grown, and setting straight the incipient moral twist. Thieves take to thieving either from necessity, by reason of poverty, or from the operation of a twisted intellect, such as Coleridge described when he said "a rogue is a fool with a circumbendibus." A man or boy finds that by the possession of a more acute intellect he can overreach a less acute one and live without la- bour,—i. e. without physical labour, for he exerts considerable mental labour in the process. The mistake he makes is in assuming that his acuteness is greater than that of the whole of society, which is interested in saving the man of little acuteness from being overreached ; so society makes a law against the overreaching, and the overreacher finds after a time that his mental acuteness has been thrown away. Could he have perceived this from the beginning, he would not have taken up the trade of overreaching ; society in the long run being too strong for any dishonesty beyond the average Which is tacitly agreed upon as a standard,—for society likes and connives at a certain amount of dishonesty according to rule, and has its own means of punishing those who presume to be more honest than the average. But dishonesty—what is it ? Phrenologists will answer, " an overdeve- lopment of the acquisitive faculty." Gamblers will answer, " using loaded dice or cheating at cards." Traders will say, " forgery, fraudulent bank- ruptcy, robbing the till, filching goods from warehouses." People in easy circumstances living in detached houses call it " burglary." Downright thieves call it " cheating one's comrades in the division of a booty." But the gambler will not call it dishonest to win money at a game of skill by playing with an unskilled adversary. The trader will not call it dishonest to take advantage of his neighbour's misfortunes and buy his goods at half their value. The easy gentleman will not call it dishonest to take 10,0001. per annum from the public under the pretence of doing something less than nothing. And the thief will not cull it dishonest to lay hands on all he can without asking the owner's leave. In truth, the majority are governed by class maxims of honesty, and work up to and not beyond them ; and if the minority does not imitate them, the world becomes uneasy, and its smooth movement is impeded:
We must go deeper into the question. The love of acquisition, at least in the present stage of society., is a virtue, without which refinement and civili- zation would cease to exist. It is a quality implanted in our natures by Providence, and, like all other qualities without exception, is intended for the furtherance of useful objects. Crimes and vices are mostly. the result of good germs running riot. Even our law tells us that thieving is not a crime when the act is that of taking food to prevent starvation ; though it is a ques- tionable thing, says the law, if taken by a servant to give to a starving fellow creature, and for such eases the Poor-law professes to find a remedy. If, then, we agree that crimes and vices are only the result of good germs running wild, it follows that we ought properly to guide those germs from the birth of the child, if not before. If the immoral lives of individuals are winked at by society as fearing to encroach too much on personal freedom, society must do the best it can to straighten the crooked individual after its birth, by finding occupations analogous to its special aptitudes. If so- ciety will not do this—if it will leave the child in a blind state, groping its way towards its natural fitness—it must expect that it will make blunders. If its blunders plunge it into poverty, it will commit in self-preservation what society calls crimes. If its friends possess means to maintain it, and apply it to unfitting pursuits, it will pass its time when it grows up in the amiable employment of spoiling material or perverting truth, or both, and labouring with all its might to prevent others with natural aptitude from using material rightly, or propagating truth. It has been said, that "one half of the world knows not how the other half lives." It may also be said, that more than one half of the world knows how unjustly they and the re- mainder are prevented from getting their living "in the sphere to which it has pleased God to call them," and in which it has pleased man to impede them. William Visor of Wincot was especially patronized by Justice Shal- low's man Davy, and the world is largely made up of Visors,—masks of men, pretending to be what they are not, doing things badly, and preventing others from doing them well—because they have served an apprenticeship to the not knowing of them, and are ignorant how else to get a living. They are a perpetual drag-wheel on progress from the simple operation of the law of self-preservation. And, however mischievous they may be to society, they themselves are not to blame—they are the result of circumstances pro- vided for them by others misapprehending their true interests. They are a result of ignorant fathers and ignorant mothers to the third and fourth generation. More favouiable circumstances would have developed them otherwise. The children of people in position become practically cheats from being misfitted to their natural aptitudes ; and children abandoned by society become thieves to preserve life, and think themselves praiseworthy and industrious when they rush away from the ragged school to what they call work, that is, picking the pockets of people coming out of chapel. Not the children but their elders are to blame for this misdirected energy. The mischievous child, like what we call the vicious child, is but an example of energy run to waste.
What are vices, and what are virtues ?
Virtue is manhood, the quality distinguishing moral man from the beast without morals. Vice is the representation of virtue ; as a viceroy is the re- presentative of a king. There must be a resemblance, therefore, between vice and virtue. Hypocrisy is said to be the tribute that vice peyote virtue ; it is vice-virtue—virtue on a sliding-scale. The act of killing a fellow being in some eases we call murder—a crime; in other cases we call it heroism and patriotism. The act of taking property without the owner's consent in a captured city we esteem lawful, in other cases we call it robbery. The act of disguising ourselves and speaking the thing which is not true, we hold to be honourable to take advantage of an enemy or to catch a thief; but in other cases we stigmatize it as lying. The acquisition of property even by means not quite straight, leads to power, and the possessor is practically ap- plauded by the deference paid to him. It was once said pithily by an Eng- lish counterpart of Talleyrand, "A rich man must be a great fool who in England comes within the clutches of the law for anything short of murder " ; which he would hold to be worse than a crime—a blunder.
Fielding says of one of his characters, " he possessed a large share of that quality which is called resolution in a good cause and obstinacy in a bad one," the good or bad in such cases being mostly measured by the success or non-success in the estimation of the critic ; and this phrase of Fielding well represents the mode in which all human qualities slide into good at one end of the scale and into evil at the other. That which is good in one state of society constantly becomes evil in another. In the estimation of a Red In• dian, to kill an enemy of the tribe by any means whatever is praiseworthy ; it leaves more space for hunting-grounds and the growth of game, the ab- sence of which is the condition of poverty and misery ; and it is a better con- dition of such a life to be killed suddenly than to die of starvation.
Human happiness in an enlarged sense must be a condition of sympathy extended and general, as well as individualized. A human being without sympathies may have the excitement of love of power, exercised in the form of murder or robbery on the large or small scale, but can have no happiness. Two or more must go to that condition of humanity. Even drunkards are with few exceptions gregarious, or drinking songs would not have existed. Happiness,. therefore, in the highest sense, cannot exist while any member of society is unhappy. The existence of unhappiness in any will more or less leaven and pervade the whole mass. The first condition essential to universal happiness in any country is the
absence of privation, and the wholesome gratification of all healthy appetites of the senses. In proportion to the facility of supplying the lower wants, so will their intensity decrease, as a table overloaded with viands palls appe- tite by the sight, and thus a larger scope will be obtained for the growth of the higher qualities. We are yet but in the infancy of the arts essential for winning the world from the wilderness. We have not yet emerged from the antagonisms. The world is still kept quiet by force—of the soldier or the policeman. The next move is to open up to the career of all, the develop- ment of their mental aptitudes. 'When society has done this, it is probable that prisons and poor-houses may be applied to other and more useful pur- poses than those of their original construction. Some of the impediments to progress I will endeavour to indicate in my next. I am, Sir, yours faithfully, W. B. A.
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