RAGGED SCHOOLS.

SELDOSELDOM is it our lot to read arguments at once so able and so M as those advanced against State support to Ragged Schools. They read like demonstrations, and are only sophisms. These schools were originally established to attract the classes to whom respectability is a formidable bugbear, to catch children who cannot be " clean," or " neat," or " well behaved," or any of the things their betters think "proper" in the children of the poor. They were intended to catch the sou of the drunkard, and the daughter of the slut, boys to whom the street is a home, and girls whose notion of happiness is immunity from blows. Fostered by the zeal of per- sons like Miss Carpenter, and supported by the lurking liking of Englishmen for anything that defies respectability, these schools rose to a place among the first agents of education. No less than three hundred thousand children, most of them savages, as barbarous as if they had been bred in New Zealand or Papua, received in these

places the rudiments of enlightenment. Nobody was rejected because he was bad, or dirty, or disorderly, the teachers iinagin indeed, with a perversity suggestive of notions not current in society, that those were reasons for, not against, a process of civilization. Of course boys who could write, learned to respect clean hands, and girls who could sew, fancied that rags might impair their naturally good looks, and so the schools got orderly, and the tone of instruction rose.

With the improvement came the necessity for funds. Government granted the tutors something, but the founders of the scheme could

not see why they should not be aided as readily and to as great an extent as the "respectable" establishments. Ragged schools are as valuable to the State as national schools, or even more so. The latter improve the working class, but the former diminish the criminal population, save money in no indirect fashion in gaols and reforma tortes, police and hangmen. To make the son of a tradesman equal to business is a good work, but it is at least not more advantageous than to make the son of a mudlark honest. Why, then, should not the State contribution be increased?

The officials of the department think otherwise, and their argument is plausible enough. The ragged schools, they say, are getting a great deal too good. Respectable people who can pay for their schooling are already sending their children to places where they receive a capital education without fees, new clothes, or burdensome restraint. If we give more money this process will be accelerated, till our system will be broken up, and the mass of children transferred from the superior to the inferior schools. Our whole principle is to give grants on condition of very burdensome but beneficial com- pliances, and now we are asked to give the same amount without any compliances at all. What, then, is the premium in favour of the re-

spectable national school ? Just this, that it is respectable. The decent artisan and the honest small tradesman will no more send his child to a ragged school because it is cheap, than a peer will send his son

to a City-road academy for the same reason. The carpenter likes

street associations for his children just as little as the gentleman likes the association of his fishmonger. Cask, the strongest of English

feelings, will keep the two systems as distinct as they always have been, even though the inferior school should do its work a little better than of old.

Besides, though money is wanted to the same extent, there is no imaginable necessity for giving it on precisely the same grounds, or through the same machinery. We see no reason, for example, why the rejection of any child, whose parents earn twelve shillings a week, should not be the first condition of the grant. A. wide exception would have to be made for the children of drinking, dishonest, or in-

human parents, but the principle would deter the respectable from thronging to the school. Changes, too, might be introduced into the

mode of reward intended to prohibit such a result. The capitation prin- ciple is obviously inapplicable. A teacher paid for the number he can collect has every temptation to be careless as to the class who swell his numbers and increase his reward. A better mode would be to reward

him in proportion to the number of Loa fuk "ragged" children, i.e. children without means, who reach a certain standard of information,

or, better still, by the number who pass from his care into a national and fee-paying school. The latter test is a little too dependent on parents to be fair, but the reflex action of these schools on the homes which necessitate them is one of their many claims upon the State.

A. clever inspector, specially. selected for the task, would soon ascer-

tain whether the children in any given place were really those of parents below the standard created by the fee. Let him decide on the facts, supervised by the local committee, and let the master be rewarded by promotions in grades of efficiency, the first test to be not the respectability but the lowness of the children he collects. Miss

Carpenter, or Dr. Guthrie, would ascertain the efficiency, of any

ragged schoolmaster in a day, and surely an inspector may be trained to equal skill. That occasional blunders would occur is probable, but men are marvellously swift to acquire the skill which pays, and an inspector can learn at least as readily as a sergeant of police. At all events, even the risk of a few "respectable" children getting edu- cated for nothing is preferable to the neglect of an agency which will

reform the very class all governments fear and most governments neglect. The classes who underlie civilization, to whom all the im-

provements of the last half-century have brought nothing except the lucifer-match, ought to be, not the object of a half-contemptuous i attention given at intervals, but the primary objects of philanthrophic

care. They can do nothing without help, while it is they, and not the classes who throng our national schools, whom modern society has to dread.