Earl Russell has published a new pamphlet on "National Education,"
which contains some curious reminiscences. So recently as 1839, Lord Melbourne doubted the value of education as a means of advancing men in the world, pointing to many un- educated men who had got on ; the Bishop of Durham believed it would make no way among the poor ; the Archbishop of Canter- bury said that when he was rector if he had proposed to educate the poor the farmers would have laughed at him ; and at Milton Abbott, in Devonshire, when the Duke of Bedford proposed to set up a school, a farmer asked if anybody "supposed he was going to send his son to school to please the Duke of Bedford." Even the late Bishop of Exeter thought instruction in geography should be confined to the geography of the Holy Land, appar- ently under some impression, widely shared by Sunday-school teachers, that that was somehow a " sacred " study. The pam- phlet is intended apparently to advocate gratuitous instruction, to be paid for out of a sixpenny income-tax, instead of out of rates, which fall on "poor widows;" but its only value consists in these stories, which show how the minds of men have changed in a single generation. In 1839 it was almost impossible to obtain £10,000 a year for national instruction.
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