c. I envy my correspondent’s complacency in his own and his Society’s munificence, too sorrowfully to endeavour to dispel it.
d. The ‘verbal’ agreement is indeed secured by the alteration. But as St. Paul, by a ‘brother,’ meant any Christian, I shall be glad to learn from my correspondent whether the Wesleyans understand their rule in that significance.
e. Many thanks to Mr. Wesley. Doubtless his disciples know what rate of interest is lawful, and what not; and also by what law it was made so; and always pause with pious accuracy at the decimal point whereat the excellence of an investment begins to make it criminal. St. George will be grateful to their representative for information on these—not unimportant—particulars.
f. How far that is, my correspondent’s duly dissenting scorn of the wisdom of the Greeks, and legality of the Jews, has doubtless prevented his thinking it necessary to discover. I must not waste the time of other readers in assisting his elementary investigations; but have merely to point out to him that definitions either of theft, adultery, usury, or murder, have only become necessary in modern times; and that Methodists, [[369]]and any other persons, are charged by me with breaking the law of Moses, David, and Christ, in so far only as they do accept Mr. John Wesley’s, or any other person’s, definition instead of their utterly unquestionable meaning. (Would T. S., of North Tyne, reprint his letters for me from the Sunderland paper, to be sent out with December Fors?)
IV. I reprint the following paragraph chiefly as an example of our ineffable British absurdity. It is perfectly right to compel fathers to send their children to school; but, once sent, it is the schoolmaster’s business to keep hold of them. In St. George’s schools, it would have been the little runaway gentleman who would have got sent to prison; and kept, sotto piombi, on bread and water, until he could be trusted with more liberty. The fate of the father, under the present application of British law, leaves the problem, it seems to me, still insoluble but in that manner. But I should like to know more of the previous history of parent and child.
“The story of George Widowson, aged fifty-seven, told at the inquest held on his remains at Mile End Old Town on Wednesday, is worth recording. Widowson was, as appears by the evidence of his daughter, a sober, hard-working man until he was sent to prison for three days in last December in default of paying a fine for not sending his son, a boy eleven years of age, to school. The deceased, as several witnesses deposed, constantly endeavoured to make the child go to school, and had frequently taken him there himself; but it was all in vain. Young Widowson when taken to school invariably ran away, the result being that his father was driven to distraction. His imprisonment in December had preyed on his mind, and he took to drinking. He frequently threatened to destroy himself rather than be imprisoned again. Hearing that another summons was about to be issued against him, he broke up his home, and on [[370]]the night of the 30th ultimo solved the educational problem by throwing himself into the Regent’s Canal. Fear of being again sent to prison by the School Board was, his daughter believed, the cause of his committing this act. The jury returned a verdict in accordance of this opinion; and although George Widowson was wrong to escape from the clutches of the friends of humanity by putting an end to his life, those who blame him should remember that imprisonment to a bonâ fide working man of irreproachable character, is simply torture. He loses all that in his own eyes makes life worth preservation.”—Pall Mall Gazette, July 7th, 1876.
V. The next extract contains some wholesome comments on our more advanced system of modern education.
“Indian Civil Service.—At a meeting of the Indian section of the Society of Arts, under the presidency of Mr. Andrew Cassels, a paper on ‘Competition and its Effects upon Education’ was read by Dr. George Birdwood. In the course of his remarks, he commented at length upon the India Office despatch of Feb. 24, regarding ‘the selection and training of candidates for the Indian Civil Service,’ and feared that it would but serve to confirm and aggravate and rapidly extend the very worst evil of the old system of competition—namely, the degeneration of secondary education throughout England.… The despatch tended to make over all the secondary schooling of the country to the crammers, or to reduce it to the crammers’ system. They were making the entrance examinations year by year more and more difficult—as their first object must necessarily now be, not the moral and intellectual discipline of the boyhood of England, but to show an ever-growing percentage of success at the various competitive examinations always going on for public services. ‘The devil take the hindermost’ [[371]]was fast becoming the ideal of education, even in the public schools. If they seriously took to cramming little fellows from twelve to fourteen for entrance into public schools, the rising generation would be used up before it reached manhood. A well-known physician, of great experience, told him that the competition for all sorts of scholarships and appointments was showing its evil fruits in the increase of insanity, epilepsy, and other nervous diseases amongst young people of the age from seventeen to nineteen, and especially amongst pupil-teachers; and if admission into the public schools of England was for the future to be regulated by competition, St. Vitus’s dance would soon take the place of gout, as the fashionable disease of the upper classes. This was the inevitable result of the ill-digested and ill-regulated system of competition for the public services, and especially the Indian Civil Service, which had prevailed; and he feared that the recent despatch would only be to hasten the threatened revolution in their national secondary schools, and the last state of cramming under the despatch would be worse than the first.… The best of examiners was the examiner of his own pupils; for no man could measure real knowledge like the teacher. What should be aimed at was regular moderate study and sound and continuous discipline to start the growing man in life in the healthiest bodily and moral condition possible. He objected to children striving for prizes, whether in games or in studies. The fewer prizes won at school, the more would probably be won in life. Let their only anxiety be to educate their children well, and suffer no temptation to betray them into cramming, and the whole world was open to them.”—Daily Telegraph.
VI. The development of ‘humanity’ in America is so brilliantly illustrated in the following paragraphs, that I have thought them worth preserving:— [[372]]
From ‘The American Socialist, devoted to the Enlargement and Perfection of Home.’