It was not vanity that led him to wish for the spread of his short-hand. He was not, indeed, insensible to fame, but the ruling passion that was strong in him to the very end of his life was the love of his fellow-men. In one letter he speaks of “the divine principle of divided labour;” in another he prays that “the divine principle of utility may be carried into every corner of human practice.” There might justly be applied to him the words that he himself used of a friend: “He had a matchless benevolence—an interest in the happiness of others.” His youngest son’s death was a dreadful blow to him. “The vacancy,” he wrote, “seems appalling.” One brother was lying dead at home, another had fallen ill in London. The old father feared that some “inconsiderate expression of impatience” of his, written before the news had reached him of his son’s illness, might have increased his fever. “You must forgive one who knew not what he did.” In the midst of all his sorrow and anxiety he found no small comfort. His beloved child had lived to see the beginning of good times. “The French Revolution (of 1830,) and the change of ministry to a liberal complexion, he had to rejoice in, and this affords us great consolation.” So, too, his private troubles were at another time overwhelmed beneath the greater troubles of his country. “Our family trials,” he writes, “merge completely in the sad prospects for our country.”
At the age of forty he had left trade, for which he was but little fitted, and had opened a school. One of the ablest among his pupils thus describes him:—
“‘Old Daddy,’ as he was afterwards more familiarly called, was one of the kindest and most upright men I ever knew: irascible as became his profession: tender-hearted: intelligent, and reflective: imbued with the liberalism which is now predominant: of moderate scholastic attainments, having indeed been originally engaged in some small business; but resolute in making his boys understand whatever he taught them.”[11]
He had, indeed, some high qualifications for the schoolmaster’s life. His “great and pure simplicity”—I use the words of another of his pupils—could not but win the hearts and ennoble the characters of all who were under him. He was, wrote a third, “a genuine man, to whom, if to any of the children of men, may be applied the emphatically Christian praise, that ‘He was an Israelite indeed, in whom there was no guile.’” On his simplicity his boys could easily impose, but though they tricked him, they never ceased to respect him. The morality of his school was, on the whole, high. It was, above all, distinguished by great truthfulness and honesty. Certainly, in one respect, he was an excellent teacher. He was, as Mr. Sargant says, resolute in making his boys understand whatever he taught them. He was altogether free from one of the worst, and one of the commonest, faults of a teacher. He never confounded rules with reasons. He cared far more that his pupils should understand why a thing is done, than how a thing is done. “His explanations of the first principles in mathematics,” says one of his pupils, “were very clear.” From this same gentleman I learn that not a little that is now taught as new in the modern system of geometry had been taught him by his old master. A week before his death he mentioned with satisfaction, that a definition which he had given of a straight line had been pronounced by a mathematician to be the best that existed.[12]
“He looked,” as I have been told by one who was long under him, “at the bearings of every subject, irrespective of its conventionalities. In every case he would be asking, ‘If we were to begin the world afresh, how should we proceed?’ He would always consider what is the best thing to be done, and next how can it be done irrespectively of everything conventional. When he had once arrived at his conclusions, and laid down his principles, he would carry them out without regard to anyone or anything.” Yet he was as free from arrogance as any man could well be. He had an old-fashioned courtesy which never forsook him even when he caned an unruly boy. Towards women, towards children, towards the oppressed, towards the poor, in a word towards those who were weaker than himself, he bore himself like a second Knight of La Mancha, or another Colonel Newcome. Nevertheless he was not a good teacher. He had at least one great failing. He was wanting, as one of his sons has said, in mental perspective. There was no “keeping” in his mind. In the image that he formed to himself of the world of learning, all things seemed to be equally in the foreground. He could not distinguish between the relative values of the different branches of study. All kinds of knowledge ranked in his eyes as of equal importance. He was, for instance, an excellent teacher of correct pronunciation and clear articulation. “We were,” says Mr. Sargant, “thoroughly taught the elements of English; and our spelling was immaculate.... The dropping of an ‘h’ was one of the seven deadly sins.” He had a quick ear for melodious and rhythmical sounds. In writing of the year 1770, he said, “It was a date which I found no pleasure in expressing. The previous year, 1769, was that in which I first became acquainted with the way of distinguishing years by their number, and I was well pleased with the metrical expression of the number first learnt. That of the subsequent 1770 ended in what my ear felt as a bathos, and I longed for the metrical restoration of 1771.” He was not seven years old when 1770 thus distressed him. He used to tell how as a child he had been delighted with the name Melinda, and how he used to repeat it again and again. His ear was grievously offended by what he called a collision. There was a collision when two like sounds came together. When his boys repeated the multiplication table they had to speak euphoniously. A collision here would have been a most serious offence. They said five sixes are thirty, but five times five is twenty-five. Five fives would have set their master’s teeth on edge, as Dean Gaisford’s were set by a wrong Greek accent. “Your old friend, Mr. A——,” he wrote to his eldest son, “has sent No. 1. of his Birmingham—m—m—Mercury. I hope more skill and more taste will appear in the selection of materials than has been evinced in the choice of a name.” In returning home from the lectures that he gave at the Philosophical Institution—and very good lectures they were, too—he would with pride draw the attention of his friends to the fact that they had not heard that night one single collision. “He used to delight,” as his son once told me, “in peculiar terms, and would amend Euclid’s language. Thus, instead of allowing the boys to say ‘the lines are at right angles to each other,’ he taught them to say, ‘the lines have a mutual perpendicularity.’ To my great annoyance the boys made a catch-cry of this, and I could hear them shouting out in the playground, ‘the lines have a mutual perpendicularity.’”
He had devised an admirable plan for curing stammering, and here he was as successful in practice as in theory. He never failed to work a cure, but he had to complain that “strange as it might appear, it was frequently much more easy to induce the capacity for speaking without stammering than the inclination.” The regard that he paid to mere utterance was, however, so excessive that the general progress of his pupils was greatly retarded. He took months to carry a class through numeration, for, fond though he was of mathematics, he paid more attention to the modulation of the voice when the figures had to be expressed aloud in words, than to the figures themselves. He took the class up to decillions. Why he stopped there it was not easy to see. It was no slight task to get a Midland County lad to express, with a correctness that would satisfy the master’s ear, a number far smaller than a decillion. When he had learnt the arithmetical value of the figures, when he had been taught to say hundred, and not underd, nine and not noine, five and not foive, the modulation of the whole sentence remained as a vast, but not, as he at length found, an insuperable task. If far too much time was wasted, no small good was thus done. His pupils were always known by the distinctness and correctness of their utterance.
He was, indeed, very fond of forming theories, but he too often forgot to test them by practice. Having once convinced himself by a process of reasoning that they were sound, he did not think it needful to put them to the proof. He was also in this part of his character like Don Quixote, who, when he had found that his pasteboard helmet did not bear the blows of his sword, having patched it up, was satisfied of its strength, and, without putting it to a second trial, looked upon it as a most finished piece of armour. When he came to build his new school-house he showed his love of theory in a curious way. “My father,” wrote his son, “having found that, with but slight deviation from the line of road, the house might be made to stand in exact coincidence with the cardinal points, would, I believe, from that moment, have been almost more willing to abandon the scheme than to lose such an opportunity of gratifying his taste.” Now most men when they build a house, build it to serve, not as the letters on a vane to show the points of the compass, but as a place of residence. A place of residence is certainly not the better, but a good deal the worse, for standing in exact coincidence with the cardinal points.
Notwithstanding his faults as a schoolmaster, he was, in many ways, admirable as a father. His children could say of him what Burns said of his father:—“He conversed familiarly on all subjects with us, as if we had been men.” “Perhaps,” wrote Mr. M. D. Hill, “after all, the greatest obligation we owe to our father is this: that from infancy he would reason with us—argue with us, would perhaps be a better expression, as denoting that it was a match of mind against mind, in which all the rules of fair play were duly observed; and we put forth our little strength without fear. Arguments were taken at their just weight; the sword of authority was not thrown into the scale.” He did not much delight to season his fireside with personal talk. It was all those matters that make up the life of a good citizen in a free state that he mostly discussed. In subjects such as these, time has proved that he was no fanciful theorist. Strong and staunch Liberal though he always was, in no single respect was he ever a man of violent or extreme views. He never was a Republican. The news of the opening scenes of the French Revolution had, indeed, been to him glad tidings of great joy. But the horrors of the Reign of Terror he never forgot or condoned. They did not scare him however from the path of reform. Unlike many of the Whigs, he always hated Bonapartism. He had, indeed, condemned as much as any man the conduct of England when in 1793 she joined the confederacy against France. He could never forgive Pitt his share in that proceeding. But when Bonaparte wantonly broke through the Peace of Amiens, and renewed the war, he was dead against him. He would have said with Southey, that had he only a single guinea in the world, he would, rather than see peace made for want of funds, give half of it in war-taxes. “My own wish,” he wrote in 1807, when the fear of a French invasion was still in the minds of men, “is that every man and every boy throughout the United Islands should be compelled, under a penalty that would be submitted to for conscience sake alone—that each should be compelled to provide himself with arms, and learn to use them.” He had his children and his pupils drilled. He was above all things a sturdy Englishman. But he longed for reforms—reforms of all kinds, but reforms that kept well within the lines of the Constitution. Above all he longed for a thorough reform of Parliament, as the fount and source of all other reforms. In that gloomiest of all years, 1811, he wrote, “a Parliamentary reform, a strong effusion of the healthy vigour of Democracy, is the only hope.” Six years later, writing to his eldest son, he says, “You will see that I have not lost sight of the excellent maxim—‘The whole man must stand or fall together.’ If your father cannot get rich without fawning, he must remain poor. If he cannot live without it, he must die, as by far the easiest alternative. Your account of London is appalling. But the land, the sunshine, the rain on our planet are as ever. Why then despair? The political heavens lower; but who shall say of what force the storm shall be, and of what duration? Who shall predict ravages too great to be compensated by succeeding seasons of calm? Let us not fear for ourselves—little indeed is needful to life—let us fear for our beloved country, and each to his utmost so trim the bark as to avoid the rocks of anarchy on the one hand, and the equally fatal, though less conspicuous, shoals of despotism on the other. The time is coming, I apprehend, when none that carries a conscience will be able to remain neuter.” He had in political matters that reasonableness which is the mark of the best English mind. When in 1819 the proposal had been made that the franchise of Grampound should be transferred to some large town, he wrote, “Cobbett and Co. would persuade the multitude to despise the boon as falling far short of what should be granted, and thus they furnish the foes of all reform with a pretence for withholding this trifling, but far from unimportant, concession.”
Evil, indeed, were the days in which the vigour of his manhood was spent, and gloomy ofttimes must have been the family talk. But amid all the gloom there was no despondency. He belonged to that hopeful but small band of brave men who amid the darkest days of the long Tory rule steadfastly held up the banner of freedom and progress. He did his best to train up his children as soldiers in the good cause. Recruits were indeed needed. The government was the most oppressive that there had been in England since the days of the Stuarts, while the upper and middle classes were sunk in an indifference that had not been witnessed since the evil times of the Restoration. “If any person,” wrote Romilly in 1808, “be desirous of having an adequate idea of the mischievous effects which have been produced in this country by the French Revolution and all its attendant horrors, he should attempt some legislative reform, on humane and liberal principles. He will then find, not only what a stupid dread of innovation, but what a savage spirit it has infused into the minds of many of his countrymen.” There were scarcely any Reformers left in Parliament. The great Whig party was either indifferent or hopeless. The Criminal Law was everywhere administered with savage severity. The Bishops, with the Archbishop of Canterbury at their head, were ready to hang a poor wretch for the crime of stealing goods that were worth five shillings. The royal dukes fought hard for the slave trade. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, and honest men were left to languish in prison.
Such were the evil days in which Thomas Hill brought up his children, and such were the evil deeds which were ever rousing his fiercest anger. The savageness of the penal code he hotly denounced. He had heard of the execution of a man whom he had known for a crime which no one now would dream of punishing with death. “I feel only compassion,” he wrote, “for the poor sufferer. Institutions more atrocious than his crimes have exacted from him a ten-fold forfeit, and he now is the injured party. It is a consolation for me to have abhorred the Draconian statutes even from my boyhood.” Slavery and the slave-trade, and religious oppression of every kind, whether carried out by law or by custom, he utterly loathed and detested. “We were all,” said one of his sons, “born to a burning hatred of tyranny.” He was too poor to take in a newspaper by himself, but he joined with three or four of his neighbours in subscribing to a London weekly journal. It was always read aloud in the family circle. The sons caught almost from their infancy their father’s ardent love of liberty. “He tuned their hearts, by far the noblest aim.” One of them could remember how, when he was a child, an account of a trial was read aloud by his eldest brother. “I underwent,” he writes, “considerable excitement in its recital, caused principally, as I recollect, by the spirited manner in which the defendant, who employed no counsel, resisted all attempts to put him down. My father’s enthusiasm, I remember, was so strong as to draw from him the wild exclamation, ‘Why the man’s a god!’” This enthusiasm he retained through life. “Beg of Arthur,” he wrote to one of his sons, on tidings coming of the Battle of Navarino, “not to get over-intoxicated with the Greek news. I bustled home to make him quite happy, and, on inquiring for him out of breath, found he had started.” I remember well how I used to read aloud to the old man, now in his eighty-seventh year, the accounts of the Hungarian Insurrection, and how deep were his groans over the defeat of the patriots, and how burning was his indignation at the cruelties of the Austrians and the Russians.