So far as science teaching and technical education are concerned, the most important of all things is to provide the machinery for training proper teachers. The Department of Science and Art has been at that work for years and years, and though unable under present conditions to do so much as could be wished, it has, I believe, already begun to leaven the lump to a very considerable extent. If technical education is to be carried out on the scale at present contemplated, this particular necessity must be specially and most seriously provided for. And there is another difficulty, namely, that when you have got your science or technical teacher it may not be easy to keep him. You have educated a man--a clever fellow very likely--on the understanding that he is to be a teacher. But the business of teaching is not a very lucrative and not a very attractive one, and an able man who has had a good training is under extreme temptations to carry his knowledge and his skill to a better market, in which case you have had all your trouble for nothing. It has often occurred to me that probably nothing would be of more service in this matter than the creation of a number of not very large bursaries or exhibitions, to be gained by persons nominated by the authorities of the various science colleges and schools of the country--persons such as they thought to be well qualified for the teaching business--and to be held for a certain term of years, during which the holders should be bound to teach. I believe that some measure of this kind would do more to secure a good supply of teachers than anything else. Pray note that I do not suggest that you should try to get hold of good teachers by competitive examination. That is not the best way of getting men of that special qualification. An effectual method would be to ask professors and teachers of any institution to recommend men who, to their own knowledge, are worthy of such support, and are likely to turn it to good account.
I trust I am not detaining you too long; but there remains yet one other matter which I think is of profound importance, perhaps of more importance than all the rest, on which I earnestly beg to be permitted to say some few words. It is the need, while doing all these things, of keeping an eye, and an anxious eye, upon those measures which are necessary for the preservation of that stable and sound condition of the whole social organism which is the essential condition of real progress, and a chief end of all education. You will all recollect that some time ago there was a scandal and a great outcry about certain cutlasses and bayonets which had been supplied to our troops and sailors. These warlike implements were polished as bright as rubbing could make them; they were very well sharpened; they looked lovely. But when they were applied to the test of the work of war they broke and they bent, and proved more likely to hurt the hand of him that used them than to do any harm to the enemy. Let me apply that analogy to the effect of education, which is a sharpening and polishing of the mind. You may develop the intellectual side of people as far as you like, and you may confer upon them all the skill that training and instruction can give; but, if there is not, underneath all that outside form and superficial polish, the firm fibre of healthy manhood and earnest desire to do well, your labour is absolutely in vain.
Let me further call your attention to the fact that the terrible battle of competition between the different nations of the world is no transitory phenomenon, and does not depend upon this or that fluctuation of the market, or upon any condition that is likely to pass away. It is the inevitable result of that which takes place throughout nature and affects man's part of nature as much as any other--namely, the struggle for existence, arising out of the constant tendency of all creatures in the animated world to multiply indefinitely. It is that, if you look at it, which is at the bottom of all the great movements of history. It is that inherent tendency of the social organism to generate the causes of its own destruction, never yet counteracted, which has been at the bottom of half the catastrophes which have ruined States. We are at present in the swim of one of those vast movements in which, with a population far in excess of that which we can feed, we are saved from a catastrophe, through the impossibility of feeding them, solely by our possession of a fair share of the markets of the world. And in order that that fair share may be retained, it is absolutely necessary that we should be able to produce commodities which we can exchange with food-growing people, and which they will take, rather than those of our rivals, on the ground of their greater cheapness or of their greater excellence. That is the whole story. And our course, let me say, is not actuated by mere motives of ambition or by mere motives of greed. Those doubtless are visible enough on the surface of these great movements, but the movements themselves have far deeper sources. If there were no such things as ambition and greed in this world, the struggle for existence would arise from the same causes.
Our sole chance of succeeding in a competition, which must constantly become more and more severe, is that our people shall not only have the knowledge and the skill which are required, but that they shall have the will and the energy and the honesty, without which neither knowledge nor skill can be of any permanent avail. This is what I mean by a stable social condition, because any other condition than this, any social condition in which the development of wealth involves the misery, the physical weakness, and the degradation of the worker, is absolutely and infallibly doomed to collapse. Your bayonets and cutlasses will break under your hand, and there will go on accumulating in society a mass of hopeless, physically incompetent, and morally degraded people, who are, as it were, a sort of dynamite which, sooner or later, when its accumulation becomes sufficient and its tension intolerable, will burst the whole fabric.
I am quite aware that the problem which I have put before you and which you know as much about as I do, and a great deal more probably, is one extremely difficult to solve. I am fully aware that one great factor in industrial success is reasonable cheapness of labour. That has been pointed out over and over again, and is in itself an axiomatic proposition. And it seems to me that of all the social questions which face us at this present time, the most serious is how to steer a clear course between the two horns of an obvious dilemma. One of these is the constant tendency of competition to lower wages beyond a point at which man can remain man--below a point at which decency and cleanliness and order and habits of morality and justice can reasonably be expected to exist. And the other horn of the dilemma is the difficulty of maintaining wages above this point consistently with success in industrial competition. I have not the remotest conception how this problem will eventually work itself out; but of this I am perfectly convinced, that the sole course compatible with safety lies between the two extremes; between the Scylla of successful industrial production with a degraded population, on the one side, and the Charybdis of a population, maintained in a reasonable and decent state, with failure in industrial competition, on the other side. Having this strong conviction, which, indeed, I imagine must be that of every person who has ever thought seriously about these great problems, I have ventured to put it before you in this bare and almost cynical fashion because it will justify the strong appeal, which I make to all concerned in this work of promoting industrial education, to have a care, at the same time, that the conditions of industrial life remain those in which the physical energies of the population may be maintained at a proper level; in which their moral state may be cared for; in which there may be some rays of hope and pleasure in their lives; and in which the sole prospect of a life of labour may not be an old age of penury.
These are the chief suggestions I have to offer to you, though I have omitted much that I should like to have said, had time permitted. It may be that some of you feel inclined to look upon them as the Utopian dreams of a student. If there be such, let me tell you that there are, to my knowledge, manufacturing towns in this country, not one-tenth the size, or boasting one-hundredth part of the wealth, of Manchester, in which I do not say that the programme that I have put before you is completely carried out, but in which, at any rate, a wise and intelligent effort had been made to realise it, and in which the main parts of the programme are in course of being worked out. This is not the first time that I have had the privilege and pleasure of addressing a Manchester audience. I have often enough, before now, thrown myself with entire confidence upon the hard-headed intelligence and the very soft-hearted kindness of Manchester people, when I have had a difficult and complicated scientific argument to put before them. If, after the considerations which I have put before you--and which, pray be it understood, I by no means claim particularly for myself, for I presume they must be in the minds of a large number of people who have thought about this matter--if it be that these ideas commend themselves to your mature reflection, then I am perfectly certain that my appeal to you to carry them into practice, with that abundant energy and will which have led you to take a foremost part in the great social movements of our country many a time beforehand, will not be made in vain. I therefore confidently appeal to you to let those impulses once more have full sway, and not to rest until you have done something better and greater than has yet been done in this country in the direction in which we are now going. I heartily thank you for the attention which you have been kind enough to bestow upon me. The practice of public speaking is one I must soon think of leaving off, and I count it a special and peculiar honour to have had the opportunity of speaking to you on this subject to-day.
THE END OF VOL. III