In Russia, the number attending schools of all kinds, including the universities, amounted, in 1846, to 195,819, which, in a population of 60,000,000, gives a proportion of less than 1 to 300 of the inhabitants.
In Pennsylvania, in 1840, 1 in 5 of the population had the advantage of instruction in common schools; in New York, on the first of January 1847, nearly 1 in 16; in Massachusetts, about 1 in 6-1/2 of the population.
It is impossible to read these details without two reflections especially being immediately suggested to the mind. One of these is the necessary connexion between the success of any system of national education and the special circumstances of each individual state to which it may be applied. To introduce the Prussian system into Scotland, with any prospect of its working here as well as it does there, one would require to change the whole character of the government, and the whole habits, nay, the very nature of the people, to make Scotchmen Prussians and Scotland Prussia.
But there is a still more important reflection forced upon us. How little mere secular education, apart from that which we hold to be an indispensable accompaniment to it—sound religious education—avails for the elevation of the people, let these statistics, read in the light of recent events, tell! The murderers of Count Latour were all well-educated persons, after that fashion which it has been proposed to introduce into this country as the national system. They had all been at schools—at schools from which religious instruction, however, was either excluded, or worse than excluded.
But, to come to National Education in Scotland. On this subject there are two questions wholly distinct from each other, which at present occupy some attention. The one relates to the long-tried and approved parochial system, the other to the plans, professedly of a supplementary character, recently introduced by a committee of the Privy Council, which constitutes a government board for the application of the parliamentary grant, now voted annually for some years, for educational purposes. In a pamphlet[11] lately published by Lord Melgund, which is of some importance now, as indicating the views with which his motion in parliament is introduced, these two questions have, we think, been unfairly confounded: with the former we have particular concern at present.
We agree, however, with Lord Melgund in condemning utterly the procedure of the Privy Council in regard to those schools which are at this moment rising up in almost every parish in Scotland, not for the purpose, even ostensibly, of supplying destitute localities with the means of education, but as parts of an ecclesiastical system, whose avowed object is to supersede in all its departments the Established Church. These schools receive much the greater part (in fact nearly two-thirds) of the whole sum voted for education in Scotland; that is to say, about two-thirds of the parliamentary grant, intended to promote general education in this part of the kingdom, is by the Privy Council diverted altogether from its proper object, and applied to purposes exclusively and avowedly sectarian.
This is an abuse which cannot be too severely reprobated. Lord Melgund, in his pamphlet, with some justice calls attention to the strictly exclusive character of the Free Church—an exclusiveness to which the Established Church affords no parallel—to the fact that it is an irresponsible body, with whose affairs no man not a member has any more right to interfere, than he has with those of a railway company to which he does not belong. It is not, however, on this ground alone, or chiefly, that the Privy Council's proceedings in regard to the Free Church schools are objectionable.
Out of the sum of £5463 granted, according to the committee's minutes last issued, to Scotland in 1847, no less than £3485 was apportioned to Free Church schools. Let us inquire on what conditions, in what circumstances, so large a proportion of the fund at the disposal of the committee has been thus expended. If this sum had been appropriated bonâ fide for educational purposes, to aid in building schools in localities previously unprovided with them, perhaps no very serious exception could have been taken to the, in that case, comparatively trivial circumstance, that the persons by whom the money was to be applied happened to be dissenters from the Established Church,—dissenters whose doctrinal standards are the same as those recognised by law. In this case, it might with some reason have been said by defenders of the Privy Council, "Why should these localities remain without schools of any kind, merely because the Free Churchmen have been the only parties zealous enough to obtain for them this boon?"
But what are the facts? Even on the face of the minutes of council themselves, it appears that at least the greater part of the large grant in question has been given to aid in erecting schools where there was no pretence at all of destitution—in localities already amply supplied with the means of education, including both parochial and non-parochial schools; and has been given, therefore, not for the purpose of supplementing, but for the purpose of SUPPLANTING existing institutions; not for the advancement of education, but for the advancement of Free Churchism.
An assertion of so serious a nature as this requires proof, and proof is easily given.