I daren't
say in these times that I'm against it--but I _am_ against it.'"

There is a pleasantly human touch in that confession of a Whig
Prime Minister, that he was afraid to avow his mistrust of a great
social policy to which the Liberal party was committing itself. The
arch-charlatan, Lord Brougham, was raging up and down the kingdom
extolling the unmixed blessings of education. The University of
London, which was to make all things new, had just been set up.
"The school-master was abroad." Lord John Russell was making some
tentative steps towards a system of national education. Societies,
Congresses, and Institutes were springing up like mushrooms; and
all enlightened people agreed that extension of knowledge was the
one and all-sufficient remedy for the obvious disorders of the body
politic. The Victorian Age was, in brief, the age of Education;
and the one dogma which no one ventured to question was that the
extension of knowledge was necessarily, and in itself, a blessing.

When I say "no one" I should perhaps say "hardly anyone"; for the
wisest and wittiest man of the time saw the crack in the foundation
on which his friends were laboriously erecting the temple of their
new divinity. "Reading and writing," said Sydney Smith, "are mere
increase of power. They may be turned, I admit, to a good or a
bad purpose; but for several years of his life the child is in
your hands, and you may give to that power what bias you please. I
believe the arm of the assassin may be often stayed by the lessons
of his early life. When I see the village school, and the tattered
scholars, and the aged master or mistress teaching the mechanical
art of reading or writing, and thinking that they are teaching
that alone, I feel that the aged instructor is protecting life,
insuring property, fencing the Altar, guarding the Throne, giving
space and liberty to all the fine powers of man, and lifting him
up to his own place in the order of Creation."

That first sentence contain? the pith of the whole matter. "Reading
and writing are mere increase of power," and they may be turned
to a good or a bad purpose. Here enters the ethical consideration
which the zealots of sheer knowledge so persistently ignored. The
language about fencing the Altar and guarding the Throne might, no
doubt, strike the Judge who tried the school-teachers as unduly
idealistic; but the sentiment is sound, and knowledge is either
a blessing or a curse, according as i