ds into heaps of coke. Would you do it? I hope not. I can
tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income
sixty-fold instead of four-fold.

83. Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The whole
country is but a little garden, not more than enough for your children
to run on the lawns of, if you would let them _all_ run there. And
this little garden you will turn into furnace-ground, and fill with
heaps of cinders, if you can; and those children of yours, not you,
will suffer for it. For the fairies will not be all banished; there
are fairies of the furnace as of the wood, and their first gifts seem
to be "sharp arrows of the mighty"; but their last gifts are "coals of
juniper."

84. And yet I cannot--though there is no part of my subject that I
feel more--press this upon you; for we made so little use of the power
of nature while we had it, that we shall hardly feel what we have lost.
Just on the other side of the Mersey you have your Snowdon, and your
Menai Straits, and that mighty granite rock beyond the moors of
Anglesea, splendid in its heatherly crest, and foot planted in the deep
sea, once thought of as sacred--a divine promontory, looking westward;
the Holy Head or Headland, still not without awe when its red light
glares first through storm. These are the hills, and these the bays
and blue inlets, which, among the Greeks, would have been always loved,
always fateful in influence on the national mind. That Snowdon is your
Parnassus; but where are its Muses? That Holyhead mountain is your
Island of Aegina, but where is its Temple to Minerva?

85. Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva had achieved under the
shadow of our Parnassus, up to the year 1848?--Here is a little account
of a Welsh school, from page 261 of the report on Wales, published by
the Committee of Council on Education. This is a school close to a
town containing 5,000 persons:--

"I then called up a larger class, most of whom had recently come to the
school. Three girls repeatedly declared that they had never heard of
Christ, and two that they had never heard of God. Two out of six
thought Christ was on earth now ('they might have had a worse thought,
perhaps'); three knew nothing about the crucifixion. Four out of seven
did not know the names of the months, nor the number of days in a year.
They had no notion of addition beyond two and two, or three and three;
their minds were perfect blanks."