m the
religious instruction of the orthodox.

On this question the municipal elections were fought. The general education
party were eventually beaten. The Roman Catholics were withdrawn from the
schools, and thrown entirely upon the priests or the streets for education,
and great was the rejoicing among the party who carried a large wooden Bible
as their standard.

But subsequent events have induced those who have given any attention to the
state of the operative classes in Liverpool, of whatever politics, to doubt
whether it would not have been better to have been busy, for the last fifteen
years, in teaching those classes something, who, knowing nothing, supply very
expensive customers to the Liverpool courts of law and jail.

Liverpool returns two members to the House of Commons.

The election contests were formerly wonderfully bitter and absurd, for on one
occasion, just before the passing of the Reform Bill, nearly two hundred
thousand pounds were spent by two parties, between whose politics there was
scarcely a shade of difference.

William Roscoe represented Liverpool for a short time, but was rejected at a
second election, in consequence of his opposition to the Slave Trade. He was
the son of a publican, and rose from an office boy to be an attorney in large
practice, and eventually a banker. He was ruined by the stopping of his
bank, which, after being for many years under the taxing harrows of the old
corrupt bankrupt system, paid twenty shillings in the pound. William Roscoe
was a voluminous writer of political pamphlets and poetry, which are now
quite forgotten; his literary reputation deservedly rests upon his lives of
Lorenzo de Medici, published in 1796, and of Leo X; the former of which has
recently been republished by Mr. Bohn, in his cheap series of reprints.

Of even more value than his literary productions, was the school, or party,
which he founded in Liverpool, while he was still wealthy and influential,
embracing all who had a taste for literature and art. At that period
Liverpool was rising into wealth on a vigorous prosecution of the Slave
Trade, of which its parliamentary representatives were the avowed supporters.
At that time vulgar wealth was the only distinction, and low debauchery the
almost only amusement of the principal merchants. Absurd as it may now seem,
when all the well-to-do world profess to be educated and temperate, Roscoe
and his friends rendered inestimable service