cked in:
abroad, it is a duty. Here, schoolmasters are perfectly irresponsible
except to their paymasters; in other countries, teachers are appointed
by the state, and a rigid supervision is maintained over the trainers of
youth, both as regards competency and moral conduct. In England, whoever
is too poor to buy the article education, can get none of it for himself
or his offspring; in other parts of Europe, either the government (as in
Germany), or public opinion (as in America), enforces it upon the
youthful population.

What are the consequences? One is revealed by a comparison between the
proportion of scholars in elementary schools to the entire population of
other countries, and that in our own. Taking the whole of northern
Europe--including Scotland, and France, and Belgium (where education is
at a low ebb), we find that to every 2-1/4 of the population, there is
one child acquiring the rudiments of knowledge; while in England there
is only one such pupil to every _fourteen_ inhabitants.

It has been calculated that there are, at the present day in England and
Wales, nearly 8,000,000 persons who can neither read nor write--that is
to say, nearly one quarter of the population. Also, that of all the
children between five and fourteen, more than one half attend no place
of instruction. These statements--compiled by Mr. Kay, from official and
other authentic sources, for his work on the Social Condition and
Education of the Poor in England and Europe, would be hard to believe,
if we had not to encounter in our every-day life degrees of illiteracy
which would be startling, if we were not thoroughly used to it. Wherever
we turn, ignorance, not always allied to poverty, stares us in the face.
If we look in the Gazette, at the list of partnerships dissolved, not a
month passes but some unhappy man, rolling perhaps in wealth, but
wallowing in ignorance, is put to the _experimentum crucis_ of "his
mark." The number of petty jurors--in rural districts especially--who
can only sign with a cross is enormous. It is not unusual to see parish
documents of great local importance defaced with the same humiliating
symbol by persons whose office shows them to be not only "men of mark,"
but men of substance. We have printed already specimens of the partial
ignorance which passes under the ken of the Post Office authorities, and
we may venture to assert, that such specimens of penmanship and
orthography are not to be matched in any