neighbourhood, who are in a
similar state of horrible misery. My own experience tells me that
the instruction of the females in the work of a house, in teaching
them to produce cheerfulness and comfort at the fireside, would
prevent a great amount of misery and crime. There would be fewer
drunken husbands and disobedient children. As a working man, within
my own observation, female education is disgracefully neglected. I
attach more importance to it than to any thing else."

This evidence is the more significant, because, one sees that the poor
woman had the material of character out of which the most engaging
qualities might have been formed. Let her have seen better things in
early life, and even if her schooling had been somewhat deficient, had
she but enjoyed the advantage of such social intercourse with her betters
as we are now considering, that poor woman might have been a source of
joy and hope to her family, instead of a centre of repulsion.

Dr. Cooke Taylor, in his "Tour in the Manufacturing Districts," has given
a table, which I subjoin, "showing the degree of instruction, age, and
sex; of the persons taken into custody, summarily convicted, or held to
bail, and tried and convicted, in Manchester, in the year 1841." The
table was formed on statistical details furnished by Sir Charles Shaw.
It shows a state of facts which has been deduced from other tables of a
like nature, but the facts are of such moment, that they can hardly be
kept too much in mind; especially when we consider that there are large
towns in which, as I have said before, half at least of the juvenile
population is growing up without education of any kind whatever. {147}
If such are the favourable results even of that small and superficial
education, which by the way I would rather call instruction than
education, described in the second and third headings of the table, what
may we not expect from a training where the youth or maiden finds in her
employers not only instructors, but friends and occasional companions?
What store of labour on the part of judges, jailors, and policemen, must
be saved by even a few of such employers.

TOTAL IN THE YEAR 1841. Degree of Instruction

1. Neither Read nor 2. Read only or 3. Read and Write 4. Superior