rtesy to other nations, to say how much more we have to be proud of
in our ancestors than they? Among our ancient monarchs, great crimes
stand out as monstrous and strange. But their valor, and, according to
their understanding, their benevolence, are constant. The Wars of the
Roses, which are as a fearful crimson shadow on our land, represent the
normal condition of other nations; while from the days of the Heptarchy
downwards we have had examples given us, in all ranks, of the most
varied and exalted virtue; a heap of treasure that no moth can corrupt,
and which even our traitorship, if we are to become traitors to it,
cannot sully.

And this is the race, then, that we know not any more how to govern! and
this the history which we are to behold broken off by sedition! and this
is the country, of all others, where life is to become difficult to the
honest, and ridiculous to the wise! And the catastrophe, forsooth, is to
come just when we have been making swiftest progress beyond the wisdom
and wealth of the past. Our cities are a wilderness of spinning wheels
instead of palaces; yet the people have not clothes. We have blackened
every leaf of English greenwood with ashes, and the people die of cold;
our harbors are a forest of merchant ships, and the people die of
hunger.

Whose fault is it? Yours, gentlemen; yours only. You alone can feed
them, and clothe, and bring into their right minds, for you only can
govern--that is to say, you only can educate them.

Educate, or govern, they are one and the same word. Education does not
mean teaching people to know what they do not know. It means teaching
them to behave as they do not behave. And the true "compulsory
education" which the people now ask of you is not catechism, but drill.
It is not teaching the youth of England the shapes of letters and the
tricks of numbers; and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to
roguery, and their literature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training
them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and
souls. It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by
kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise,--but above
all--by example.

Compulsory! Yes, by all means! "Go ye out into the highways and hedges,
and _compel_ them to come in." Compulsory! Yes, and gratis also. _Dei
Gratia_, they must be taught, as, _Dei Gratia_, you are set to teach
them. I hear strange talk continually, "how