difficult it is to make
people pay for being educated!" Why, I should think so! Do you make your
children pay for their education, or do you give it them compulsorily,
and gratis? You do not expect _them_ to pay you for their teaching,
except by becoming good children. Why should you expect a peasant to pay
for his, except by becoming a good man?--payment enough, I think, if we
knew it. Payment enough to himself, as to us. For that is another of our
grand popular mistakes--people are always thinking of education as a
means of livelihood. Education is not a profitable business, but a
costly one; nay, even the best attainments of it are always
unprofitable, in any terms of coin. No nation ever made its bread either
by its great arts, or its great wisdoms. By its minor arts or
manufactures, by its practical knowledges, yes: but its noble
scholarship, its noble philosophy, and its noble art, are always to be
bought as a treasure, not sold for a livelihood. You do not learn that
you may live--you live that you may learn. You are to spend on National
Education, and to be spent for it, and to make by it, not more money,
but better men;--to get into this British Island the greatest possible
number of good and brave Englishmen. _They_ are to be your "money's
worth."

But where is the money to come from? Yes, that is to be asked. Let us,
as quite the first business in this our national crisis, look not only
into our affairs, but into our accounts, and obtain some general notion
how we annually spend our money, and what we are getting for it.
Observe, I do not mean to inquire into the public revenue only; of that
some account is rendered already. But let us do the best we can to set
down the items of the national _private_ expenditure; and know what we
spend altogether, and how.

To begin with this matter of education. You probably have nearly all
seen the admirable lecture lately given by Captain Maxse, at
Southampton. It contains a clear statement of the facts at present
ascertained as to our expenditure in that respect. It appears that of
our public moneys, for every pound that we spend on education we spend
twelve either in charity or punishment;--ten millions a year in
pauperism and crime, and eight hundred thousand in instruction. Now
Captain Maxse adds to this estimate of ten millions public money spent
on crime and want, a more or less conjectural sum of eight millions for
private charities. My impression is that this is