nommee qui repousse
l'injustice. Quand il l'a perdue et qu'on lui impute
tous les crimes, les torts des autres et ceux meme de
la fortune, il n'a plus la faculte de gouverner, et
cette impuissance doit le condamner ... a se retirer.'
(Thiers, t. x. p. 276.) Applicable to our Government
now.

August 10th, 1839 {p.229}

I went to Norwood yesterday to see Dr. Kay's[9] Poor Law School,
supposed to be very well managed, and very successful. As I
looked at the class to whom a lesson was then being read, all the
urchins from eight to eleven or twelve years old, I thought I had
never seen a congregation of more unpromising and ungainly heads,
and accordingly they are the worst and lowest specimens of
humanity; starved, ill-used children of poor and vicious parents,
generally arriving at the school weak and squalid, with a
tendency to every vice, and without having received any moral or
intellectual cultivation whatever; but the system, under able and
zealous teachers, acts with rapid and beneficial effect on these
rude materials, and soon elicits manifestations of intelligence,
and improves and developes the moral faculties. When one sees
what is done by such small means, it is impossible not to reflect
with shame and sorrow upon the little, or rather the nothingness,
that is accomplished when the material is of the best
description, and the means are unlimited,--upon the total absence
of any system throughout places of education, either public or
private, and consequently at the imperfect and defective
education which is given to the highest and richest class of
society, who are brought up thus stupidly at an enormous expense,
acquiring little knowledge, and what they do acquire, so loosely
and incompletely as to be of the smallest possible use. When one
sees what is done here, it makes one think what ought to be done
elsewhere, and then contrast the possible with the actual state
of the case.

[9] [Afterwards Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, Bart. Dr. Kay
was a zealous promoter of national education, and had
recently been appointed to the Education Department of
the Privy Council Office, then in its infancy.]

CHAPTER VII.

Review of the Session--Ministerial Changes--Effect of Changes in
the Government--A Greenwich Dinner--Dover Dinner to the Duke of
Wellington--A Toast from Ovid--Decay of