vernment to protect our
persons and property from danger. The gross ignorance of the common
people is a principal cause of danger to our persons and property.
Therefore, it is the duty of Government to take care that the common
people shall not be grossly ignorant.

And what is the alternative? It is universally allowed that, by some
means, Government must protect our persons and property. If you take
away education, what means do you leave? You leave means such as only
necessity can justify, means which inflict a fearful amount of pain,
not only on the guilty, but on the innocent who are connected with
the guilty. You leave guns and bayonets, stocks and whipping-posts,
treadmills, solitary cells, penal colonies, gibbets. See then how the
case stands. Here is an end which, as we all agree, governments are
bound to attain. There are only two ways of attaining it. One of those
ways is by making men better, and wiser, and happier. The other way is
by making them infamous and miserable. Can it be doubted which way we
ought to prefer? Is it not strange, is it not almost incredible, that
pious and benevolent men should gravely propound the doctrine that the
magistrate is bound to punish and at the same time bound not to teach?
To me it seems quite clear that whoever has a right to hang has a right
to educate. Can we think without shame and remorse that more than half
of those wretches who have been tied up at Newgate in our time might
have been living happily, that more than half of those who are now in
our gaols might have been enjoying liberty and using that liberty well,
that such a hell on earth as Norfolk Island, need never have existed, if
we had expended in training honest men but a small part of what we have
expended in hunting and torturing rogues.

I would earnestly entreat every gentleman to look at a report which
is contained in the Appendix to the First Volume of the Minutes of
the Committee of Council. I speak of the report made by Mr Seymour
Tremenheare on the state of that part of Monmouthshire which is
inhabited by a population chiefly employed in mining. He found that,
in this district, towards the close of 1839, out of eleven thousand
children who were of an age to attend school, eight thousand never went
to any school at all, and that most of the remaining three thousand
might almost as well have gone to no school as to the squalid hovels in
which men who ought themselves to have been learners pretended t