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What is desirable under an efficient Board of Works is to place every existing work of irrigation in the best repair, as being the plan which is at once the most economical and efficient. The experience of a few years will establish the percentage of casualties and common repairs which are yearly required, and a fixed sum, revisable from time to time, should be annually allowed for the purpose as a deduction from the gross land revenue. An additional sum should be fixed as the yearly expenditure on new works, and anything beyond this should be the subject of a special application to the Government of India. This is a question of detail, but it is not unimportant. The present system of requiring a separate application from the subordinate governments for permission from the Government of India to undertake any work which is to cost 1000l., is open to serious objection. It causes disgusts and heart-burnings, whether from its being felt to be a continual reminder of want of confidence, or from an unreasonable desire of not being subjected to any superior so near at hand, or from the occasional refusals which are met with. As regards Madras, indeed, such refusals have been very limited in number; the whole during the last ten years being 8 in 134 proposals, or just 6 per cent.

The object to be borne in mind in devising arrangements of this nature is, to combine the requisite control on the one hand with the greatest practicable liberty of action in the party controlled. Between the Board of Works and its own government, and between the subordinate and superior governments, the same system should prevail, of sending a yearly estimate describing, in anticipation, the plans to be carried out in the ensuing year, and a yearly report stating what had been executed in accordance with the estimate previously sent, and with the orders passed upon it. Under such a system there will be a sufficient power of check and control, and, in comparison with the present, there will be more free action. Under such a system it would have been equally impossible to have neglected to assign the ferry funds for the repair of roads, or to take proper steps towards expending the fund which the Court of Directors lately allotted to the road department.

In the course of our remarks we have indicated how wide is the field for internal improvement in Southern India. It is with reference to the possibility of such improvements being attempted that we look upon it as nothing short of essential that whoever is selected as Governor of Madras should be versed in the details of Indian administration, and be also capable of statesmanlike views, and that on that or some other field of action he shall have shown himself to be equal to the duties which rightly belong to that important office. Above all things

he should not be a mere name. The Madras Government, in the person of its European revenue officers, is brought every year into direct contact with every member of the agricultural class, and how numerous a body that is may be inferred from the fact that in Tanjore alone they are 140,000. This extensive ramification of its agency enables it to influence for good or for evil the fate of vast bodies of peaceable and industrious men. On the correct solution of some of the vital questions which we have indicated depends the manner in which the most important matters affecting their prosperity and advancement shall be regulated, and it is not therefore too much to say that there are few men to whom it is given to have such power of benefiting his fellow creatures as is intrusted to a Governor of Madras.*

The subjoined statement exhibits the revenue derived from miscellaneous sources, exclusive of land, in the Bengal Presidency in 1792-3 and in 1850-1. The more recent acquisitions of that Presidency have been omitted from both columns. Since 1792-3 the events principally affecting these branches of revenue have been the imposition of stamp duties, the abolition of internal transit duties, and the increase of the consumption of opium in China. The gross revenue from these sources, in round numbers, has risen in the interval from a million sterling to five millions; the net revenue from 800,000l. to 3 millions. A certain influence in producing this result is unquestionably due to each of the changes which we have mentioned, more especially to the increased demand for opium; but these events could only supply favourable circumstances, and the elasticity and power to take advantage of them is due to the limitation of the land revenue. This circumstance is altogether wanting in Madras, and it will accordingly be found that no corresponding increase has taken place there.

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ART. V. 1. A Bill for the Promotion of Education in Cities and Boroughs in England, prepared and brought in by Lord John Russell and Mr. Secretary-at-War. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 7th April, 1853.

2. Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education, 1852-3. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. London: 1853.

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3. A Bill intituled An Act for the better Administration of Charitable Trusts.' Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed. 1st July, 1853.

4. Report and Evidence upon the Recommendations of Her Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of the University of Oxford. Presented to the Board of Heads of Houses and Proctors, December 1. 1853. Oxford: at the University Press. 1853.

TH

HE urgent necessities of public business made it impossible for Parliament to consider last Session the Government Education Bill, which we have placed first in our list at the head of this Article. This delay need not, however, be regretted, if, as we trust will be the case, the measure be in consequence made more comprehensive, and if, by the time thus given for consideration, the public becomes more fully awake to the existence of evils which cry aloud for a remedy, and to the absolute necessity for meeting these evils in a practical way in spite of all difficulties.

Of course reasonable objections may be made to the system of an education-rate as embodied in this Bill, and to the neces sary compromise as to full religious instruction which a rate. seems to entail; but, what every man who loves his country is at this time bound to consider, is, not what objections can be raised to the scheme proposed, but whether, amidst the many objections to which every scheme is liable, the scheme now brought forward be liable to the fewest, and whether the overwhelming weight of objections does not lie against proposing no general measure at all. To our minds the case as to the education of the poor presents only these, three alternatives: either, 1st, no general measure of education for them at all; or, 2ndly, a measure of mere secular, ignoring religious teaching, and therefore very faintly recognising the thousands of schools founded on religious principles which already exist and flourish; or, 3rdly, some such measure as that proposed by Govern

ment, based upon the well-approved system of the Committee of Council, and endeavouring to enlist the sympathies of the community generally in the maintenance and efficient working of all the schools which the Christian benevolence and zeal of the several religious bodies have already founded or shall hereafter found. We believe that the third of these alternatives is cordially embraced by an overwhelming majority in the country. The only disagreement or doubt refers to matters of detail, on which the time allowed for further consideration and discussion, bringing out more clearly the absolute necessity for mutual concession, will probably lead earnest-minded men of various parties to more complete agreement, before the proposed measure appears in Parliament.

Meanwhile it may be useful if we try quietly to review the position in which the great Education Question now stands. We shall probably find that it has made marked progress, and yet that there is a very wide field still almost untrodden.

We say the great Education Question; for we cordially agree in the propriety of that extension of the question which Lord John Russell introduced in his opening speech of April 4. The elementary education of the children of the poor, on which so much attention and energy has hitherto been concentrated, is not the education of the nation. A Ministry really alive to the importance of a thorough national education will think both of rich and poor. Therefore we hold that Lord John Russell was bound to introduce into his speech all those three elements, which many thought it unwise, while all allowed that it was unusual, to combine. A really national system of educa tion must reach the middle and upper classes as well as the poor. Aristocratic Fellows of All Souls, and honourable members who are now Life Guardsmen and have been Gentleman-Commoners of Christ Church, felt themselves somewhat insulted when they heard the reform of the learned body, of which they are distin guished ornaments, mixed up with measures for the better regulation of parish schools, and discussions as to the proportion in which such schools ought to be made dependent on the children's pence; while the governors of our great Public Schools would be shocked at hearing their ancient and dignified Institutions spoken of in the same breath with the whole herd of little grammar schools and other eleemosynary foundations for educating tradesmen's and ploughmen's sons. But the fact is that the time has come when the education of the poor, imperfectly developed as it is, has already made such progress that it has become absolutely necessary for Government to attend to the education of the rich. We should certainly have in a very

few years a complete overturn of social order - 'now servant is master, and inaster is manif, when the son of any poor labourer in a common parish school may attain such knowledge as the pupil teachers of any well-regulated village now possess, the squire's son were to be allowed unmolested to enter on the quiet possession of his acres, and stand for the representation of his county in Parliament, with that scanty modicum of misunderstood Latin grammar, and Horace committed most imperfectly to memory without being construed, which we fear is sometimes still dignified with the name of education. We are confident that there are many sets of freshmen at present in our universities who know less of arithmetic, history, geography, and, above all, of the Bible, than the first class of the parish school frequented by the children of their fathers' gamekeepers. Moreover the middle schools frequented by the children of small tradesmen and farmers are notoriously much less efficient than our lower schools. It could not be sound policy, while we greatly improve the education of the children of the poor, to allow that of the higher classes to remain stationary.

Perhaps there is no more important feature in the state of the Education Question, as it now stands before the public, than the growing conviction of the necessity for Government directing its attention to the education of the middle and upper classes. The Charitable Trusts Bill has now become law. There is good reason to hope that, through the operation of this Act, many years will not elapse before the sum of 152,0477. per annum, at which the income of the endowed grammar schools is calculated*, together with a fair proportion of the rest of that half million at which Lord Brougham has calculated the annual income of the endowments for education throughout the landt, has been made available for furnishing every locality with a really good middle school. And, moreover, the Duke of Wellington's examinations for all young men who aspire to bear Her Majesty's commission in the army, the clause in the Government India Bill throwing open writerships and the higher cadetships to public competition, and Lord John Russell's warning to the Universities that they have only been spared for a time from Parliamentary reform on the express condition of their labouring to reform themselves-all these are indications that the Education Question is now understood to extend far beyond the schools for the lower orders.

And now, in the interval which the postponement of the

Sir J. K. Shuttleworth's Public Education, &c., p. 223. † Ibid. p. 224.

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