which he believed himself to have discovered, and which, if thoroughly applied, was to regenerate mankind. That principle is that character is formed not by man, but for men, that man is the creature of circumstances, and that human nature may be indefinitely modified for the better by improving its environment. "Any general character from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, can be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means, which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have power in the affairs of men."'1 But education is one of the most powerful instruments for the formation of character. Hence the first duty of Governments is education.

It

18. The statesmen whom Owen invited to New Lanark to verify for themselves the response of character to environment applauded the curious results of his philanthropy, but disregarded his proposals. was through his influence on working class movements that his ideas on education were diffused among a wider audience and perpetuated as among the fundamentals of the democratic programme. The doctrine which provided chartists, co-operators and trade unionists with a philosophy interpreting the causes of popular suffering and offering a social ideal for which to strive, was the doctrine of Owen, and the importance of education stood too near the heart of it to be discarded when it passed from the study to the marketplace. Hence each of these movements produced statements of the necessity of organising a system of education not only for children but for adults, and, some attempts, at least, to devise practical measures for meeting it.

19. The ablest of the early working class expressions of the demand for higher education came not from the Co-operative Societies with which Owen's name is imperishably associated, but from the leader of a movement which failed, William Lovett.2 Lovett's social doctrines were those which he had learned from Owen and Hodgskin. The pre-eminent importance which he ascribed to education was a triumph of idealism in an age of economic misery, and he deserves a place in history, not only as the parent of Chartism, but as the first and greatest of working-class educational reformers. Like his friends, Francis Place and Thomas Cooper, he was one of the workmen of whom it may be said that amid heart-breaking discouragements, poverty and failing health and political persecution, the hunger for knowledge "haunted them like a passion." 1 Owen, First Essay on the Formation of Character.

? For Lovett, see William Lovett, Life and Struggles (by Lovett himself); Hovell, The Chartist Movement; Beer, A History of British Socialism; Wallas, Life of Francis Place; Dobbs, Education and Social Movements.

3 "My desire for information was, however, too strong to be turned aside, and often have I been sent away from a bookstall when the owner became offended at my standing reading, which I used to do until I was turned away. . . . I used to borrow books from a man who kept a small shop. leaving a small sum as a deposit.' At the age of 20 he had worked through "the bistories of Greece and Rome and some translated works of Greek and Roman writers; Hume, Smollet, Fielding's novels and Robertson's works; some of Hume's essays, some translations from French writers, and much on geography ; some books on anatomy and surgery: some relating to science and the arts and many magazines." When unemployed he read "many volumes in history, voyages and travels, politics, law and philosohpy, Adam Smith and Locke, and especially Hume's 'Essays' and Treatises.' I taught myself decimals, equations, the square, cube and biquadrate roots. I got some knowledge of logarithms and algebra." (Wallas, Life of Francis Place.)

"Historical reading, or the grammar of some language, or translation was my first employment on week-day mornings, whether I rose at 3 or 4, until 7 o'clock, when I sat down to the stall. A book or a periodical in my hand while I breakfasted gave another halfhour's reading. I had another half-hour and sometimes an hour's reading or study of language from 1 to 2 o'clock, at the time of dinner. . . . I sat at work till 8, sometimes 9, at night; I then either read or walked about our little room and committed Hamlet to memory or the rhymes of some other poet, until compelled to go to bed from sheer exhaustion." (Cooper, Autobiography.)

As a member and afterwards the president of the cabinetmakers' trade union, manager of the first co-operative store established in London, an attendant at the London Mechanics' Institute, where he heard Birkbeck lecture, the colleague of Cleave, Hetherington and Watson in their struggle for a free press, a disciple of Owen and founder of the London Working Men's Association, and through it the parent of the Chartist Movement, for which he drafted the famous Six Points of 1837, Lovett touched almost every social agitation of the period from 1820 to 1840. It is the more significant that to the end of his life he should have reiterated his belief in education as the foundation of all other kinds of popular progress. His own views upon it were expressed in his address on "National Education" (1837) and his later work, which he wrote in gaol, 99 Chartism (1840). Education ought to be the right of all. "Is it consistent with justice that the knowledge required to make a man acquainted with his rights and duties should be purposely withheld from him, and that then he should be upbraided and deprived of his rights on the plea of ignorance ?" It is the one irresistible weapon:-"How can a corrupt Government stand against an enlightened people?" It should be provided free at the public cost and administered by locally elected bodies. It should begin with infancy and be continued in adult life. The people themselves (for, as time went on, he grew more and more to distrust the State) should accumulate funds for education by voluntary contributions. If everyone who had signed the National Petition would subscribe one penny per week, £256,600 would be raised; and £256,600 would support 80 halls, 710 travelling libraries, 20,000 tracts per week and 4 missionaries. A people who did this "would be gradually accumulating means of instruction and amusement and in devising sources of refined enjoyment to which the millions are strangers. It would be industriously employed in politically, intellectually and morally training fathers, mothers, and children to know their rights and perform their duties. And with a people so trained exclusive power, corruption and injustice would soon cease to have an existence."

20. When Lovett formulated this programme only seven years had elapsed since the State had made its first grant of £20,000 to Education. Such schools as existed were provided by voluntary societies, and, of course, the public assistance of adult education was still in the remote future. The Chartists themselves did something on a humble scale to fill the gap. Not only did the London Working Men's Association give a prominent place amongst its objects to that of "promoting by all means available the education of the rising generation," but individuals connected with the movement laboured hard to provide facilities for education. The National Association for promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People, which was founded in 1840, opened a hall in Holborn where working men and women were to meet for lectures, concerts and classes. Lovett not only played a prominent part in the agitation for a free press, and drafted a petition to Parliament urging that museums and art galleries should be opened on Sundays, but himself taught for some years in London. Cooper-shoemaker, musician, journalist and poet, who by incredible labour and at the cost of destroying his health had taught himself the elements of Latin, Greek, French, Mathematics, Music and English Literature-established in Leicester "the Shakesperian Association of Leicester Chartists," where he lectured on Literature and History to starving stocking-makers. Chartist Churches were established at Birmingham, at Bath, and in parts of

1 Hovell, The Chartist Movement, pp. 206-7

At

Scotland, and conducted classes for children and young men. Deptford there was a "Working-men's Church" whose members were said to study the New Testament in Greek. That the first independent political movement of the English working classes should have produced spontaneously a demand for education as an indispensable element" in the mental and moral dignity of a pure democracy," and should have put forward an educational programme as advanced as any that has since been realised, is a comment upon the superficial, though common, complaint that English people do not care for education. It would be truer to say that it is only within recent years that they have begun to be offered an education worth caring for. To those who remember the condition of England in the 'forties of the last century few episodes are more moving than these efforts of men, half-famished by material want and dogged by the agents of the Government, to assert their right to a share not only in political power but in the kingdom of the spirit.

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21. In order to endure, educational effort must normally be embodied in some permanent institution. Chartism had a profound influence on the lives of individuals, and the educational ideals which it advanced become a tradition which has coloured the thought of all subsequent working-class movements. They led in the 'forties to attempts on the part of certain trade unions2 to provide educational facilities for their members. In 1842 the Journeymen Steam Engine and Machine Makers' Friendly Society established a mutual improvement class at Manchester. In 1845 the Glasgow Branch of the Scottish United Operative Masons "formed a class for mutual instruction and an association for moral, physical and intellectual improvement.' In 1848 the London Society of Bookmakers established a library, as did the London Society of Compositors a few years later. In 1850 the Flint Glassmakers' magazine urged the education of every man in our trade, beginning at the oldest and coming down to the youngest." If you do not wish to stand as you are," wrote the Editor, "and suffer more oppressions, we say to you, get knowledge, and in getting knowledge you get power.' Let me earnestly advise you to educate. Get intelligence instead of alcohol; it is sweeter and more lasting." The effect of Chartism in rousing the minds of middle-class sympathisers to the demand for popular education is equally noticeable. Carlyle's book "Chartism" ended with a plea for it-Universal Education is the first great thing we mean." The People's College, established at Sheffield in 1842, was planned on lines which recall Lovett's scheme of education, and the better known Working Men's College in London, of which we speak below, was founded under the influence of the emotions which the Chartist agitation had aroused in the group of men who became later known as the Christian Socialists.

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22. Though the indirect influence of Chartism in stimulating education was considerable, its practical experiments left no permanent legacy behind them, because Chartism itself, as an organised agitation, had no existence after the fiasco of 1848. The vehicle by which the educational aims of the working classes were carried forward was a movement which had developed about the same time and under similar influences, but which had a much longer and more prosperous life. Cooperation, which at the present day is a potent and growing educational force, had begun its career in the 'twenties of the nineteenth century as one of several attempts to realise Owen's ideal of a social order based not

1 Hovell, The Chartist Movement, pp. 202-3.

2 Webb. History of Trade Unionism.

on competition but on brotherhood. Such an order was impossible without the training of intellect and character for the service of the community.

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23. Hence education, of a kind which would now be called civic, occupied a prominent place in the plans of the early co-operators. The Co-operative and Economical Society, which it was proposed to establish in London in 1821 as a result of Owen's propaganda, included among its purposes the education of the members' children, and periodical meetings of the whole society for the purposes of mutual instruction, and of rational recreation and amusement." The community founded by Owen at Ralahine, in addition to its economic objects, was to promote "the mental and moral improvement of the Adult members."2 The Co-operative Society established at Birmingham in 1828 maintained a library and debating club, and proposed to establish a school where children would receive an education "better than even the higher classes are receiving," and to arrange for concerts and lectures for the benefit of their adult members. A group of co-operators at Salford, in 1831, "took a couple of large rooms and opened a school for the instruction of boys and girls and such adults as might think it worth while to learn what we had to teach." Some stocking-frame weavers at Sutton-in-Ashfield wrote to. Owen in 1834 that, "believing that knowledge is power, we shall appropriate the upper room to the purpose of a school, lecture-room, etc."3 When co-operators, though cherishing as their ultimate goal the establishment of "selfsupporting home colonies," settled down to pursuing, as one step in that direction, the method of co-operative trade on which the movement subsequently built up its prosperity, they still treated education "for the common benefit as an essential part of their programme. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the formation of which in 1844 may be regarded as the starting point of modern co-operation, not only proposed "as soon as practicable to arrange the powers of production, distribution, education and government,' but in 1848 established an Educational Department, and down to the passage of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act in 1852 made regular, though illegal, quarterly grants for educational purposes. When, in preparing their rules for registration under that Act, they inserted a clause devoting ten per cent. of their profits to education, the Registrar declined to sign them, on the ground that the proportion was excessive, with the result that the proportion finally allotted was 21 per cent.4

24. Their example was widely followed. Libraries, classes and lectures were established by a established by a considerable number of the early co-operative societies; and the present educational work of co-operators, which, as we point out later, has recently been expanded and systematised, may be traced directly to the origin of the movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. Co-operative education is, in short, as old as the Co-operative Movement itself. This connection of education with what has sometimes been regarded as merely one kind of trading venture will cause surprise only to those who have not been touched by the co-operative spirit. For co-operation was not merely a method of trading, and the connection is not accidental but essential. On its economic side the movement was an attempt to organize society, disintegrated by the competitive forces of the new industrialism,

on the basis of mutual service. On its educational side it was an attempt to create by training the personal qualities and social habits which might make such an organisation possible.

(III.) ADULT EDUCATION SINCE 1850.

25. The year 1850, which was in more than one way a turning point in English social history, is also a natural division between one period of educational activity and another. Revolutionary effort had collapsed finally in 1848. The years from 1850 to 1870 were a time of rising wages and falling prices. The days of squalid misery and distant visions seemed, as the economists had foretold, to be settling into a long afternoon of more or less equable, if uninspired, prosperity. Working class idealism had received a rude shock from the fiasco of Chartism, and was directed to the prosaic task of building trade unionism and cooperation on a sound economic foundation.

26. In the sphere of educational effort, the character of the agencies at work and the motives behind them underwent an equally noticeable change. Certain movements which we have already described, in particular the Adult Schools and Co-operation, expanded; on their more recent activities we touch shortly below. But in the main the forces which entered the field were new. They consisted first of the revival and multiplication of University Institutions; secondly, of the creation of a national system of elementary, and later of higher, education provided by the State; thirdly, of the revival of the demand for higher education on the part of working men and women, inspired by somewhat the same motives as had guided the chartists and early co-operators, but attacking the problem on a higher plane and with the equipment provided by a more effective training in childhood. At the beginning of the period adult education was still the spontaneous effort of a few working-class enthusiasts to provide for themselves educational opportunities in a world where any general system of education was still unknown. At the end the spontaneous demand remained, and was, indeed, more insistent than ever before. But in the interval both the Universities and the State had begun to do something to aid its satisfaction, and it was no longer a substitute for the earlier stages of education, but the completion of them.

(a) State-aided Evening Schools.

27. Upon the significance for our subject of the creation of a national system of elementary education we need not dwell. Its effect was not only to lay the foundations of all later educational effort, but fundamentally to change the character of the evening classes, which, as we point out later, are the commonest organ, though not, of course, the only organ, of adult education at the present day. When in 1851 the Committee of Council on Education for the first time made grants in aid of evening schools, their object was to assist elementary, not secondary or higher, education, and it would appear that a considerable proportion of the attendants at the evening schools then existing were adults who desired to obtain as men the elementary education which they had failed to receive as children. The Revised Code of 1862 stated definitely that the evening school "should differ in nothing from the morning or afternoon meetings, except in the scholars who attend. Its business is not secondary, but continued elementary instruction." The passage of the Acts of 1870 and 1876 had indirectly two important effects upon evening education. The immediate consequence of the great development of elementary schools was