among persons from Boeotian Pudsey: of 12 witnesses, 'all of
respectable appearance, examined before the Mayor of Bradford at the
court-house there, only one man could sign his name, and that
indifferently.' Mr. Nelson has clearly shown in statistics of crime
in England and Wales from 1834 to 1844, that crime is invariably the
most prevalent in those districts where the fewest numbers in
proportion to the population can read and write. Is it not indeed
beginning at the wrong end to try and reform men, after they have
become criminals? Yet you cannot begin, with children, from want of
schools. Poverty is the result of ignorance, and then ignorance is
again the unhappy result of poverty. 'Ignorance makes men improvident
and thoughtless--women as well as men; it makes them blind to the
future--to the future of this life as well as the life beyond. It
makes them dead to higher pleasures than those of the mere senses,
and keeps them down to the level of the mere animal. Hence the
enormous extent of drunkenness throughout this country, and the
frightful waste of means which it involves.' At Bilston, amidst
20,000 people, there are but two struggling schools--one has lately
ceased; at Millenhall, Darlaston, and Pelsall, amid a teeming
population, no school whatever. In Oldham, among 100,000, but one
public day-school for the labouring classes; the others are an infant
school, and some dame and factory schools. At Birmingham, there are
21,824 children at school, and 23,176, at no school; at Liverpool,
50,000 out of 90,000 at no school; at Leicester, 8200 out of 12,500;
and at Leeds itself, in 1841, (the date of the latest returns,) some
9600 out of 16,400, were at no school whatever. It is the same in the
counties. 'I have seen it stated, that a woman for some time had to
officiate as clerk in a church in Norfolk, there being no adult male
in the parish able to read and write. For a population of 17,000,000
we have but twelve normal schools; while in Massachusetts they have