neighborhood, only 14 can sign their names in the receipt of their wages;
and this not because of any diffidence on their part, but positively
because they cannot write.' And only lately, the "Leeds Mercury" itself
gave a most striking instance of ignorance 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. Neison 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 laboring 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, 8,200 out of 12,500; and at
Leeds itself, in 1841 (the date of the latest returns), some 9,600 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