AFTER the supposed settlement of the Eastern Question at the Congress of Paris, a sort of languor seems to have come over Parliament and the public mind in England. Lord John Russell endeavored unsuccessfully to have something done which should establish in England a genuine system of national education. He proposed a series of resolutions, one of which laid down the principle that after a certain appointed time, when any school district should have been declared to be deficient in adequate means for the education of the poor, the Quarter Sessions of the Peace for the county, city, or borough should have power to impose a school rate. This was a step in the direction of compulsory education. It anticipated the principle on which the first genuine measure for national instruction was founded many years after. It was, of course, rejected by the House of Commons when Lord John Russell proposed it. Public opinion, both in and out of Parliament, was not nearly ripe for such a principle then. All such proposals were quietly disposed of, with the observation that that sort of thing might do very well for Prussians, but would never suit Englishmen. That was a time when a Prussian was regarded in England as a dull, beer-bemused, servile creature, good for nothing better than to grovel before his half-inebriated monarchs, and to get the stick from his incapable military offi cers. The man who suggested then that perhaps some day the Prussians might show that they knew how to fight, would have been set down as on a par intellectually with the narrow-minded grumbler who did not believe in the profound sagacity of the Emperor of the French. For a country of practical men, England is ruled to a marvellous extent by phrases, and the term "un-English" was destined for a considerable time to come to settle all attempts at the introduction of any system of national education which even touched on the compulsory principle. One of the regular attempts to admit the Jews to Parliament was made and succeeded in the House of Commons, to fail, as usual, in the House of Lords. The House of Lords itself was thrown into great perturbation for a time by the proposal of the Government to confer a peerage for life on one of the judges, Sir James Parke. Lord Lyndhurst strongly opposed the proposal, on the ground that it was the beginning of an attempt to introduce a system of life-peerages, which would destroy the ancient and hereditary character of the House of Lords, allow of its being at any time broken up and remodelled according to the discretion of the minister in power, and reduce it, in fact, to the level of a continental life senate. Many members of the House of Commons were likewise afraid of the innovation; it seemed to foreshadow the possible revival of an ancient principle of Crown nomination, which might be applied to the representative as well as to the hereditary chamber, seeing that at one time English. sovereigns did undoubtedly assume the right of nominating members of the House of Commons. The Government, who had really no reactionary or revolutionary designs in their mind, settled the matter for the time by creating Sir James Parke Baron Wensleydale in the usual way, and the object they had in view was quietly accomplished many years later, when the appellate jurisdiction of the Lords was remodelled. Sir George Lewis was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was as yet not credited with anything like the political ability which he afterward proved that he possessed. It was the fashion to regard him as a mere bookman, who had drifted somehow into Parliament, and who, in the temporary absence of available talent, had been thrust into the office |