This is, however, little different from what might be looked, for in a country whose provision for the education of its people is thus described:--
"About one-half of our poor can neither read nor write. The test of signing the name at marriage is a very imperfect absolute test of education, but it is a very good relative one: taking that test, how stands Leeds itself in the Registrar-General's returns? In Leeds, which is the centre of the movement for letting education remain as it is, left entirely to chance and charity to supply its deficiencies, how do we find the fact? This, that in 1846, the last year to which these returns are brought down, of 1850 marriages celebrated in Leeds and Hunslet, 508 of the men and 1020 of the women, or considerably more than one-half of the latter, signed their names with marks. 'I have also a personal knowledge of this fact--that of 47 men employed upon a railway in this immediate neighbourhood, only 14 men 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. 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 three such schools for only 800,000 of population."