In addition to the great extension of instruction in a form specifically religious, there have been various causes and means contributing to the increase of knowledge among the people. After it had been seen for centuries in what manner the children of the poor were suffered to spend the Sunday, it struck one observer at last, that they might on that day be taught to read!--a possibility which had never been suspected; a disclosure as of some hitherto hidden power of nature. And then the schools which taught the children to read made some of the parents so much better pleased with their children for their first steps in so new an attainment, that they could not be indifferent to the opening of other schools of a humble order to continue that instruction through the week. It was within the same period that there was a large circulation of tracts, by some of which many who might be little desirous of instruction, were beguiled into it by the amusing vehicle ingeniously contrived to convey it; and the most popular of which will remain a monument of the talent, knowledge, and benevolence, of that distinguished benefactor of her country and age, Mrs. H. More, perhaps even pre-eminent above her many excellent works in a higher strain. Later and continual issues of this class of papers, of every diversity of composition, and diffused by the activity of numberless hands, have solicited perhaps a fourth part of the thoughtless beings in the nation to make at least one short effort to think.
The enormous flight of periodical miscellanies, and of newspapers, must be taken as both the indication and the cause that hundreds of thousands of persons were giving some attention to the matters of general information, where their grandfathers had been, during the intervals of time allowed by their employments, prating, brawling, sleeping, or drinking their hours away. [Footnote: Since this was written there has been a prodigious augmentation of all such means of general excitement; and happily a diversified multiplication of a class of them calculated to benefit the inferior people, at once by giving them a new and enlarged range of ideas, and by bringing them on some tracts of common ground with the liberally educated; thus abating the former almost total incapacity, on the part of those inferiors, for intelligent intercommunication.]