6

Education Acts, on lines laid down by a Liberal statesman, and so just in themselves that in the main they have been followed by the present Government in the Education Act of 1876.

It is worth while to compare the spirit of the Education Acts with that of the Factory Acts as regards the points under discussion. Both deal with the labour of children under ten, and insist upon their due education. We have seen that the prohibition of the Factories Bill is peremptory and without exception. The prohibition of the Education Act of 1876 is qualified by a wise exception, when the employment by reason of being during the school holidays or during the hours during which the school is not open or otherwise, does not interfere with the efficient elementary instruction of such child, and that the child obtains such instruction by regular attendance for full time at a certified efficient school, or in some other equally efficient manner. In the one case the interference with work is limited by the reason and necessity for it, in the other it is needlessly sweeping and unlimited. I can imagine but one real excuse for this distinction in the spirit of the two Acts. The one Act, it may be said, has to look after the health as well as the education of children. The other regards education alone. But even this excuse seems to fail when the question is asked, whether on grounds of health alone a total prohibition of employment in domestic handicrafts is needful. For the answer is obvious-granted the existence of cases of hardship and excess in connection with some employments, the sweeping interference is still harsh and careless, because it far exceeds the necessity, by making a rule what ought to be dealt with as an exception.

Compare the spirit of the two parallel lines of legislation on another point. The Education Acts wisely recognise that education may be obtained by children, not only in public elementary and certified efficient schools, but also privately and at home. It is sufficient for the Education Acts that the child shall be educated at school or ‘in some other equally eficient manner. The Education Acts are thus saved from being in principle class legislation. If a rich man's

a child is not educated at school, or otherwise efficiently educated, the comp-ulsory clauses apply. There may be few children of the poorer classes who come under this exception, but still the exception is there for those who may come under it; and at least its presence is valuable as a proof of care lest the Act should become class legislation on the one hand, or needlessly interfere with the habits and wishes of poor or rich on the other. The Factory and Workshops Bill, though brought forward immediately after the Education Act of 1876, like its predecessors rides rough-shod over all such exceptions. The children must attend some recognised efficient school, and obtain their half-time schooling in that particular way, or they may not work,

The child of an educated mother, educated at home, may not assist her mother in any handicraft at home, however great the care of the mother may be herself to give her a good education. There may be but few such cases in the poorer walks of life. Where they exist they may not be found out. The objection may be almost an objection on paper alone. It may seem to be a mere straw, but it is a straw in the wind. It shows from which direction it blows. It suggests at least that this legislation comes from a quarter more conservative of the rich man's rights, habits, and conveniences than of those of the poor, and evidently not over-anxious to avoid the appearance of class legislation.

It is much to be regretted that the present Conservative Government have not been able to lift themselves out of the old ruts and prejudices of factory legislation on to the wider and wiser lines which they themselves had accepted in a previous session, when they passed the Education Act of 1876. They no doubt fell easily into those lines in that particular instance, because the prohibitory clauses of their Education Act, they knew very well, would apply not only to handicrafts but also to those pet agricultural employments towards which they have always exhibited an hereditary tenderness. Is it too much to ask that some of the same tenderness be extended to those fireside employments of the poor which are unlucky enough to come under the definition of handicrafts ?

What, then, is the sum of the whole matter as regards these domestic handicrafts? (1) There seems to be every reason why the work of women by their own firesides should be free from interference. (2) There seems to be hardly any reason why the similar labour of young persons over fourteen should be interfered with. (3) The education of children under fourteen is already provided for under the Education Acts of 1870 and 1876, without interfering unduly with these employments when they do not unduly interfere with the children's education. Why should not the factory legislation follow the same lines as to children engaged in domestic handicrafts, while giving them the additional advantage of the half-time system ?

I should have been glad if, now that the Education Acts have been passed, the whole question of the education of children engaged in domestic handicrafts could have been handed over to the Education Department. If power were given to Attendance Committees and School Boards to deal with these children, independently of by-laws —to allow their work when arrangements satisfactory to them had been made for the continuance of the children's schooling on a halftime system along with their work—then I believe it would be by far the wisest course to leave domestic handicrafts under the care of the Education Department, and to except them altogether from the Factory Acts, with perhaps some simple precautionary provision giving power for the Courts to interfere in cases where the local educational authority reports that the capacity of a child to receive

instruction is injured by excessive work at home. I believe that cases of real hardship would be more likely to be brought to notice, and checked by such a provision, than by the spasmodic presence of inspectors. I believe that the remedy could thus be applied without half the irritation which the old mode of procedure must involve. It would at least have a chance of success. It would carry public opinion with it. It would be free from the objections which are involved in needless interference with the privacy of cottage homes. It would liberate the amended Factory and Workshops Bill from objections which, if unremoved, must both risk its popularity and mar its usefulness.

One other point remains. If I have made out a good case for the exemption of the two domestic handicrafts specially mentionedstraw-plaiting and lace-making—from legislative interference of the kind proposed by the Bill, it would be very easy to introduce into it a clause making them the subjects of a special exemption. So far so good. But would this be a wise procedure ? Would it not be far better to take a broader view of the whole question? Instead of making these two employments favoured exceptions to an obnoxious rule, would it not be better, on broad grounds of principle, to exclude the cottage fireside altogether from the artificial definition of a

workshop, and then to deal specially with any domestic employments (if there be any) which require regulation as exceptions ?

It surely is better to call a spade a spade. A cottage fireside is not a workshop in any proper sense of the word. And the attempt, by a sweeping definition, to include the fireside among workshops,' is in itself objectionable. Acts of Parliament are not meant to be intelligible to lawyers only; they ought to be couched in language which is English, and intelligible and reasonable to the common mind. Artificial and unnatural use of words is surely slovenly draughting. And, to make an end of this unpleasant criticism, if there be anything in the sacredness of home and hearth which is worth preserving, why indeed should a Conservative draughtsman be allowed to make the State use words in an Act of Parliament which seem at least to ignore it? Surely it is not for the State to suggest to the working classes that it regards the privacy of the cottage home as any less sacred than the privacy of the home of the rich.

FREDERIC SEEBOHM.

6

RECENT LITERATURE.

1

Pacchiarotto ' is the last of Mr. Robert Browning's own pieces of character painting, and his latest reproduction of Greek drama is his • transcript' of The Agamemnon of Æschylus.?

Pacchiarotto is an artist who, like Mr. William Morris, transforms life into pictures, though his work is disturbed, as Mr. Morris's is not, by violent intrusion of the real. Vasari has omitted to record, but Lanzi celebrates, that painter of Siena who advanced the school of Perugino, and in whose figures there is sometimes a transcendent beauty that has caused them to be ascribed to Raffaelle. He sought to raise his fellow-citizens to an ideal life, shared in conspiracy against the Government, and would have been hanged if he had not been protected by the Osservanti monks, who hid him for some time in a tomb. In 1535 Pacchiarotto escaped from Siena, and he died in France. What he has shown already under many figures, Mr. Browning under this type shows again ; a wide interval between life as it is and life as we can imagine that it ought to be. We hear sometimes of the dangers of over-civilisation. If civilisation mean right citizenship, as its name implies, a common practice among men of the right way of living together, no nation in any age of the world has half achieved it. The sense of this is frequent in Mr. Browning's poetry.

Giacomo Pacchiarotto,
Who took • Reform ' for his motto,

6

In Mankind profuse around him ?
Man, devil as now he found him,
Would presently soar up an angel
At the summons of such evangel,
And owe-what could Man not owe

To the painter Pacchiarotto. Many an idealist who seeks to right the wrongs of life paints men in distemper on the walls of his own Pacchiarotto's chamber, and, like Pacchiarotto, is disturbed by the first glance of actual life that breaks his illusion. When he comes out of his chamber with a real endeavour to transform his fellow-men who are not tractable as the phantoms of his brain, he seeks refuge from the tumult, finds it with death, and is taught by the flesh that sees corruption. The abbot of the Osservanti tells Pacchiarotto that he also in his youth bad hopes of converting the foolish to wisdom :-.

I talked and I wrote, but, one morning,
Life's Autumn bore fruit in this warning:
• Let tongue rest, and quiet thy quill be !
Earth is earth and not heaven, and never will be.'
Man's work is to labour and leaven-
As best he may-earth here with heaven;
'Tis work for work's sake that he's needing :
Let him work on and on as if speeding
Work's end, but not dream of succeeding !
Because if success were intended,

Why, heaven would begin ere earth ended. Pacchiarotto's answer, though dramatic and outwardly humorous in construction, simply completes the abbot's thought. The corpse rotting in the tomb to which he fled for refuge had a voice for him. Had he come out of warm light because above the darkness of the tomb one man is Jack and one is John; because there are

Rich and poor, sage and fool, virtuous, vicious ?
Why complain? Art thou so unsuspicious
That all's for an hour of essaying
Who's fit and who's unfit for playing
His part in the after-construction
-Heaven's Piece whereof Earth's the Induction ?
Things rarely go smooth at Rehearsal.
Wait patient the change universal,

And act, and let act, in existence ! Such passages indicate no small part of Robert Browning's poetic interpretation of Nature. In Nature, for him, is above all things the mind of. man.

He shares with other poets of our century, perception of the beauty of the outward world, and can make others feel it: but from his earliest to his latest book he has been constant to the highest theme—the inner life of a man, and its relation to the lives of others. Intense interest in this made him a dramatist. Even in lyrical pieces, he continually represents men and women of