here, and upon this any child residing in the district might have its name placed. Applications were numerous at the start, but they gradually dropped off, and soon almost entirely ceased: free education. fell flat in Costermongria.

The net result of five years work was that 800 children were being educated in a place where none had been educated before; and though, as I have said, they were not drawn chiefly from the district, and did not belong to the class the care of which was my nearest concern, something had been attempted and something done.

We certainly made full use of our modest school buildings. Evening classes were held on every week night except Saturday, and in 1850, 570 males and 256 females were admitted. The fee was a uniform 2d. per week, and every one who attended had to be over the age of fourteen. The adults, though taught in the same room, were separated from the children by a curtain, and each night one particular subject, Mathematics, Geography, Scripture, or English, was taught for one hour. The adults were instructed either by one of the clergy or by the schoolmaster, and the children by the under-master and the pupil teachers. Writing copies and working sums always preceded and followed the lesson of the evening, and reading aloud was a permanent feature of the children's instruction.

In 1851 I determined to make a further educational

advance.

Three hundred children were waiting for admission to the schools, and in February I waited upon the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Lord President of the Council, with a petition signed by upwards of a thousand of the inhabitants, two-thirds of whom signed their names with a cross, praying him to make a grant of money towards the erection of new schools. He received me most courteously, and said that, taking into consideration the peculiarly destitute condition of the district, and the great success which, under all the difficulties, had attended the present schools, he should move the Committee of Council on Education to make an extraordinary grant of £800 towards the proposed buildings.

It was upon the site of the hired room that we wished to erect our permanent structure. My idea was a school, pure and simple, but the Privy Council pressed me to include rooms for industrial trainingthe boys in tailoring and shoemaking, the girls in cooking and laundry work-and of course I consented. But the official part of the scheme was, for want of funds, subsequently abandoned, and our aim was restricted to the provision of an education, not only for some of the 300 children whose names were on our list, but for some of the 700 children of a better class, who, as ascertained by house-to-house visitation, were receiving no instruction whatever.

Now began my importunate begging. I tried in turn every society, corporation, livery company, charity, and

I

fund in London, and I dunned my private friends till I was ashamed to look them in the face. The £800 from the Committee of Council was a good lead-off. The National Society followed with £130, and the Governors of the Charterhouse and the Bank of England each gave me £100. The site was to cost £1500, and the total amount to be £5500. We were a very long way from that when I decided to begin building; but on April 28th, 1852, the foundationstone was laid by the Marquis of Lansdowne. cannot express too warmly or gratefully the great obligations I often owed to that distinguished and enlightened nobleman. He had no ties of property or otherwise with St. Thomas's, and he might fairly have pleaded the many pressing claims upon his time and his purse. Yet, on very many occasions, both officially and personally, he gave me the kindest and most substantial support, and that, be it remembered, at a period when rank and society were not so alive as at present to the condition of the poor.

There are others, too, too, whose names I can never forget in this connection earnest, loyal, liberal friends, who in hours of deep anxiety and responsibility stood by me. Such were the Earl of Dartmouth, the Hobhouses (without Arthur Hobhouse I should have perished in mid-stream), the Gurneys, the Farrers (Oliver, Tom, and William), the present Bishop of London (then at Kneller Hall), Charles Freshfield, Marlborough and Robert Pryor,

Dr. Dawes, Dean of Hereford, John Walter of the Times, and Alderman Sir Robert Carden (who never wrote me a letter without enclosing a cheque). As time went on I gained some equally steadfast friends, but these were among the earliest.

Goswell

The stone-laying was a great occasion. Street was not a place much frequented by peers and prelates, but I managed to muster a goodly gathering of notabilities. At noon we met in the Church (it was my policy to associate the Church with every undertaking), and, headed by the churchwardens and beadles (it is not wise to do anything of this kind without plenty of beadles), and followed by the children, proceeded to the scene of business. Lord Lansdowne officiated in masterly fashion with a trowel presented by the teachers and scholars; Dr. Lonsdale, Bishop of Lichfield, who till his death aided me in the most fatherly way with his advice and support, conducted the religious part of the proceedings; and Dr. Short, Bishop of St. Asaph, who as an old Carthusian was interested in the locality, delivered what for those days was a "forward" ad-. dress.

In February of the next year the schools were opened by Earl Granville, who succeeded Lord Lansdowne at the Privy Council, and Goswell Street again gazed on the great and noble; the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Powis, and the Bishops of London and Salisbury this time paying us a visit. Lord Lans

downe was to have come, but was prevented by ill-health. Lord Granville made, as he has been doing all his life, a thoroughly liberal speech, full of trust and hope in the future of the working classes, showing himself keenly alive, before some of his political colleagues seemed to care a jot about it, to the need for a wider recognition of national education. The Bishop of London also spoke, and pointed out that "education, by which he meant the complete intellectual, moral, and religious training of man, was the great necessity of England. When he talked of education he meant, in the first instance, holy education-education in the holy principles of our religion; and he should be especially wanting in duty to that Church over which he was a ruler if he did not say that he meant by holy education a Church education." In the evening, at five o'clock, we dined in true civic style at the "Albion," and under the influence of the oratory some of the debt was wiped off. I had received £2000 from the Government, and had begged about £2000 more; but I was still responsible for a clear £2000 at least. In return I had secured a first-rate building, an ornament to this day to that grimy neighbourhood, capable of holding 1000 children.

By February of 1854 I had reduced the debt to just under £1000. A young man of thirty-five who owes his banker £1000 is not the happiest of mortals, and I determined upon a great effort to

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