Public Order: The Best Way of Keeping These People Quiet

Early in 1847, the House of Commons was preparing to request a grant from the Crown of one hundred thousand pounds for the support of public instruction, and Macaulay, whom we heard earlier outlining the purpose of education in India, defended the measure against its conservative detractors, delivering a passionate speech supporting popular education. Citing The Wealth of Nations, Macaulay called education for the poor one of the most urgent concerns of the commonwealth, for “just as the magistrate ought to interfere for the purpose of preventing the leprosy from spreading among the people, he ought to interfere for the purpose of stopping the progress of the moral distempers which are inseparable from ignorance.” ^[66]

“The most dreadful disorders,” he quoted Smith, would follow from the inflammation of religious animosities among the uninstructed masses, as they had in the “No Popery” riots of 1780, which had seen urban prisons emptied, Parliament besieged, dozens of fires set in London, and a shocking loss of life.^[67] The cause of the incident, “a calamity which…ranks with the great plague and the great fire…was the ignorance of a population which had been suffered, in the neighbourhood of palaces, theatres, temples, to grow up as rude and stupid as any tribe of tattooed cannibals in New Zealand,…as any drove of beasts in Smithfield Market.” ^[68] Then naming half a dozen similar outrages against person and property committed by the malcontents of the Industrial Revolution, he came to the main argument for popular instruction:

Could such things have been done in a country in which the mind of the labourer had been opened by education, in which he had been taught to find pleasure in the exercise of his intellect, taught to revere his Maker, taught to respect legitimate authority, and taught at the same time to seek the redress of real wrongs by peaceful and constitutional means?

This then is my argument. It is the duty of Government to protect our persons and property from danger. The gross ignorance of the common people is a principal cause of danger to our persons and property. Therefore, it is the duty of the Government to take care that the common people shall not be grossly ignorant.^[69]

The state, already remiss in its educational duties, had no choice but to resort to “the dread of the sword and the halter” in punishing those responsible for such breaches of public order, “since we had omitted to take the best way of keeping these people quiet.” ^[70]