TURNING OFF THE HISTORICAL TAP AT THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9489, 19 April 1894, Page 3

TURNING OFF THE HISTORICAL TAP AT THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir,— History is a study which never loses its interest, nor grows old it links together the present and the past, and enables us to some extent to forecast the future. It deals with moral and not only material motives of action, and exhibits for our instruction and guidance the effects on the one handof justice, loveof truth, self-restraint, and brotherly kindness, and on the other hand those of selfishness, the absence of good faith, disregard of others, and immoral habits. In a word, it teaches us the source of a nation's strength and of a nation's weakness, leaving us to apply the lessons we have learned to ourselves and to our country." The above extract is from an address delivered by the late Canon Butler to the working men of Liverpool. If such is the calm opinion of so ripe a scholar, brilliant genius, and so astute and experienced an observer, surely the verdict is worthy our serious thought and sober consideration. If in the teeth of reliable testimony we can eliminate the teaching of history from the curriculum, we are guilty of an act of insanity excelled in virulence only by the cognate folly of having previously kept out from our schools the grandest and most inspiring classic in the language. The latter act is, with a vengeance, shutting out the light; the former excluding the air from the moral and intellectual temple in which "we live, move, and have our being." In this connection it is time we doffed the robes of darkness and put on the whole armour of light. May I add, this savant who, being dead, yet speaks") was the honoured husband of Josephine Butler, one of the most remarkable heroines of the 19th century. Suddenly bereft of a lovely child whose glance was fascination, the tendrils of maternal affection were entertwined so closely around her beauteous offspring that when the idol was ruthlessly snatched from her embrace she became inconsolable. Under the poignancy of this grief, and from the deep depths of her dismantled heart, she resolved to search out other creatures more miserable than herself. Star-guided, she halted and entered a blask dungeon in Liverpool, wherein were assembled abandoned females of the worst type (the frightful wrecks of more abandoned men). Sitting down on the damp floor, breathing the pestiferous atmosphere of this cellar, she commenced picking oakum in the midst of this remarkable crew. They laughed, talked, and finally listened to Her gracious words ; a thrilling chapter of exquisite pathos was read from the inspired pen of an old writer, who lost hi» head at the instance of a lecherous woman, by the hand of a despotic king, for the crime of telling the truth. Judge Williams might well ask, "Is truth too strong?" She succeeded in rescuing many victims .from this maelstrom oi sin, shame, and suffering, took them to her home, and piloted them to that shor« over which the simooms of passion and cyclones of vice never circulate. Future historians will accord to this queenly woman a name and place in the temple of fame worthy her dignity and majesty. Did she not single-handed with her sling in unerring aim deposit a pebble in the brazen forehead of one of the most leprous and bloody monsters that ever paraded and defiled the " British Statute-book." Did not her missile cause this cruel tyrant to reel, stagger, and ignominiously fall into the crater of that hell which is the befitting receptacle of this corrupt and corrupting imported structure of Napoleonic iufernalism.— am, etc., .' „ J no. Abbott. Hurstmere, April 18, 1894.