Whether the founders of the province of New Brunswick left the American Colonies because of love for king and royal traditions, or whether loyalty was only the basis of the cause of their exodus, and not the cause itself,1 an examination of the institutions to which they adhered, the traditions which they cherished, and the political and cultural ideals of the country with which their connections were strengthened is an integral part of any study of the early history of the province.

By the Restoration of 1660 Puritanism and democracy in England gave place to Anglicanism and aristocracy.2 Twenty-five years later when royal absolutism led James II to attack parliamentary traditions and the vested interests of church and state, the aristocracy took the lead in the movement against an unpopular king, thus identifying vested interests with the cause of British freedom.3 Quite naturally, therefore, an oligarchy of aristocrats replaced the discredited divine-right monarchy.

In broad principles there was little difference between Whig and Tory at the beginning of the eighteenth century, for both were aristocratic and intent on the perpetuation of the existing social and economic order. However, since many Tories became suspect of Jacobitism, Whig ministers and a Whig majority in parliament seemed desirable and necessary to ardent Protestants, to supporters of the Hanoverian succession, and to the first Hanoverian Kings. The eighteenth century was, therefore, the period of a powerful Whig oligarchy, and even the efforts of the third Hanoverian King to revive personal rule made no essential difference. “It would be a conservative estimate to say that ten thousand landlords and merchants ruled the England of George 111.” 4 The interests and desires of this class shaped the policies of English government from 1689 until the Industrial Revolution bore fruit in the nineteenth century, in the form of middle-class aspirations that would not be denied.

The social aristocracy of the Hanoverian epoch included the titled nobles, the squires, higher clergy and the cultivated middle class, i.e., merchants and bankers, who shared business interests with the aristocracy or were related to them by blood or marriage alliance.5 Accepting Locke's political philosophy that governments are for the protection of life, liberty and property, and using it as justification of the Revolution of 1689, they believed that as property owners they were the indubitable custodians of a government designed to preserve the rights of property. The unprivileged might indeed be grateful to them for an England of tolerance toward Dissent, of comparative freedom of person,
speech and press, an England whose parliamentary constitutionalism was the admiration of a continent still enslaved to priests and kings. The duty of the masses, aside from this gratitude and a due appreciation of the charitable deed, the kindly smile and condescending word of their betters—product of a mixture of benevolence, amusement and good-natured contempt—was to exhibit a proper contentment with the station in which God had placed them, and to refrain from meddling in what was none of their concern.

“Partly as a matter of deep unconscious habit, partly in reasoned self-interest, . . . the ruling class in every society dreads change and seeks to perpetuate the existing status in morals, politics and religion.” 6 To the “Whig Oligarchy” the English parliament of the eighteenth century was a ready instrument for this purpose.

When the settlement of 1689 ended the rivalry between Crown and Parliament, it made the latter the leading partner in a co-operation between the two powers.7 Increasingly, except during the interval of George III's personal rule, the Crown became a symbol and Parliament omnipotent. While supposed to represent the people of Great Britain, actually Parliament did so very imperfectly and unfairly. The Upper House, composed of titled landlords and Anglican ecclesiastics, was a purely aristocratic body. The House of Commons, as everyone knows, although more representative in appearance, was in reality scarcely less aristocratic. Neither Whigs nor Tories in the eighteenth century dreamed of reforming such a system. The enthusiasm for vested interests, engendered by the outrages which had provoked the Revolution of 1688, gave those interests a sacrosanct character and defied reform for one hundred and forty years. For this reason, and because Parliament had shrivelled up into the selfish organ of a small group, “the period of Walpole and the Pitts was the heyday of unchallenged abuses in all forms of corporate life. Holders of ecclesiastical, academic, charitable and scholastic endowments had no fear of enquiry or reform. Schoolmasters could draw their salaries without keeping school. Universities could sell degrees without holding examinations or giving instruction. Parliamentary boroughs and municipal oligarchies could be as corrupt and ridiculous as they liked; it was enough that they were old.” 8

With politics a “gentleman's game” and Parliament amenable to manipulation by gentlemen, it is not surprising to find that in domestic policies the Oligarchy favored agriculture and the great landlords. Happily, economic self-interest could be garbed in patriotic dress. Tudor and Stuart “enclosures” had been the means of improving agricultural production. With the growth of population the national food supply was becoming increasingly important. By capitalistic, large-scale scientific agriculture the yield (and profits) of English farming could be increased. Between 1700 and 1800 Parliament passed a series of Enclosure Acts giving noblemen and squires the privilege of depriving tenants of their former right to common holdings. Similarly, the continuation of the
Corn Laws long after Britain had ceased to be able to produce enough grain for her mounting population is evidence not only of the benefits reaped by the landed classes, but also of their ability to make their own interests appear as national needs. Continued into the nineteenth century Enclosures and Corn Laws were among the factors which sent droves of impoverished people to the British North American colonies, including New Brunswick, where they created heavy relief problems, and swelled that section of the population whose educational needs were most acute, but which exhibited the greatest indifference towards the benefits of education.

If the Enclosure Acts and the Navigation Acts favored the landed class the latter were also especially in the interests of the mercantile and commercial groups. It is true that these restrictions which “canalized trade along certain narrow lines” 9 had, as their primary object, the maintenance of British naval supremacy and national security. The statement of Judge Croke that 'every deviation from this system, whether voluntary or from irresistible necessity, every licence to admit foreign vessels into British ports, is a nail driven into the Coffin of the British empire'10 expressed the national attitude towards any relaxation of British mercantile regulations. Even Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations in 1776 shook the theory of 'beggar my neighbor', realized that the problem of the navigation system was closely tied up with national existence. Although he opposed the Physiocratic idea that agriculture is the basis of wealth, and agreed that the natural laws by which a nation might increase its wealth were to be found in laissez-faire principles, he admitted that the defence of Great Britain depended much on the number of her sailors and her shipping, and that the Navigation Acts properly endeavored to give the seamen and ships of Great Britain the monopoly of the trade of their own country.11 Granted that trade was considered principally as a means of promoting the employment of ships and that an extensive mercantile marine might serve as a nursery of seamen for the navy, the fact remains that the prosperity of a large number of British merchants and industrialists depended on schemes of trade protection. “National security was a catch phrase which could easily be made to serve the ends of self-interest.” 12 Justified, then, on the grounds of national safety, the external policy of England in the eighteenth century fell more and more under the influence of mercantile considerations.l3

This policy inevitably involved the regulation of colonies. Hide-bound believers in the colonial system were thoroughly in agreement with William Knox, on whom the settlement of Anglo-American commerce largely devolved, when he enunciated the rule that 'It was better to have no colonies at all, than not to have them subservient to the maritime strength and commercial interest of Great Britain.'14

In spite of certain compensations, British trade regulations sacrificed the interests of the American colonies to the interests of England or the Sugar Islands. They were tolerated, however, for many years, partly because they were not rigidly enforced, and partly because the weak and disunited Thirteen Colonies were dependent on British aid for security against France. When the outcome of the Seven Years' War had ended that danger, a revival of the Navigation Acts and a determined effort to enforce them contributed to the causes creating irreconcilable differences between England and the American Colonies.

After the loss of these possessions the power of tradition and the propaganda of vested interests continued strong enough to maintain the mercantilist scheme, with some concessions and modifications, for several decades of the nineteenth century. It follows, therefore, that during New Brunswick's colonial tutelage, her trade relations with Great Britain, the United States, and the West Indies, hinged largely on the British trade and navigation system.

The relationships between church and state also furnish many interesting pages of history. When a church is established and supported by the state, treason and heresy may almost be regarded as interchangeable terms. Conversely, adherence to the established church may connote loyalty. In general, national churches tend to serve secular interests and to link patriotism with religion.

As the eighteenth century advanced, belief in “nature” and “reason” fostered, among other great ideals of the “Enlightenment” , that of toleration, and in greater or less degree principles of that saving doctrine were proclaimed by all the great thinkers of the century.l5 As a matter of statecraft, expediency made toleration in England a necessary provision of the settlement of 1689, and in actual practice the spirit of the age secured even to Roman Catholics and Unitarians a considerable degree of free religious worship. Of religious equality, however, there was none until the nineteenth century, for the Church of England, while no longer a persecuting body, continued to enjoy many exclusive privileges.16 Moreover, the ecclesiastical constitution of the country harmonized with the political.l7 Both were designed to perpetuate aristocratic leadership power, and prestige.

The established Church was not, however, free from criticism, sometimes subtle, sometimes direct, aimed against its secular spirit and its exclusiveness, or against orthodox theology in general. This came from various quarters— non-conformists, deists, sceptics, and emotional pietists, especially the Wesleyans. Although the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment was in favor of relaxation of the old religious intolerance in educational matters, “coincident with this growth of religious tolerance among the English we find the Church of England redoubling its efforts to hold the children of its adherents, by the organization of parish schools, and by the creation of a vast system of charitable religious schools.” 18

In this field of educational endeavor one finds the chief significance of eighteenth-century Anglicanism for British North America. Through various missionary agencies, by means of political machinery, by alliances with “Family Compacts” , the Anglican Church exercised a monopoly over the educational institutions of those North American colonies still in British hands after the American Revolution. Moreover, the Loyalists, Americans though they were, looked to Great Britain for intellectual, as well as political, sponsorship. Consequently, theories and practices prevalent in the English educational system were naturally features of colonial educational schemes, modified though they might be by pioneer conditions and American influences. An understanding of the English conception of education is therefore of importance.

“In the history of England, the dominant theme throughout has been the response of a conservative society in terms of education to conditions brought about by revolution in industrial life.” 19 Although the Industrial Revolution began in the eighteenth century, response to the new forces of machinery and capitalized industry did not come until later. Throughout the long reign of George III the new forces “worked their blind will upon a loosely organized aristocratic society that did not even perceive that its fate had come upon it.” 20 Progress in terms of education was made only after pressure and as a reluctant concession.21 The history of education in England exhibits the characteristics of the national genius. The English temper is reverent of the past. In an aristocratic social organization, such as existed in England, this reverence for tradition practically amounted to an attitude that 'whatever is is right—if it can show a charter.'22 Moreover, the English national genius23 turns from the theorist and system-maker and approaches social and political problems without comprehensive views or fundamental principles. It meets the needs of the hour with the suggestions of the hour. It prefers patching up a system or institution to making a clean sweep, and tends to compromise.24

When one thinks of education in terms of the relation of the individual to the organized social and economic structure, its purpose is seen to fall into one of three categories: “education to perpetuate the existing pattern of economic and social arrangements” , to modify or reform the established system, or to reorganize it completely.25 “The needs of an aristocratic society, regarding the liberal education of the gentleman as alone necessary, are very different from the needs of a democratic society, asserting the rights of all men to an equal share in the dividend of culture.” 26 To the controlling upper classes, a system which prepared leaders for Church and State seemed highly satisfactory. Few felt under obligation to provide education for children not their own. As yet there was no general realization of any connection between the spread of
education and the welfare of the state, and no perception that mass ignorance might be a public danger. During the whole of the eighteenth century the British Parliament did not pass a single law relating to the education of the people, aside from enactments concerning workhouse schools.27 In point of fact, English education was the result of no government plan or statute. The schools were not controlled by the government with respect either to curriculum or discipline. The only government regulation was to see that grammar school teachers were orthodox Anglicans and under oath of loyalty to the reigning sovereign.28

This view that education was no business of the state, but was a private voluntary affair, to be had by those who desired it and could afford to pay for it, meant, if maintained, that education, like wealth and breeding, would remain an attribute of aristocracy, a badge of superiority, a qualification for leadership. That the dominant classes were conscious of this implication is indicated by the half-indignant query 'Why should we let down a ladder that the people may climb up and dispossess both us and our children?'29

Even more deeply rooted in tradition than the exclusive spirit was the conception of the religious purpose of education. After the Reformation, the Anglican Church took the place in England of the Roman Catholic Church in the control of education. All school instruction was narrowly religious. “Christianity came to be identified with a strict conformity to the teachings and practices of the Established Church, and to teach that particular faith became one of the particular missions of all types of schools.” 30 At the middle of the eighteenth century, while in the German states and in the American colonies there was a shifting of emphasis from the old exclusively religious purpose toward a new view of education as preparation for life in the world, in Church of England schools the end and design continued to be instruction in the knowledge and practice of the Christian religion as taught in the Church of England.31 Secular instruction for the masses was considered unnecessary, even unwise. There was a suspicion that it would teach labourers to despise their lot, read bad books, and imbibe bad doctrine. Consequently, the Church stoutly maintained the attitude that “education must be the handmaid of religion” , and through charity and parochial schools, Sunday Schools, schools of the “Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge” , and later, the “National Schools for the Promotion of Education of the Poor” , exercised almost exclusive control of education for the lower classes. In all these schools Bible-reading and the Catechism formed the major part of the meagre curriculum.

It was the special function of the eighteenth century to civilize manners and to humanize conduct.32 Besides finding in science a new standard of truth and in reason a new authority, the Enlightenment gave an impulse to an interest
in humanity, and, along with the Wesleyan Revival, helped to strengthen a conviction that the lot of mankind could, and should, be improved. Humanitarian movements, warmed by the blaze of romanticism and stirred to pity by the desperate plight of victims of waxing industrialization, multiplied in numbers and influence in the nineteenth century, and in the educational field compensated in some measure for the inertia of the public authorities. For the most part, however, the purpose of charity schools was to teach morals and religion. Illiteracy to the philanthropists was only one aspect of general moral delinquency, “and education was attached to the program of social reform only as a means to the larger end of removing profligacy, drunkenness and crime . . . The educational motive was not to provide opportunity for the lower classes to raise themselves to superior social stations, but to make them less of an eyesore in the face of respectability” , and, particularly after the French Revolution, to render them less susceptible to the blandishments of political and social radicals. The real purpose of philanthropic educational agencies was to Christianize: it was but incidental that they also helped to educate.33 But whatever the motive, schools founded and maintained through the benevolence and initiative of individuals and societies did extend a knowledge of the elements of learning to the poorer classes of society throughout the eighteenth century, and on into the next.

An understanding of the English conception of education as a private and voluntary affair, the concern of individuals, churches, and philanthropies, forces upon one the conclusion that the word “system” can scarcely be applied to educational operations in that country in the eighteenth century. Individualism expressed itself in a perfect welter of institutions. At the top were the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, wrapped in the traditions of the past, “intellectually torpid” , hostile to every new movement—whether Methodism or Jacobinism—and limited in clientele to the sons of the rich and the aristocratic.34 Below the Universities was a chaos of secondary schools, many of them heavily endowed. The most important were the great boarding-schools known as Public Schools, such as Eton, Winchester, Charterhouse, Rugby, and Harrow. These great secondary schools had been established to educate leaders and to give free education to a fixed number of poor boys. But very early the word “poor” in the title deeds was interpreted to mean the sons of poor gentlemen, and various expedients were employed to evade the founders, liberal intentions. In time, the sons of the local butcher and baker felt out of place among the gentlemen's sons, and ceased to enrol. In many of the Grammar Schools, and especially in the larger Public Schools, the fees were so high that only boys from fairly well-to-do families could attend. By the end of the eighteenth century the larger Public Schools were attended by the sons of the nobility, country gentry, merchant princes, and professional classes, and the smaller more local Grammar Schools had the patronage of members of the
middle commercial class and the poorer members of the landowning and professional groups.35 As fiercely as the boys defended their schoolboy mores, just as fiercely did the administrators resent any interference in management. Misapplication of revenues, extravagances, favoritism, patronage, maladministration, had, indeed, little to fear so long as Parliament was an aristocratic oligarchy and tradition a fetish.

The instruction in these English secondary schools was in conformity with the traditional spirit of humanism. By the close of the seventeenth century the cultural and useful aim of the humanistic education which, as a result of the Revival of Learning, had been introduced into the secondary schools and universities of Europe, had shrunk into the lesser aim of imparting a mastery of the Ciceronian style in writing and speech.36 The periods of Cicero and the rules of Quintillian “doomed Europe to centuries of schooling in the polished but studied and meagre literature of Rome, to a formal and barren preoccupation with the bones of language, . . . to the sodden horrors of imitation Horace and veneer Virgil.” 37 This narrow linguistic attitude characterized classical education in German lands until the middle of the eighteenth century, and in other western European countries and in America until about the middle of the nineteenth century.38

So strong was the literary and classical bias in the curriculum of English secondary schools of the eighteenth century—and much of the nineteenth— that arithmetic represented mathematics, and there was practically no instruction in English language, literature, history, geography or civil government. The entire scholastic effort was expended on learning the Latin grammar, writing Latin prose or verse and translating Latin classics, or in similar exercises in Greek. Benthamites might protest against an education so lacking in “utilitarian” features, but in vain, for those who sent their sons to a public school scorned a scientific education as plebeian and materialistic. What the English valued in their public schools, and indeed regarded as a source of national greatness, was the aristocratic spirit with which they were imbued, and the manly training achieved through games and vigorous, if rough, self-government.39 Since in the great Public Schools boys learned to obey and to rule, to reach agreements, to effect compromises, since there they made friendships among the group destined to furnish the future rulers of England, such schools exerted a great influence in giving the sons of the ruling classes a sense of national unity, a national loyalty and a preparation for national service.40 If there was a “cultural lag due to the load of tradition and classical training,” 41 the supporters of these schools were unaware of it, or counted it a small debit against mighty credits in the form of services at Waterloo or in affairs of state. Not until the second half of the nineteenth century did the new democracy, pro-
gressive, orderly, economical, the advocate of less expensive, more uniform, more modern and more advanced instruction for all,42 effect any marked change in either the administration or curriculum of English Public and Grammar Schools.

Besides these institutions of higher range there was a bewildering variety of elementary schools which, however, met the needs of only a fraction of the lower classes. Some of these schools were supported by endowments, others by church titles, charitable subscriptions or tuition fees. The workhouse schools or “schools of industry” , represented the only form of education supported in the eighteenth century by taxation in the form of parish rates. Of a humble type were the Dame Schools where old women, in their own kitchens, eked out a livelihood by imparting the rudiments of learning to small children. The private-adventure or “hedge” school was similar but was kept by a man. In all these schools the education given was of the most elementary kind, and in the church and charity schools it was largely religious.43

Toward the close of the century several interesting agencies developed which were of particular significance later for North America. One of these was the Sunday School. Partly inspired by religious and evangelical zeal, but owing something to the humanitarianism represented by Rousseau which was arousing the public conscience to a keener sense of duty toward children,44 these schools gave “the little heathen of the neighborhood” 45 a limited secular and religious instruction. Yet at first the movement met an opposition that reveals class prejudice and intolerance. Hannah More's Sunday Schools in Gloucestershire were violently attacked by the local gentry and farmers, and by the Tory press, as a public danger, as breeding-grounds of political and religious sedition, and as hotbeds of Methodism and Jacobinism.46

In the opening years of the nineteenth century a new school plan attracted attention in England, spread to the continent, and met with ready acceptance m the United States. This was based on the system of mutual or monitorial instruction, and seemed to be the answer to the demand for cheap education. Two organizations, the “National Society for the Promotion of Education of the Poor” , and the “British and Foreign School Society” , promoted this system in England, the former a Church of England creation, the latter favored by Dissenters and featuring non-sectarian religious education. As will be seen later monitorial schools promoted by the National Society played a prominent part for many years in New Brunswick education.

There is little to say about female education in the eighteenth century, for female intelligence at that time was not highly esteemed, and there was little provision for the formal education of girls. Reading, writing, a little arithmetic, religion, social accomplishments, and the art of housekeeping were thought sufficient to equip any woman for life.47 In church and charity schools
girls seem to have been provided for as well as boys, and besides learning to read and to spell, were taught to 'knit their stockings and gloves, to mark, sew, and make and mend their clothes'.48 Unless there was a family governess, the road to higher education was closed to girls. Until the development of the democratic idea of education for all an educated woman was regarded with some suspicion, to the disgust of the few strong-minded female intellectuals who dared to be different, such as Lady Mary Montague, who complained 'that it is looked upon as in a degree criminal to improve our reason or fancy if we have any.'49

Aside from a few Teachers' Seminaries in Prussia, training schools for teachers were unknown in Europe in the eighteenth century. English pedagogues, as everywhere, were a motley lot, The masters of the Public and Grammar Schools were clergymen, were fairly well paid, and ranked well in social opinion, but elsewhere the abilities, virtues, and emoluments of the profession were small. Teachers in the elementary schools, especially in the private-adventure schools, were not infrequently sextons, choristers, bell-ringers, grave-diggers, shoemakers, pensioners, invalids, and failures rather than teachers.50 Pedagogical methods were simple. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the social realists, Locke and Montaigne, had condemned the school training of their time and had urged that tutors should train the judgment and understanding rather than the memory, but the ideals of educational theorists were long neglected in actual practice. To teach was to tell: to learn was to memorize. The rod was a prominent feature of school discipline. Not much spared at home, “it was worn to shreds at school” . Pedagogues not infrequently boasted of the number of lashes, slaps, and blows which they had imparted during their teaching career. The natural interests, the capacities, and even the feelings of children were not studied or considered. Scarcely any books had yet been written especially for children, and very little had been written about them.51 Rousseau's protest, carried perhaps to absurd lengths in Emile , and at fault in wishing to deprive children of the heritage of human experience, was nevertheless an understandable reaction against some of the worst tendencies of the age.52 But authorities everywhere in church and state condemned Emile, and to the English tendency to ignore what other nations were doing in education there was added the prejudice against anything French during the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The existence of such attitudes delayed any application of even the most rational theories put forward by Rousseau, or the progressive plans of later French theorists such as La Chalotais, Diderot, and Condorcet.

Criticism of the English educational system of the eighteenth century must be tempered by the realization that it harmonized with prevailing attitudes and practices in Europe at the time, but the English reluctance to relinquish eighteenth century philosophies and to face the necessity of state action in edu-
cation does lie open to modern criticism. When progressive ideas were being translated into action in France, America, and Prussia, England, as a nation hesitated to move forward from her traditional position. In France and America, however, revolution meant a clear break with the past, and in Prussia the humiliations suffered at the hands of Napoleon necessitated a national regeneration. In England, the slower process of evolution took the place of revolution. If, in retrospect, that evolution in the educational field seems unconscionably deliberate, one must remember that it was part of a complex process and was conditioned by many factors.

The significance of the connection between England's colonial possessions and the aristocratic tradition in English society, politics, business, and culture, only casually suggested in this chapter, will emerge more clearly later for in the development of New Brunswick this background often obtruded. But if ties of allegiance and dependence bound the province to Britain, other ties linked it with Britain's earlier colonies. The Loyalists were British, but they were also American. It is not enough to know something of conditions in the country to which they adhered politically and spiritually. The reasons for that adherence, the things they rejected as repugnant, and the cultural heritage which they brought with them to New Brunswick were to be found in America rather than in England. The American setting is therefore an integral part also of any study of New Brunswick history.