8. _Education._—It is acknowledged that, in no other country is education so cheaply and amply provided as in Germany. It is remarked by Dr. Hawkins, that the _results_ of education in Germany and in England, are very different. In the _former_, the student is almost entirely engrossed by the physical and practical sciences—whilst the English one is very much occupied with theology, morality, classics, poetry, and rhetoric. “Yet in the end, the Englishman becomes most practical, and the German the most theoretical and sentimental.” With all due deference to Dr. Hawkins, I doubt or rather deny the fact, that the practical _education_ of the German renders him theoretical: or that the theoretical _education_ of the Englishman makes him practical. Will Dr. H. maintain that a good education in the physical and practical sciences would convert an Englishman into a theorist or sentimentalist? No, it would not. It is not the education, but the different circumstances in which the two people are placed, after leaving the schools, that produce the contrast noticed by Dr. Hawkins. A complaint is made that this facility of education leads to surplus candidates for professional honours; and the German governments endeavour to divert the aspirants into other channels than the learned professions. But where is there _not_ this surplus? In England, where education is expensive enough, the ranks of the church, bar, and medicine, are crowded to suffocation. Two causes of this operate in Germany. The cheapness of education—and the cheapness of living afterwards.—Two or three in England—the redundancy of population, and the choaking up of the war-channels, those waste-pipes and safety-valves of society. To these may be added the restless ambition of the shopocracy to push some of their sons into the carriage from behind the counter. A considerable portion of the English consider that education (among the lower classes) without a particular creed, is worse than no education at all. The real, though not the acknowledged meaning of this is, that education, or knowledge, is, in the abstract, or _per se_, an evil rather than a good. It would be much better to openly and candidly maintain this doctrine at once, than mystify it under the term “religious instruction,” that is, instruction combined with a _particular_ creed. An ingenious casuist might easily shew—perhaps prove—the truth of the anti-education doctrine. Beginning with the Garden of Eden, he might quote Scripture that knowledge first “Brought death into this world, and all our woe.”