Note 203 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

What was lacking to the age, once more, was a social foundation on which it could not only endure but develop. In a nation of which the majority had no intellectual culture, such a foundation could not exist. Green exaggerates203 when he writes that “schools there were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth”;204 but by another account only twelve public schools were founded in the long reign of George III;205 and, as a result of the indifference of two generations, masses of the people “were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive.”206 A great increase of population had followed on the growth of towns and the development of commerce and manufactures even between 1700 and 1760;207 and thereafter the multiplication was still more rapid. There was thus a positive fall in the culture standards of the majority of the people. According to Massey, “hardly any tradesman in 1760 had more instruction than qualified him to add up a bill”; and “a labourer, mechanic, or domestic servant who could read or write possessed a rare accomplishment.”208 As for the Charity Schools established between 1700 and 1750, their express object was to rear humble tradesmen and domestics, not to educate in the proper sense of the term.