 We're going to hear about an entirely new phenomenon in the history of libertarian education. In the course of his research, George discovered a large body of literature which has been overlooked by most of the professional historians of education, and I suspect with some intent, George is going to tell us about this research, or about what he has discovered in today's paper, which is part of this larger work that I just dropped, George. I'm suffering from a rather bad head cold, so if I sound like I'm talking through a tunnel, please excuse that. I thought rather than cover material that is covered in my paper, I would rather sketch some material that is not presented there in the way of trying to provide a broader perspective about the movement which was called, in the 19th century, the Voluntaryist Movement. That's a rather difficult term to say. They used the Y, they would use voluntary and put the IST on the end of it. I would prefer that they use the term volunteerism, but nonetheless they call themselves Voluntaryists. And I'll explain in a moment in the broadest sense what they meant by that term, who these people were, and how it applied to the education question. But let me say in advance that the Voluntaryists certainly represented a strong and explicitly libertarian movement in the middle of the 19th century in England. In fact, they were the radical cutting edge of the liberal, the classical liberals. Many of the individuals involved in the Voluntaryist Movement are not well known to scholars, let alone delay persons, although some of them are. I'm sure all of you are familiar with Herbert Spencer. Later, Oberon Herbert are both well known 19th century English libertarian figures. Nevertheless, there are many lesser known names that you probably never have heard of at all. Algernon Wells is one who is absolutely brilliant. There were a number of others, and they were relatively minor figures involved in, they were usually congregationalist or Baptist, and they were involved in the various religious organizations in England at the time. But nonetheless, they've been, although they were important at the time, they've been totally overlooked by scholars. Now, in my paper, what I do is I begin with a overview of what is today called revisionism in American education. And we have two distinguished representatives on the panel today of American revisionism. And revisionism, of course, is a term that's applied to a lot of historical disciplines. And it's applied to American education. What it means basically is that body of literature, which beginning in the late 60s, there was revisionist literature before that, but it really made an impact in the late 60s, about 1968, that body of literature which was written by American historians, which is, we could say, extremely critical of the history of American state schooling. Previous to that time, certainly the bulk of American historiography when devoted to education was very eulogistic. L. Wood-Cubberley, the Stanford historian earlier in the century being a notable example of this. If you read the classic history of education texts, you basically get this picture of humanitarian reformers battling for free schools for poor children. They could read and write and battling against selfish capitalist interests. We didn't want to give up money for poor kids. That's kind of the image you get of who was for and who was against. And revisionist historians have totally altered that picture. And they have emphasized that the growth of a government bureaucracy on whatever level for schooling was actually promoted, in most cases, to benefit and further the goals of those who were controlled with bureaucracy. In other words, it's kind of a self-interested theorem as applied to government bureaucracies and specifically to educational bureaucracies. Now, the revisionists come from a wide spectrum of political views. Many of them came from the left politically. And I don't think it's coincidental that revisionism really made an impact during the Vietnam War period with a lot of leftist agitation against the war. Nevertheless, some, such as Joel, for example, are explicitly libertarians. So you get quite a spectrum of political beliefs. But I think the value of revisionism for an education for libertarians is basically the same as the value of the type of revisionism in the New Left historiography, such as Koko, his triumph of conservatism. The type of integration that people like Rothbard have made using that sort of progressive revisionism and applying it to applying a libertarian theory to explain the same sorts of facts that Koko presents. I think that's the main value of the revisionist body of literature for libertarians. Not that we always agree with the interpretation given by the revisionist historians, but rather given their critical attitude they have uncovered an enormous amount of interesting and valuable information for libertarians who can then apply their own theoretical framework to explain that the historians have uncovered. Now the thesis of the paper was that many of the things that revisionists complain about in schools today, lack of diversity, what the leftists might call class dominance or class oppression, many of these aspects were, if not in words, then in substance, were the same things that were predicted in the 19th century by the voluntarists. In other words, the opponents of state education in England were very accurate in what they said would happen if in fact state education was imposed. And that was my, when I used the title 19th century opponents of state education, profits of modern revisionism, that's what I meant. And I think this to a certain extent vindicates the opponents of state education because I think what the revisionists have done is to in effect verify the principles to some extent that the libertarian opponents were operating from. Now with that, let me get more specifically to the movement itself. By the way, the reason I concentrate on England is because although there were scattered opponents of state education in America, there was never a national movement, an organized movement against state education in America as there was in England. And the best libertarian thinkers came out of England rather than America. So that's the place I like to concentrate my attention on. Now as I said before, the libertarian opponents, the classical liberal opponents of state education in England have been totally ignored. Not totally, there are a few references to them in the literature. But if not totally ignored, when they have been mentioned, they've been mentioned in extremely disparaging terms. Typically they're represented as defenders of the capitalist class and this sort of rhetoric that you get, especially by historians from the left. If they haven't been represented in those terms, they've typically been castigated as being sectarian bigots because they were in many cases sincerely religious people, primarily congregational and Baptist. And it's commonly argued by historians that they were fighting for narrow sectarian interests against the general welfare. Both of those charges that they were somehow puppets of the capitalist class or that they were sectarian bigots, both of those are grossly untrue. In fact, they were libertarians. Now as I said, the Voluntaryist represent the radical edge of the classical liberal movement. Now the thing you have to understand is that even among those quasi-libertarians of the 19th century that we identify often with classical liberalism, most of the prominent figures were pro-state education. Richard Cobden was avidly in favor of a secular system of state education. He said he wanted the Massachusetts system, he was a great admirer of Horace Mann. Someone like John Bright was a little better on the issue. All of he too eventually came around to favoring some system of state education. Now later on I want to deal a little bit with the conflict in the classical liberal movement itself between Cobden and the Voluntaryist that explained Cobden's reaction to what happened because it really split the liberal movement after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. I'll deal with that shortly. But in order to understand the background of Voluntaryism you have to understand a little bit about the background of classical liberalism. Well basically, it would be difficult to date when classical liberalism began but certainly I suppose dealing with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776 would be as good a place to start as any I suppose. All I want to certainly trace it back much further than that to Locke and other philosophers. But that represented the seminal modern work in defending freedom of trade, free market. Now I'm going to pick out one individual named Edward Baines. This is Edward Baines Sr. He was the father of the Edward Baines I talk about in my paper. I'm going to focus on Baines just for a few minutes to give you an idea of around the turn of the century and during the Napoleonic Wars up to around 1815 what the classical liberals were doing, what they were thinking about to give you a kind of a feel for the classical liberal mentality during this period. Now Baines had become proprietor in the early 1800s of the Leeds Mercury which he turned shortly into the most prestigious and influential of the provincial papers in England. And the Leeds Mercury became a very vocal and articulate defender of volunteerism in the following years. Baines came from a descending background as did all of these volunteers, the dissenters in England were technically any Protestant who refused to subscribe with 39 articles of the Anglican Church, the established church in England. Now traditionally you had three denominations in the Protestant descending tradition. They're called the Old Descent. That would be the Congregationalists or sometimes called Independents, the Baptists and the Presbyterians. There was also what was called New Descent, those were the Methodists. Now the Methodists were the result of the Wesleyan Revival as you probably know in the 18th century in England. The Methodists were by far the largest body of dissenters in England including the 19th century but they were never radical politically. They were very conservative and in fact they frustrated many of the radical goals that the other dissenters wanted. This is a controversy in his current English historiography. It was the thesis of the French historian Hallévé that the Methodists in effect provided a real impetus for conservatism in English, early 19th century England, and I won't get into that, but it's quite clear that they were a conservative force. By the 19th century, going into the 19th century, the Presbyterians had more or less transformed into Unitarianism and become very liberal theologically. Many of the Unitarians were active also in fighting for state education. The two hardline sects of the Old dissenters continued to be the Baptists and the Congregationalists. Now one can look all the way back to the Puritan Revolution in the 1640s in England and show a clear connection between the Independent Congregationalists and Baptists and Libertarian ideas. Many of the levelers came out of this sort of religious tradition and the tradition, especially after the restoration in 1660 of Charles II, when the screws were turned on the non-conformists or dissenters, the dissenters had to kind of go underground, especially in their educational institutions because Oxford and Cambridge were barred to them. The active uniformity in 1662 decreed that no dissenter could even teach a child privately. Now these were not always enforced, these sorts of laws, they led to the rise of what were known as dissenting academies, which were very renowned educational institutions, private institutions, and they led to a whole network, an underground network of dissenting education. So the dissenters had behind them a long tradition of non-governmental education. And early in the 19th century they began with the British and Foreign School Society an organization explicitly to provide elementary education to children who could not afford to pay on a charitable basis. And this organization proceeded for many years, was quite successful, it spurred the growth of a competing group by the Anglicans called the National Society, and education, elementary education, went on in England until around 1833 really without any government assistance, whatever. It was in 1833 that the government offered what the volunteers later liked to refer to as a golden bribe. That is to say they started saying, look, we'll give you some money. There's a very modest amount at first, and the volunteers later were saying in the 1840s, they were saying, look, wherever their government money comes, strings are going to follow and regulations are going to follow. Of course, the people in the government at the time usually denied this. They simply said, no, we just want to help you out, help you build your schools and so forth. We're not really interested in controlling them. Of course, that turned out to be totally false later on. Now going back to Baines, when Baines took over the Leeds Mercury, Baines was a great admirer of Charles James Fox, who was kind of a liberal wig in the late 1700s. Fox, as you may know, was really opposed to the wars with France. He was an anti-war type. He was a pretty good classical liberal sort. Baines had very libertarian sentiments. He was opposed to the war. He wasn't really, he obviously was a pro-Napoleon. To give you a few examples of how Baines Sr. argued, and he wrote this shortly after the war, he said, quote, war is the harvest of ministers. It is a period of extensive patronage. But though to ministers it is a time of plenty, a war like the present is a time of famine to merchants to manufacturers of the tradesmen, close quote. He went on to condemn the inflation produced by the war. He condemned the quote, baseless fabric of paper currency, close quote, and called for return of gold standard. Now after the war, Baines called for retrenchment, including drastic cuts in naval and military expenditures. When the Corn Laws came in after the war in 1816, he posed them vigorously and continued to do so throughout his life. I should point out here that the dissenters constituted the bulk of the anti-Corn Lawly and the prominent volunteers were also the prominent people oftentimes in the agitation to the field of Corn Laws. Now the other thing I want to say about Baines is he had a very good perspective on the economic problems after the war. Now there was this thing that you probably know called the Luddite movement, the machine breakers, kind of a redacted reaction to the Industrial Revolution. And of course the controversy goes on today as to whether the Industrial Revolution created economic hardship in England. Baines living through that period argued that there wasn't the economic hardship but that it was a result of the 15 years of war with France. It was not a result of industrialization. And he wrote, quote, if therefore our agriculture trade and finance now feel an unusual degree of depression, the evil is not to be imputed to the country having to soon return to a state of peace but to the necessity no matter how created under which she was placed and so long continuing the war. He went on to say, war which diverted the nation from the Holston state of prosperity in which it was found in the year 1793 and has burdened us with an enormous debt and an impressive taxation is solely to blame for that share of public distress which does at present exist and for all those miseries that may continue to prevail to the country shall again revert back to a period of settled peace and prosperity, close quote. I'm providing this as just background again to show you the liberal, classical liberal attitude to such things as war, taxes, military expenditures. They were quite libertarian in their basic instincts in these areas, as you may already know. Now the thing to understand is that Baines himself, who was later a member of parliament, Baines Sr. again, was not particularly opposed to state education in the early years. Many of the later volunteers were not particularly opposed to it. They weren't really in favor of it, but it was not really a clearly defined issue until 1843. But the voluntary movement as such started previous to 1843. Baines' son, one of his sons, Edward Baines Jr., who took over the late's merchant community for many years and later became a member of parliament as well, was one of the primary figureheads in this whole movement. Now voluntaryism in the general term refers not just to opposition to state education. It was coined originally to refer to those dissenters who called for the total disestablishment of the church, of an Anglican church. In other words they wanted a total and unconditional separation of church and state. Now this radical stand, in other words they used the term the voluntary principle to refer basically to separation of church and state. Later it was applied specifically to the opposition to state schools. This stand really began to surface after many years of agitation against things like church rates and many other sorts of things, that laws that dissenters found very obnoxious to them. And there was open call for rebellion in the sense of not paying church rates and so forth, disobedience, civil disobedience, but I think we can trace the real outburst of the voluntary sentiment. At least I can see the research I've done in this and it's been quite extensive in some of the journals. It starts to appear in a major dissenting journal called The Eclectic Review, which I quote extensively in my paper. There was a character, again very obscure virtually no work has been done on him, but he's a marvelous character from the material I've read of his. His name was Thomas Price. He was a Baptist minister, a good libertarian type. And he took over The Eclectic Review, the editorship in 1837 from Josiah Condor, who was a much more moderate conservative dissenter. And The Eclectic Review immediately took on a radical tone from the moment of its first issue under Price's editorship. In his first issue he said that the guiding principle thereafter of The Eclectic Review would be quote the purely voluntary character of all religion. And he said he would pursue quote, the dissolution of the disgraceful connection between church and state. Now let me explain a little bit what they meant by the voluntary principle so you can see how it later became applied to education. In fact you'll find articles in The Eclectic Review during this period entitled things like the voluntary principle. Price, in an early issue after he took over The Eclectic Review, explained the voluntary principle as follows. He said, by what do we mean the voluntary and compulsory modes of supporting religion? We answered that by the latter, that is the compulsory mode, we mean that the system which throws the supportive religion upon taxation, the system which compels men to contribute to the maintenance of forms of faith and worship to which they may be indifferent or to which they may be conscientiously opposed. By the former we mean the system of appealing for the supportive religion through moral inducement alone with that italicized. The voluntary system consequently will include even endowments so far as they are voluntary. In a word, all the various forms in which money is voluntarily contributed to this purpose. Close quote. Now the voluntariest insisted that the voluntarism was a logical outgrowth of Christian principles. As I, in exchange with Professor Kletner yesterday as I indicated, the voluntariest argued that religious conversion, and by the way, again I want to emphasize these people were evangelical Christians. They were not liberal in their theology for the most part. They were what we would describe today as moderate Calvinist. And a moderate Calvinist in the mid-19th century is a fairly extreme character by today's standards. But they insisted that voluntaryism was true to the spirit of Christianity because any sort of coerced belief was useless for a moral point of view. Conversion itself had to be voluntary to have moral value and they went to apply this principle, the voluntary principle to all areas involving human beliefs and values. Price declared that voluntarism is true to the spirit of Christianity and it, quote, openly declares that a constrained obedience is totally worthless. Close quote. And he spent considerable time trying to prove this. Now another thing of tactical importance that later became important with the voluntariest is that unlike many of the American panel parts, they were not particularly concerned who they allied with politically. They'd rub shoulders very closely with atheists or free thinkers and whoever would support the cause of religious freedom and civil freedom. Price insisted that the love of liberty is compatible with evangelical piety. He said, quote, men we are quite aware may be ardently attached to liberty and yet have no sympathy with true religion. But their love of freedom is not incompatible with their pursuit of evangelical piety which cannot be predicated on the love of oppression. He went on to say that the dissenters pursuit of liberty might lead to an alliance with unbelievers. He said that he welcomed an alliance with any friends of civil liberty. He said, quote, it is incomparably better to be blended with unbelievers in promoting liberty than associated with the highest ecclesiastical dignitaries in forging the change of oppression. Close quote. Now I'm mentioning this because it shows a marked contrast in the attitude of the English pietists with the American pietists who were typically the pro-state people. In other words, the voluntary is the primary value on the cause of human liberty. Now as an example of the reaction to piety I don't want to over stress this, their idea that they were totally libertarian. There were a few of the volunteers who later became mixed up in things like the temperance movement in England. That was always the big weakness of these people, although a number of them did not. But as an example of at least an early attitude towards temperance, let me give you kind of an anecdotal event. After the passage of the beer bill in 1830 and the beer bill permitted anyone to sell beer after purchasing a license at a low price, the English temperance movement really began in earnest. And in 1832 the total abstinence movement was formed, which was backed primarily by churchmen, by Anglicans, who would be really liturgical types, and by Quakers. Now the congregation was failed to participate in this movement, and they were castigated by other religious figures for so failing. And an interesting anecdote occurred when two American congregations, and of course American congregations were hip-deep in the temperance movement in America, they visited the Congregational Union, and that was formed in 1831. And they condemned it, quote, for its free use of stimulating liquors at public meetings, close for. Specifically, they would make a decanter of wine available to the speaker of the Congregational Union. And the American congregationalists were quite upset with this, with their pietistic background. The English congregationalists struck back and would not accept this. They objected to T-totalism, as it was known. They condemned it as, quote, contrary to reason in Scripture, close quote. The congregation officially, official statement of the Congregational Union in England stated, quote, that it was not prepared to submit to censor for the temperate use of that which we regard to be one of the choice blessings of a beneficent creator, close quote. They went on to condemn total abstinence from liquor as, quote, they said it would lead to, quote, monkish austerities, close quote. And they went on to condemn it by saying it was fanatical and absurd. Now, that shows a very interesting contrast and attitude, certainly, between the English pietists and the American pietists. And that's why I think it's a value to point that out. Now, in the time remaining, let me deal a little bit with the conflict that was caused in the classical liberal movement by the voluntarist faction. As I said before, most classical liberals, most well-known classical liberals were pro-state education. This is equally true of the so-called philosophic radicals. That's the term used to apply to the bentomites, the followers of Jeremy Bentham. That would include in the House of Commons individuals like Roebuck who were avidly calling for a system of state secular education. Among the supporters of state education, you had two basic groups. You had the people advocating what was known as the denominational system and you had another group advocating what was called the secular system. The nominationalist system advocates wanted funds to be made available to church groups or to church schools on an impartial basis. The secular proponents wanted funds to be made available only to secular schools. They didn't want government funds to be made available to any school teaching religious doctrines. The voluntarists opposed both proponents. They were totally opposed to any kind of government aid. And as I mentioned in my paper, and it's very interesting to point this out, for many years the congregationalists, they had a voluntary movement, as I mentioned, to provide funds to build their own schools. They refused to provide aid to any school which accepted any government funds. This is how seriously they took it. They refused to associate with any school or aid any school which would influence so far as to accept government funds. Now, the voluntarists saw themselves in the tradition of the liberal Whig tradition. They were typically allied with the Whig party, the liberal branch of the Whig party. They felt they owed some debt of gratitude to the Whigs as a political party because the Whigs had been instrumental not only in the passing of the reform bill in 1832, which the voluntarists supported, but also in getting rid of some of the legal disabilities that were imposed upon the centers. But their alliance with the Whigs became very tenuous as it became clear that even the liberal Whigs were not particularly concerned about promoting voluntarist causes, involving separation of church and state, abolition of church rates, and later preventing state encroachment in the field of education. And with each disappointment, the voluntarists became progressively disillusioned. Now, as in 1843, as I explained in my paper, that the voluntarist movement began in earnest as an organized movement, although individuals such as Herbert Spencer, who was part of this movement, had advocated voluntarism in education before this time. But it was in 1843 that the infamous factories education bill was attempted to be put through the House of Commons. And that would have provided compulsory education for factory children in the, of course, the northern manufacturing districts such as Leeds and Manchester in England. And it would have... Graham, who was Home Secretary in the Field Administration, had set it up in such a way that the Anglican church would have had control of the school system. And, of course, the dissenters reacted violently to this, and they managed in an apparently short time to gather thousands of petitions with a total of over four million signatures for testing this encroachment on their civil and religious liberties. And the bill was dropped as a result. It was a magnificent victory for the voluntarist movement. Now, their successes after that were not as compacted and they became increasingly less frequent after that point. The next big flap occurred in 1847 under... Now, in 1846, the Field Administration, because the field supported the field of corn laws, and the liberal, or the so-called liberal, Lord John Russell came in. And if you read the descending periodicals at the time, they were very suspicious of Russell from his past activities. And when Russell supported what became known as the Minutes of the Educational Council, Educational Committee of the Privy Council... Now, this is kind of complicated, I can't get into this, but earlier there had been set up an Educational Committee in the Privy Council. This is where Sir James K. Shuttleworth worked as Machiavellian schemes, kind of behind the scenes. And what has permitted many of the pro-state education people to do is set up educational schemes without technically going through a vote of parliament. Parliament only voted on the funding. They didn't vote on specific measures. And the senators thought this was a very devious way of getting around parliamentary procedure to get their schemes through. But the Minutes of Council from August and December 1846, which were voted on in 1847, was a very important step in setting in a school system, state school system in England. For one thing, they wanted to set up normal schools, which means by that, training schools for teachers. They wanted to establish pensions for retired teachers that set up a system of certification. It was a very important approach, a very important step. The volunteers, again, got themselves screwed up and opposed this, but the liberal Russell government pushed it through. At this point, the volunteers voted from the liberal movement. They had had it up to here. The Corn Laws had been repealed in 1846. They felt there was no longer anything holding them together like that. So they openly called for the senators to form their own political organization and vote against any politician, whether liberal or not, who would not support voluntary causes. And they were, in the elections of 1847, successful and unseating, for example, Macaulay, who was seated from Edinburgh, who was a very prominent member of the House. They were instrumental in defeating Roebuck for return to the House at that time. They tried to unseat Russell that didn't succeed in that. But they, in effect, declared their independence at this time. Now, as I said before, the thing that held them to the liberal movement was their common opposition to the Corn Laws. And that was really the unifying force that held the liberal movement together until 1846. So let me just deal then in conclusion with how Cobbden reacted to this. And I'm bringing up Cobbden because I want you to see that this tremendous important struggle that went on in the liberal movement over the issue of state education. Now, Richard Cobbden was at once a hero and an irritant to the volunteers. He had been, of course, a leader in the movement for free trade, and he was frequently admired by the many dissenters who participated in the anti-Corn Law League. But his persistent efforts in the half of state education alienated many volunteers who accused him of abandoning his own free trade principles. Now, Cobbden was a moderate Anglican. He really wasn't a very devout religious person, but he was an Anglican. And he was sympathetic somewhat to dissenting causes. But he didn't really have it, he didn't really understand the grievances of the centers, how seriously they took these legal disabilities that they were subjected to. He thought they were rather picky unions in some cases. The volunteers appealed to the rights of conscious, the refusal to compromise even on the smallest issues, their insistence that the power of government should be limited on principle to the protection of life and property. Such views, heavily laden with political ideology, were foreign to Cobbden's way of thinking. As Cobbden's biographer John Morley observed, quote, it is true that Cobbden sometimes slips into the phrases of an older school about the rights of man and natural law, but such lapses into the dialect of a revolutionary philosophy were very rare, and they were accidents. His whole scheme rested, if ever any scheme did so rest, upon the wide positive base of great social expediency. Close quote. Cobbden supported the Graham Factory Education Bill in 1843, much to the displeasure of the centers. He supported the Maynooth Grant, as it was called in 1845, which was an endowment to an Irish Catholic college that the dissenters were incensed by that. He accused them of being anti-Catholic, and they were no such thing. They were just consistently opposed to all state endowment of religion. In fact, the dissenters claimed that the grant represented an attempt to buy off the Irish establishment. And throughout the voluntary's literature, you will find rabid attacks on English imperialism in Ireland and calling for Irish home rule. So they were certainly not in any way anti-Catholic or anti-Irish. Cobbden really didn't understand this, however, and when he supported the Minutes of Council in 1847, the basic of the volunteers had just had it with Cobbden. A leading volunteer is to his prominent in the anti-Cornelaw League, angrily attacked Cobbden for his stand on the Maynooth Grant. He complained of the, quote, alienation and hostility aroused among dissenters by Cobbden's, quote, all together on call for support of the measure. This volunteer is predicted that a split was looming on the horizon in the liberal movement, because dissenters, quote, will now be compelled to rally their strength and vote for their own candidates, close quote. Cobbden, meanwhile, complained that he was, quote, very much persecuted by the fanatics, close quote. As I said, though, he just misread his opposition. He didn't understand his opposition. Now, as I mentioned also, the Cornelaw agitation overshadowed all else during this period, so the predicted split did not occur. With the repeal in 1846, however, the unifying force dissolved, and when Cobbden joined other liberals to support the Minutes of the Educational Committee in 1847, the volunteers resolved to end their support of liberals who ignored the dissenting cause, thus resulting in the defeat of Akali and others. Cobbden went on to play a leading role in the following years in the National Public School Association, the Lancashire Public School Association, which pushed energetically for free secular education supported by local rates. Now, Cobbden's position on education, and more specifically his position on the volunteers, is revealed in a series of letters he wrote to George Combe, who was the Scottish phrenologist and a close friend of Horace Manns, by the way, and an avid supporter of state education. In 1848, Cobbden wrote to Combe as follows and said, you know how cordially I agree with you upon the subject of education, but I confess I see no chance of incorporating in any new movement for an extension of the suffrage. The main strength of any such movement must be in the liberal ranks of the middle class, and they are almost exclusively filled by dissenters. To attempt to raise the question of national education amongst them at the present moment would be Vita throw a bombshell into their ranks and disperse them, close quote. Now, Cobbden knew that he could count on dissenting support in a campaign for suffrage extension, but he also knew that if the campaign were linked to a plan of national education, the dissenters led by the volunteers, the opponents of state education would revolt. He was greatly aggravated by the volunteer campaign against state education. He wrote in another letter, quote, there is no active feeling at present in favor of national education. The dissenters, at least Baines's section, referring to Edward Baines Jr., who had been the only movement party since the League was dissolved, have rather turned popular opinion against it. Above all, don't suspect that sitting for Yorkshire, as a stronghold of voluntarism, will shut my mouth. I made up my mind on returning from the continent that the best chance I could give to our dissenting friends was to give them time to cool after the excitement of the late opposition to the government major, meaning the 1847 minutes. And therefore, I have avoided throwing the topic in their faces, but I do not intend to preserve my silence much longer. If I take part in a new reform movement, I shall do my best to connect the education question with it, close quote. Now, over two years later, in 1850, Cobden noted that the situation had really not improved as he thought of what he wrote. I thought I had given Mr. Baines and his dissenting friends time to cool down upon the subject, but they appear to be as hot as ever. However, I shall now go straight to the mark and shall neither give nor take quarter. I have made up my mind to go for the Massachusetts system as nearly as we can get it, close quote. Now, in a letter written to Edward Baines in 1848, Cobden warns, quote, against seeking for points of collision among liberals that would cause a split among the liberals. Cobden caution-bained and actually somewhat disingenuous, I might add, quote, to be silent upon the differences one may now see between his own opinions and those of his political allies. And he went on to say that education is the main cause of the split amongst the middle-class liberals. Now, in conclusion, let me just summarize what Cobden himself thought about education. And his views on education emerged clearly in his writing. He favored later in life his secular system of education. He said, as he emphasized repeatedly, that he was, quote, for the American system precisely as it stands. And by the American system, he met the common school system of Massachusetts. He was a great admirer, as I said, of Horace Mann. And I'll just summarize by reading another short passage from Cobden. He said, what I want is to have the same system of education in England that they have in Massachusetts. The same system of education, because I knew there in America it was applied to the satisfaction of those descendants of the nonconformists who have not forgotten their principles and where we know the system works without injury to the rights of conscience of any individual in the country. Of course, he was buying a lot of the propaganda about how the Massachusetts system actually worked. Now, to tie this together, what we're really setting out here is kind of a research program because this has not really been explored. You don't really see an emphasis on this enormous split in the early classical liberal movement over the problem of state education. And by the interpretation I'm giving it here, I am suggesting that contrary to common libertarian belief, Cobden on this issue at least represents anything in the middle of the road position. And the true radical liberals were these unheard of people like Edward Baines Jr., Algernon Wells, and many, many others who might discuss in my paper. So I think that enormous work remains to be done in this area and those libertarians who are interested in history, specifically English history should really take up the issue of volunteerism and look into its literature. It's an enormous literature. I haven't written any of the quotes from the volunteers because there are extensive quotes in my paper and as Joe and I were discussing last night, any of those quotes you could swear could have been written by a modern libertarian. They're explicitly libertarian arguments with rights of conscience and so on and so forth. So it's a marvelous area and we really need to do a lot of work here. Thank you.