"
As you have proved these truths in your own experience or in your
own observation, and as it may be safely assumed that there can be
very few persons in Birmingham, of all places under heaven, who
would contest the position that the more cultivated the employed
the better for the employer, and the more cultivated the employer
the better for the employed; therefore, my references to what you
do not want to know shall here cease and determine.
Next, with reference to what your institution has done on my
summary, which shall be as concise and as correct as my information
and my remembrance of it may render possible, I desire to lay
emphatic stress. Your institution, sixteen years old, and in which
masters and workmen study together, has outgrown the ample edifice
in which it receives its 2,500 or 2,600 members and students. It
is a most cheering sign of its vigorous vitality that of its
industrial-students almost half are artisans in the receipt of
weekly wages. I think I am correct in saying that 400 others are
clerks, apprentices, tradesmen, or tradesmen's sons. I note with
particular pleasure the adherence of a goodly number of the gentler
sex, without whom no institution whatever can truly claim to be
either a civilising or a civilised one. The increased attendance
at your educational classes is always greatest on the part of the
artisans--the class within my experience the least reached in any
similar institutions elsewhere, and whose name is the oftenest and
the most constantly taken in vain.
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