[Education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. - G. M. Trevelyan

It is significant of much that in the seventeenth century members of Parliament quoted from the Bible; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the classics; in the twentieth century from nothing at all.

The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was indeed the one large measure of reform that became law between the French Revolution and Castlereagh's death in 1822. It is greatly to the credit of our ancestors that England, in her death-grip with Napoleon, should have given time and thought to do justice to the negro. It was a fine use to make of the sea power that Nelson bequeathed us for the duration of the war. And, at the return of peace, the world-wide influence that Trafalgar and Waterloo gave to England's representatives was used by Castlereagh and Wellington, in consultation with Wilberforce, to further the suppression of slave trading under every flag.

The sum total of progress associated with the Industrial Revolution has not been wholly for the good of man.