4 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



and deterring young men from entering upon it. How far this 

 may be the fault of business, and how far of the university, we 

 need not now consider ; but naturally it has not been a pleasant 

 experience to the manufacturer who expected his son to return 

 from the university and set to work in earnest. And to 

 experiences of this kind, joined to other causes of an historical 

 nature, is due the fact that hitherto the great body of sub- 

 stantial English manufacturers and merchants has kept aloof 

 from the older universities. A few of the wealthier among 

 them have sent their sons chiefly for social reasons; and every 

 year a few clever boys have been picked out of their native 

 milieu by means of scholarships and ambitious schoolmasters, 

 and their ability lost to the commercial world. These excep- 

 tions, however, have hardly affected the class as a whole. And 

 yet a good many business men were beginning to realise in an 

 obscure sort of way that the old practice of putting a boy into 

 the office at sixteen or seventeen was also no longer satisfactory. 

 They felt that a boy's time could be more advantageously em- 

 ployed than in the work of a junior clerk, if there was no cogent 

 pecuniary reason for putting him at once to the desk. 



It was the statesmanlike imagination of Mr. Chamberlain 

 which gave a name to this vaguely felt want when, in the 

 charter of the new University of Birmingham, he provided for 

 the future establishment of a " Faculty of Commerce," side by 

 side with the older faculties of Arts, Science, and Medicine. 

 Since then the new northern universities of Manchester and 

 Leeds have also established faculties of commerce ; and a 

 department so named will soon be a part of the ordinary 

 machinery of all the modern seats of learning. The ancient 

 University of Cambridge, though it clings to its old nomen- 

 clature and calls its new degree course the " Economics Tripos," 

 means the same thing by it. 



So far so good. But, granted a serious intention on the 

 part of university authorities to provide a training which shall 

 tend to fit, rather than unfit, men for business life, in what is 

 that training to consist ? This is a question which has so far, in 

 my opinion, obtained nothing like the consideration it requires. 



Let us, then, begin by observing that Higher Commercial 

 Education, or education of a university type, cannot be related 

 to commercial education in the schools (of whatever grade) in 

 what is probably the usual sense of " higher " as related to 



