632 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



take a perverse pride in the varied contents of their asylum. 

 Experience gained anywhere else is habitually held to be 

 inapplicable ; "I am sure it would never do here," is the 

 first line of defence against reform : and the reformer admits 

 with shame that usually it wouldn't. 



It is a notable sign of the course of events elsewhere that, 

 within a month of the vote in Oxford, the Board of Education 

 was ready with an exhaustive report on the working of the 

 examination system in Secondary Schools. It is another sign, 

 that in the last few days a Royal Commission is announced 

 to inquire into the methods of appointment to (and promotion 

 in) the Civil Service, the upper divisions of which offer one 

 of the few remaining careers for which the classical courses at 

 the older universities are popularly regarded as adequate 

 and " safe " preparation. So intimate, indeed, is the correlation 

 become between these university courses and the highest 

 present requirements of the Civil Service Commissioners, that 

 hardly any change in these requirements could be contemplated 

 which would not derange both the teaching and its academic 

 tests and even the financial arrangements of colleges. It is not 

 only "Smalls Greek" or the curriculum of the Secondary 

 Schools that is on its trial ; the old universities are called to 

 account for their husbandry of the nation's brains. 



It is not very easy to say why the Greek question should 

 give rise to divergences of opinion worthy of a dispute not 

 in pedagogy but in politics or religion. But the sharpness 

 of the antithesis is partly explained when we remember that 

 it is one of those between Have and Have-not on which, as 

 Plato observed long ago, no agreement is possible, because 

 one of the parties is ex hypothesi incapable of realising the 

 position of the other. It is, moreover, almost as hard to 

 persuade the man who has Greek and loves it, that any 

 reason is left in the man who hates it having none, as to 

 persuade the Greekless fanatic that the Grecian has not been 

 made mad by his much learning. And it is small consolation 

 to the practical man to be reminded by the historian that 

 the feelings now aroused on both sides are as nothing, compared 

 with the passions and open violence which ensued when Greek 

 first came into vogue in Oxford as a new and optional alternative. 

 In those days, as now, the arrival of students with a different 

 kind of preparation meant that some teachers had to remodel 



