in.] A LIBERAL EDUCATION. 41 



Now let us pause to consider this wonderful state of 

 affairs ; for the time will come when Englishmen will 

 quote it as the stock example of the stolid stupidity of 

 their ancestors in the nineteenth century. The most 

 thoroughly commercial people, the greatest voluntary 

 wanderers and colonists the world has ever seen, are 

 precisely the middle classes of this country. If there be 

 a people which has been busy making history on the 

 great scale for the last three hundred years — and the 

 most profoundly interesting history — history which, if 

 it happened to be that of Greece or Eome, we should 

 study with avidity — it is the English. If there be a 

 people which, during the same period, has developed a 

 remarkable literature, it is our own. If there be a 

 nation whose prosperity depends absolutely and wholly 

 upon their mastery over the forces of Nature, upon their 

 intelligent apprehension of, and obedience to, the laws 

 of the creation and distribution of wealth, and of the 

 stable equilibrium of the forces of society, it is pre- 

 cisely this nation. And yet this is what these wonderful 

 people tell their sons : — " At the cost of from one to two 

 thousand pounds of our hard earned money, we devote 

 twelve of the most precious years of your lives to school. 

 There you shall toil, or be supposed to toil ; but there 

 you shall not learn one single thing of all those you will 

 most want to know, directly you leave school and enter 

 upon the practical business of life. You will in all 

 probability go into business, but you shall not know 

 Avhere, or how, any article of commerce is produced, or 

 the difference between an export or an import, or the 

 meaning of the word 'capital/ You will very likely settle 

 in a colony, but you shall not know whether Tasmania 

 is part of New South "Wales, or vice versd. 



" Very probably you may become a manufacturer, but 

 you shall not be provided with the means of under- 



