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they will, yet the poet Gray, e.g. lives, and while the English 

 race endures, will live, on the strength of some dozen illumined 

 pages. It is the deadly triumph of the semi-competent mass 

 that it has already more than half imposed on us the sterilising 

 belief that quantity is everything, and quality scarcely any- 

 thing. It has extended instruction at the price of making it 

 shallow and repetitive ; it has multiplied workers at the ex- 

 pense of the product : it has popularised the sempiternal dul- 

 ness of a plethora of identical machine-made commodities ; it 

 has enthroned the plutocrat above the thinker, and this, 

 despite Mulcaster's withering dictum, " of all the means to 

 make a gentleman it is the most vile to be made for money." 

 Faguet quotes Nietzsche's " Modern education consists in 

 smothering the exceptional in favour of the normal," but he 

 had already said it implicitly himself when he pleaded for 

 quality before quantity. 



While France, with her political ostracism and her rigid 

 examination system, " cuts down the tall ears of corn," England 

 achieves a like result with less forethought. We produce 

 incompetence largely by educational chaos, which in its turn 

 springs from our profound indifference. It may seem incredible, 

 but it is true, that about a dozen years ago the editor of one 

 of the foremost English monthlies returned an article on the 

 Training of Teachers with the remark that it was well written 

 and interesting, but " unfortunately education is of no public 

 interest." Could he have put the truth more succinctly ? 



Lastly, as we seek to lay M. Faguet 's lessons to our own 

 hearts, we must reckon for our national passion for compromise. 

 Despite all our weaknesses, faults, and even turpitudes, it 

 would be difficult to draw quite so definitely black a picture of 

 our own incompetence, as M. Faguet 's relentless pencil has 

 limned of our great Ally, a picture, however, which her risor- 

 gimento has gone some way already towards obliterating. But if 

 we are not so deliberate, we are as wrong. The English love of 

 compromise, so alien to the Gallic genius, so genuinely stupid 

 as it demonstrably is in theory, and often so irritating in prac- 

 tice, yet accounts, in some sort, for the nation's mysterious 

 fortune in triumphing over those predictable calamities which, 

 in all logic and sense, should follow on our vagueness, and not 

 least on our inveterate habit of trying to do two opposite 

 things at once, and of entrusting expert direction in one sphere 



