NOTES 313 



overestimate this amount by some hundreds, though the correct figure had been 

 published by myself before and since this speech. I also appeared to say that 

 Greek and Latin were compulsory subjects in the present-day Sandhurst and 

 Woolwich examinations. They are not, they are optional, though heavily baited 

 with marks. What I had intended to say was that at the time when most of our 

 general officers were educating themselves the classics were compulsory. Latin, at 

 any rate, remained a compulsory subject down to the period before the war (1914). 



I endeavoured to set these matters right in my Nineteenth Century article 

 for July, but here again there was mischance. In my MS. I stated the marks 

 allotted at Sandhurst and Woolwich for Freehand Drawing at 400. My figure 4 

 was mistaken by the printer for 2 (200). For various reasons the Editor was 

 unable to send me proofs, and so the article has gone forth with that mistake — 200 

 marks instead of 400 (the correct figure). 



On the strength of these three mistakes, in reality of no importance to the 

 arguments advanced, certain writers in the Press attempted to pour scorn on 

 the whole of my presentation of this subject — the subject being, "Are those 

 persons of the middle and upper classes from whom are drawn, with very few 

 exceptions, all the important servants of the State in Military and Civil Service 

 careers, properly educated in their boyhood and youth for the work they may be 

 called upon to perform in such careers ? " Although the question has only 

 interested the public since the beginning of 191 5, it is, as a matter of fact, one on 

 which I have written in books and articles at different times between 1903 and 

 the present day. 



Then, if the allusion to these three inaccuracies in my statements were not 

 thought sufficient to confound my arguments, certain schoolmasters proceeded to 

 rate me indignantly or loftily for having any opinions on education at all. I was 

 informed that not having been a schoolmaster by training, still more, not having 

 passed through Oxford or Cambridge as a student and graduate, I was quite in- 

 capable of forming any opinion as to how my fellow-countrymen and women should 

 be educated. I am not content to sit down under such an unfair attempt at 

 disqualification. The assets as educationalists possessed by the clerical or lay 

 schoolmasters who thus attempt to brush my opinions on one side, wherever I 

 have been able to look them up in books of reference, appear to be the con- 

 ventional attendance at inefficient preparatory schools and inefficient public 

 schools followed by the stereotyped courses in Classics, Mathematics, Greek, 

 Roman and miswritten English (not British) History at one or other of the great 

 universities, together with some dabbling in a few really useless subjects, such as 

 Logic. In most cases it has seemed, even, as though their Mathematics (which as 

 a subject for education I have no wish to attack) have been inapplicable on their 

 part to any useful purpose. As regards their own country they have bicycled or, 

 in later years, motored over a good proportion of England, they have seen some- 

 thing of Scotland, and perhaps had a peep at Wales. But as a rule they know 

 nothing of the Channel Islands or of Man, and scarcely any one of them (not of 

 Irish birth) has been to Ireland. Their foreign travel has been limited for the 

 most part to visiting Belgium, the Rhine, Switzerland, North Italy, and Paris. 



I, though I have studied both at Oxford and Cambridge at different periods 

 of my life, have never been through those universities as a student. Yet both 

 have helped me in different ways from an early period of my life onwards in 

 the sciences on which I have chiefly written ; and one of them— Cambridge — con- 

 ferred on me the honorary degree of Doctor of Science as far back as 1902. I 

 have had the usual education at small and large preparatory schools, and have 



