EDITOR'S TABLE, 



385 



gdit0r^s %^yi%. 



LIBERAL EDUCATION AXD 

 DEMOCRACY. 



IN" a most thoughtful article, in 

 the Modern Education Series of 

 The Cosmopolitan, President Had- 

 ley, of Yale, remarks that the 

 conception of a liberal education 

 changes as forms of government 

 change. " It takes one shape," he 

 proceeds to say, "in a military 

 state, and quite another shape in a 

 state ruled by public opinion. In 

 the former case it will teach the 

 sterner virtues of courage and pride. 

 In the latter case it will teach re- 

 spect for law, progressiveness, and 

 human sympathy. But in either 

 case a liberal education is an edu- 

 cation for citizenship; a develop- 

 ment of those distinguishing quali- 

 ties moral, intellectual, and physical 

 by which the people are to be ruled." 

 It is a happy definition of " a 

 liberal education " to say that it 

 is " an education for citizenship." 

 From this point of view the most 

 liberally educated man will be he 

 who is educated to be a citizen of 

 the world and to feel his relation 

 not only to the present but to the 

 past, and the future as well. Comte 

 had much the same idea when he 

 taught that the moral and social 

 education of the individual was ac- 

 complished first by the family, then 

 by the state, and finally by the race. 

 In other words, the egoism of the 

 individual is first tamed by family 

 life, then broadened by political 

 life, and, lastly, humanized in the 

 full sense by conscious participa- 

 tion in the age-long progress of 

 mankind. President Hadley has 

 well chosen the qualities which he 

 says a liberal education under a 

 democracy should aim at develop- 

 ing, but we think he might with 

 much advantage have added an- 



TOL. LVI. — 30 



other. He will remember that 

 when the poet Horace would de- 

 scribe the character of a high-prin- 

 cipled citizen, a man just and firm 

 of purpose, he says that his mind is 

 shaken neither by the lowering 

 countenance of a tyrant nor by the 

 frenzy of the populace command- 

 ing vicious courses of policy. In 

 our land and time the vultus in- 

 stantis iyranni is no longer, if it 

 ever was, an object of terror, but 

 the civium ardor prava juhentium is 

 a danger, we fear, which has yet to 

 be reckoned with. 



In a state, therefore, which is 

 ruled by public opinion one of the 

 qualities which a liberal education 

 should most distinctly aim to im- 

 part is firmness to resist popular 

 pressure when exerted in a wrong 

 direction. In like manner, under 

 an aristocracy a truly liberal educa- 

 tion would not be one that would 

 tend to perpetuate in the rising 

 generation the faults of the preced- 

 ing one, or to shut out all criticism 

 of the established regime; on the 

 contrary, its tendency should be to 

 temper whatever was extreme or 

 one-sided in the views of the ruling 

 class. The liberality of an educa- 

 tion comes in just here, in opening 

 out wider views than would prob- 

 ably be acquired in actual contact 

 with private business or public af- 

 fairs. When William Pitt, while 

 Prime Minister of England, be- 

 took himself to the study of Adam 

 Smith's recently published Wealth 

 of Nations, and began to consider 

 how he could apply the enlightened 

 and philosophical views contained 

 therein to the fiscal policy of the 

 British Empire, he was converting 

 his old-fashioned liberal education 

 into a liberal education of the best 

 kind. 



