RELATIONS OF SCIENCE TO THE PUBLIC WEAL. 41 



In the United Kingdom we are just beginning to understand the 

 wisdom of Washington's farewell address to his countrymen, when he 

 said: "Promote as an object of primary importance institutions for 

 the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of 

 a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public 

 opinion should be enlightened." It was only in 1870 that our Parlia- 

 ment established a system of national primary education. Secondary 

 education is chaotic, and remains unconnected with the state, while 

 the higher education of the universities is only brought at distant in- 

 tervals under the view of the state. All great countries except Eng- 

 land have Ministers of Education, but this country has only ministers 

 who are the managers of primary schools. We are inferior even to 

 smaller countries in the absence of organized state supervision of edu- 

 cation. Greece, Portugal, Egypt, and Japan have distinct Ministers 

 of Education, and so also among our colonies have Victoria and New 

 Zealand. Gradually England is gathering materials for the establish- 

 ment of an eiBcient education minister. The Department of Science 

 and Art is doing excellent work in diffusing a taste for elementary 

 science among the working-classes. There are now about seventy- 

 eight thousand persons who annually come under the influence of its 

 science classes, while a small number of about two hundred, many of 

 them teachers, receive thorough instruction in science at the excellent 

 school in South Kensington, of which Professor Huxley is the dean. 

 I do not dwell on the work of this Government department, because 

 my object is chiefly to point out how it is that science lags in its prog- 

 ress in the United Kingdom owing to the deficient interest taken in it 

 by the middle and upper classes. The working-classes are being roused 

 from their indifference. They show this by their selection of scien- 

 tific men as candidates at the next election. Among these are Pro- 

 fessors Stuart, Roscoe, Maskelyne, and Rticker. It has its signifi- 

 cance that such a humble representative of science as myself received 

 invitations from working-class constituencies in more than a dozen of 

 the leading manufacturing towns. In the next Parliament I do not 

 doubt that a Minister of Education will be created as a nucleus round 

 which the various educational materials may crystallize in a definite 

 form. 



III. SciExcE AND Secondary Education. — Various Royal Cora- 

 missions have made inquiries and issued recommendations in regard 

 to our public and endowed schools. The commissions of 1861, 1864, 

 1868, and 1873 have expressed the strongest disapproval of the condi- 

 tion of our schools, and, so far as science is concerned, their state is 

 much the same as when the Duke of Devonshire's commission in 1873 

 reported in the following words : " Considering the increasing impor- 

 tance of science to the material interests of the country, we can not but 

 regard its almost total exclusion from the training of the upper and 

 middle classes as little less than a national misfortune." No doubt 



