36 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [in. 



the contrary. And as for science, the only idea the word would 

 suggest to his mind would be dexterity in boxing. 



I have said that this was the state of things a few years back, 

 for the sake of the few righteous who are to be found among the 

 educational cities of the plain. But I would not have you too 

 sanguine about the result, if you sound the minds of the existing 

 generation of public schoolboys, on such topics as those I have 

 mentioned. 



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 Rome, 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 precisely this nation. 

 And yet this is what these wonderful people tell their sons : 

 &quot; 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 where, 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 



