in.] A LIBERAL EDUCATION. 37 



not know whether Tasmania is part of New South Wales, or 

 vice versa. 



&quot; Very probably you may become a manufacturer, but you 

 shall not be provided with the means of understanding the 

 working of one of your own steam-engines, or the nature of the 

 raw products you employ ; and, when you are asked to buy a patent, 

 you shall not have the slightest means of judging whether the 

 inventor is an impostor who is contravening the elementary prin 

 ciples of science, or a man who will make you as rich as Croesus, 



&quot; You will very likely get into the House of Commons. You 

 will have to take your share in making laws which may prove a 

 blessing or a curse to millions of men. But you shall not hear 

 one word respecting the political organization of your country ; 

 the meaning of the controversy between free-traders and pro 

 tectionists shall never have been mentioned to you ; you 

 shall not so much as know that there are such things as 

 economical laws. 



&quot; The mental power which will be of most importance in your 

 daily life will be the power of seeing things as they are without 

 regard to authority ; and of drawing accurate general conclusions 

 from particular facts. But at school and at college you shall 

 know of no source of truth but authority ; nor exercise your 

 reasoning faculty upon anything but deduction from that which 

 is laid down by authority. 



&quot; You will have to weary your soul with work, and many a 

 time eat your bread in sorrow and in bitterness, and you shall 

 not have learned to take refuge in the great source of pleasure 

 without alloy, the serene resting-place for worn human nature, 

 the world of art.&quot; 



Said I not rightly that we are a wonderful people ? I am 

 quite prepared to allow, that education entirely devoted to these 

 omitted subjects might not be a completely liberal education. 

 But is an education which ignores them all, a liberal education ? 

 Nay, is it too much to say that the education which should 

 embrace these subjects and no others, would be a real education, 

 though an incomplete one; while an education which omits 



