Liberal Education. 283 



prosody are made much of. On the one hand, 

 young men may graduate with signal honour, and 

 yet never know what great principles were at 

 stake in the Peloponnesian War ; while, on the 

 other hand, these same young men are taught to 

 be "ashamed of falling short of perfect knowl- 

 edge in the genders of Latin nouns, which involve 

 no principles at all, and in which a minute ac- 

 curacy can hardly be attained without a certain 

 frivolity or eccentricity of memory ! " 



Still worse, the competitive system vulgarizes 

 the mind of the student. Scholarly enthusiasm, 

 an exalted opinion of the value of knowledge, 

 faith in culture as such, " divine curiosity," in a 

 word, should be the student's incentives to la- 

 bour. These are the only motives which can ever 

 lead to any culture worthy of the name. The 

 competitive system tends to destroy these mo- 

 tives, replacing them by the vulgar desire to out- 

 shine one's companions. 



Instead of enlarging the range of the student's an- 

 ticipations, it narrows them. It makes him careless of 

 his future life, regardless of his higher interests, and 

 concentrates all his thoughts upon the paltry examina- 

 tion upon which perhaps a fellowship depends, or suc- 

 cess in some profession is supposed to depend. It is 

 well known that any one who asks himself the question, 



