A Liberal Education 61 



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. 5 

 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 men- 

 tioned. 



Now let us pause to consider this wonderful state of 10 

 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 15 

 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 20 

 study with avidity it is the English. If there be a people 

 which, during the same period, has developed a re- 

 markable 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 in- 25 

 telligent 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: "At the cost of from one to two thou- 30 

 .sand 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 



