340 



LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, xix 



arises from dense ignorance; the other, the advantage to the 

 community of giving capable men the chance of utilising their 

 capacity. 



The first furnishes the justification for compulsory ele- 

 mentary education. If a child is taught reading, writing, draw- 

 ing, and handiwork of some kind; the elements of mathematics, 

 physics, and history, and I should add of political economy and 

 geography; books will furnish him with everything he can pos- 

 sibly need to make him a competent citizen in any rank of life. 



If w 7 ith such a start, he has not the capacity to get all he 

 needs out of books, let him stop where he is. Blow him up with 

 intermediate education as much as you like, you will only do 

 the fellow a mischief and lift him into a place for which he has 

 no real qualification. People never will recollect, that mere 

 learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, 

 while energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn 

 and cannot be taught, are everything. 



The technical education act goes a long way to meet the 

 second claim of the State ; so far as scientific and industrial 

 capacities are concerned. In a few years there will be no reason 

 why any potential Whitworth or Faraday, in the three king- 

 doms, should not readily obtain the best education that is to 

 be had, scientific or technical. The same will hold good for Art. 

 So the question that arises seems to me to be whether the State 

 ought or ought not to do something of the same kind for Litera- 

 ture, Philosophy, History, and Philology. 



I am inclined to think not, on the ground that the univer- 

 sities and public schools ought to do this very work, and that 

 as soon as they cease to be clericalised seminaries they probably 

 will do it. 



If the present government would only give up their Irish 

 fad and bring in a bill to make it penal for any parson to hold 

 any office in a public school or university or to presume to teach 

 outside the pulpit they should have my valuable support ! 



I should not wonder if Gladstone's mind is open on the sub- 

 ject. Pity I am not sufficiently a persona grata with him to 

 offer to go to Hawarden and discuss it. 



I quite agree with you, therefore, that it will play the deuce 

 if intermediate education is fossilised as it would be by any Act 

 prepared under present influences. The most I should like to 

 see done, would be to help the youth of special literary, linguistic 

 and so forth, capacity, to get the best training in their special 

 line. 



