1 66 LIFE AND EXPERIENCES CHAP. 



"why" must be constantly on their lips; they did 

 not accept a statement without some kind of proof; 

 the proof might be in some degree incomplete or even 

 erroneous, but at any rate it was the best they could 

 get at the time. Science was nothing but systematised 

 common sense. I added that it would ill become me 

 speaking in Liverpool, to decry in any way the benefit 

 both of historical and literary studies, but at the same 

 time I believed that all education ought not to be 

 purely literary, and that it was a mistake that scholar- 

 ship was the only road to culture. In speaking of the 

 science classes I said that Government had been 

 perfectly right in beginning this system of spreading 

 wide the knowledge of and interest in scientific sub- 

 jects ; that it had been well said that Faraday, the 

 bookbinder's apprentice, was the greatest of Sir 

 Humphry Davy's discoveries ; and that if in the 

 course of a generation they succeeded in rescuing 

 one Faraday, the country would be amply repaid, 

 not only for all the work but for all the money that 

 the nation had spent upon him. 



It is to be remembered that at that time such classes 

 as these were the only means of a scientific education 

 in Liverpool, and many years elapsed before the 

 foundation in that city of a university college which 

 has since become a university. 



The benefaction of ,100,000 by a comparatively 

 unknown Manchester merchant, John Owens, in the 

 year of grace 1848, for the foundation of a college in 

 that great city of manufacturing industry, but then 

 of little intellectual activity, was a most remarkable 

 occurrence. It was the beginning of a movement for 

 the higher education of a university type among the 

 masses which has led to results of a national import- 

 ance that cannot be overrated and of which the end 



