326 RETIREMENT, TO 1897 : OF BOOKS, ETC. 



Germany more by a war than would any other nation in 

 Europe. 



By conviction of travel in our great dependencies he was 

 somewhat of an Imperialist before the word became a political 

 shibboleth ; he felt strongly the duties, and sometimes the 

 compensations, we owed to these dependencies, and to the 

 very end of his career was keenly concerned in the aid which 

 scientific botany could lend to their comfort, health, and 

 prosperity. His own active share in this was not small. It 

 was very much due to Kew in his time that Jamaica was 

 recovered from bankruptcy, and afterwards he kept in close 

 touch with the work of the West Indian Governors and their 

 botanical advisers, and was especially rejoiced at the issue 

 of the Sugar Commission by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain when 

 Colonial Secretary. 



Education, again, was no party matter with him. Ignorance 

 and the indiscipline of ignorance are the greatest enemies 

 of the State. State education * was necessary, but let it 

 be appropriate. The farm-hand must not be trained merely 

 as a clerk for town life. Neither should boys of the wealthier 

 classes be restricted to a literary education, for which at 

 least half of them were unsuited. These and similar points, 

 such as the course taken by the higher education of women, 

 he discusses freely in his letters to Mr. La Touche, who as a 

 school manager in his Shropshire village was much exercised 

 over the working of popular education. 



In the case of his elder sons he had tried to avoid, so far as 

 was possible in the existing arrangements of the public schools, 

 the extreme dose of classical instruction ; but the modern side 

 was not then organised as it is now, and the newer schools which 

 tried to meet the new demand did no good because they taught 

 the new subjects in the old bookish way. It is only a minority 

 of boys who are naturally adapted to reap the full benefit 

 of this highly specialised form of literary education, and he 



1 As to the State's attitude towards religious teaching, ' I have always,' he 

 writes, ' been for a purely secular State Education, affording at the same time 

 encouragement to religious teaching by private effort. ' ( 1 896 . ) 



