A LIBERAL EDUCATION 41 



classes who can read aloud decently, or who can put his 

 thoughts on paper in clear and grammatical (to say nothing 

 of good or elegant) language. The "ciphering" of the lower 

 schools expands into elementary mathematics in the higher ; 

 into arithmetic, with a little algebra, a little Euclid. But 5 

 I doubt if one boy in five hundred has ever heard the explana- 

 tion of a rule of arithmetic, or knows his Euclid otherwise 

 than by rote. 



Modern geography, modern history, modern literature, the 

 English language, as a language; the whole circle of theio 

 sciences, physical, moral, and social, are even more completely 

 ignored in the higher than in the lower schools. Up till 

 within a few years back, a boy might have passed through 

 any one of the great public schools with the greatest distinc- 

 tion and credit, and might never so much as have heard of one 15 

 of the subjects I have just mentioned. He might never have 

 heard that the earth goes round the sun ; that England under- 

 went a great revolution in 1688, and France another in 1789, 

 that there once lived certain notable men called Chaucer, 

 Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller. The first 20 

 might be a German and the last an Englishman for anything 

 he could tell you to the contrary. And as for science, the 

 only idea the word would suggest to his mind would be dex- 

 terity in boxing. 



I have said that this was the state of things a few years 25 

 back, for the sake of the few righteous who are to be found 

 among the educational cities of the plain. 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 mentioned. 30 



Now let us pause to consider this wonderful state of 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 



