50 SELECTED ESSAYS FROM LAY SERMONS 



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 precisely the middle 

 class 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 cr 

 Rome, we should study with avidity — it is the English. If 

 there be a people which, during the same period, has devel- 

 oped a remarkable 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 intelligent 

 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 thousand 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 want to know directly you leave school 

 and enter upon the practical business of life. You will in 

 all probability go into business, but you shall not know 

 where, or how, any article of commerce is produced, or the 

 difference between an export or an import, or the meaning 

 of the word 'capital.' You will very likely settle in a 

 colony, but you shall not know whether Tasmania is part of 

 New South Wales, or vice versa. 



"Very probably you may become a manufacturer, but 

 you shall not be provided with the means of understanding 

 the working of one of your own steam-engines, or the nature 



