ADDRESS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 135 



education, while it opens the way for the indefinite strength- 

 ening of any special capabilities with which he may be gifted. 

 In a country like this, where most men have to carve out 

 their own fortunes and devote themselves early t6 the prac- 

 tical affairs of life, comparatively few can hope to pursue 

 their studies up to, still less beyond, the age of manhood. 

 But it is of vital importance to the welfare of the community 

 that those who are relieved from the need of making a liveli- 

 hood, and still more, those who are stirred by the divine 

 impulses of intellectual thirst or artistic genius, should be 

 enabled to devote themselves to the higher service of their 

 kind, as centres of intelligence, interpreters of Nature, or 

 creators of new forms of beauty. And it is the function of 

 a university to furnish such men with the means of becom- 

 ing that which it is their privilege and duty to be. To this 

 end the university need cover no ground foreign to that 

 occupied by the elementary school. Indeed it cannot; for 

 the elementary instruction which I have referred to embraces 

 all the kinds of real knowledge and mental activity possible 

 to man. The university can add no new departments of 

 knowledge, can offer no new fields of mental activity; but 

 what it can do is to intensify and specialise the instruction 

 in each department. Thus literature and philology, repre- 

 sented in the elementary school by English alone, in the uni- 

 versity will extend over the ancient and modern languages. 

 History, which, like charity, best begins at home, but, like 

 charity, should not end there, will ramify into anthropology, 

 archaeology, political history, and geography, with the history 

 of the growth of the human mind and of its products in the 

 shape of philosophy, science, and art. And the university 

 will present to the student libraries, museums of antiquities, 

 collections of coins, and the like, which will efficiently sub- 

 serve these studies. Instruction in the elements of social 



