Liberal Education. 281 



worth of the competitive system now in use as a 

 wholesome incentive to the average young man 

 who does not passionately love knowledge for its 

 own sake ? Does it tend to widen and render 

 more thorough the education which he will get at 

 the university ? Experience is beginning to tell 

 us plainly that the reverse is the case. The edu- 

 cation of young men in the English universities 

 is narrowed and rendered more superficial by the 

 competitive system. Whatever results may be 

 brought forth by comparing the lists of great 

 scholars which England and the Continental na- 

 tions can respectively furnish, there can be no 

 doubt that the average college graduate in France 

 or Germany attains to a far higher degree of 

 knowledge and culture than the average graduate 

 of Oxford or Cambridge. He does not ordinarily 

 manifest that preternatural ignorance of every- 

 thing except the classics which characterizes the 

 English student. And his study of the classics 

 has usually enriched him with a more or less val- 

 uable stock of literary, critical, and philosophical 

 ideas, which the Englishman, absorbed in verse 

 writing and prize-getting, has never caught sight 

 of. He knows a greater number of authors, and 

 he knows them to more profit. Now for this su- 

 perficiality and narrowness of English education 



