184 THE IDEALS OF A SCIENCE SCHOOL 



they were founded have faded into shadows, to permit 

 the hope that any amount of negative experience will 

 bring about a reformation in the matter we are now 

 considering. It is solely to a growing conviction of 

 the necessity of larger and wiser instruction of our 

 governing classes, if they are to remain our governors, 

 that we must look as the source of any beneficial 

 change." 



The instinct of self-preservation, to which Lord 

 Houghton appealed, is one of those primitive instincts 

 which are weakened by security and protection from 

 the struggle for existence. What neither it, nor any 

 amount of negative experience, was able in fifty years 

 to accomplish has been accomplished by the last five 

 years' bitter positive experience, which nearly made 

 of us just one more of those flagrant examples which 

 the history of the human mind affords. Since Lord 

 Houghton's day the further operation for fifty years 

 of the causes which he deplored, has made the 

 necessity, or even the desirability of preserving our 

 governing classes, if they are to remain our governors, 

 a question of relatively small importance. But the 

 necessity of preserving the nation if it is to remain a 

 nation has become obvious to the remotest inhabitant 

 of our wide-flung Empire. There is therefore every 

 hope that the unholy combination against science in 

 our universities has done its worst, and that once 

 more, as at the Renaissance, the love of truth for its 

 own sake and the enlargement of the boundaries of 

 knowledge, the present ideals of science in other 

 words, will again dominate our universities and 

 schools, and through them all classes and conditions 

 of the people. 



It has become a question, no longer of the issue 

 at stake, but merely of the means by which the 

 necessary changes are to be effected. There is a 

 widespread feeling that within a few years we shall 



