30 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 
true practice of stagnation. I do not bid you cease to lay 
mains, to erect gasholders, or to make gas-fires, till we, in the 
august seclusion of our learned halls, have worked out the 
whole true science of heating and illumination. 
But while conceding all this, we have to remember that it is 
man’s prerogative, and it should be his delight, to possess, to 
use, and to extend the faculty of reason ; to increase his power 
over the forces of Nature, and to constrain them to his service 
by a deliberate, a carefully organized, and an unceasing culti- 
vation of the human mind. . 
The true barbarian is the man who is content to do, and 
does not want to know. And yet how many men are there 
not, whom no one could call barbarians, who look upon our 
organized system of education with a degree of distrust that 
increases in intensity as their survey passes upwards from 
the elementary school to the university? This, in my 
judgement, is a most serious question of the day. 
I have long held the opinion that education in England 
is afflicted, from top to bottom, with an utterly exagge- 
rated fear of what is called ‘useful knowledge’. In that fear 
much of a vital kind has been left undone, and much 
has been given in the name of education which helps 
its possessor neither to truer wisdom, better work, nobler 
conduct, nor to greater happiness. The world cries out for 
educational bread, and it receives only too often an academic 
stone. 
I do not know that I am behind other men in the delight 
I feel in abstract studies; and I can honestly say it is but 
rarely I envy another man his larger share of loaves and fishes. 
But knowledge gathered for what is sometimes called its own 
sake, and treasured for its own sake, seems to me in great 
danger of unwholesomeness, and a learned man who is merely 
a’man of erudition, as likely-to prove a mischief as he. is 
certain to be a bore. 
