“a 
68 THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN’S WORK 
degrees of dilution, for all classes of the community throughout 
the length and breadth of the land. I have heard it alleged 
that this dominance of what are called classical studies is. 
quite as much due to the former practical necessity of learning 
Latin, because it was the common tongue of the learned 
professions, as to the intrinsic merits of the language and of 
_ the humanizing literature that it enshrines. 
The fact that the education of this country has been so long 
dominated by the interests of the learned professions, seems 
to me to account for a good deal, and, amongst other things, 
for the want of sympathy with education which has character- 
ized the average Englishman outside the professions in question. 
Attempts to add to education or to alter it in the interest of 
those who are engaged in other occupations have been made 
mainly outside the old universities, and have produced a new 
educational movement which, instead of being merely supple- 
mentary to the ancient order of things, has come to be at 
some points in antagonism to it, and given rise to mischievous 
attempts to set one kind of learning above another. 
The fact is, that the great change which took place in the 
conditions under which the practical arts are or may be 
pursued was not accompanied by simultaneous changes in the 
world of education. The change that I allude to is this, that 
whilst at the beginning of the nineteenth century the practical 
arts were little more than crafts, at the beginning of the 
twentieth century we find that they have an intellectual basis. 
The laws of nature are not new, and industry has always had 
to conform to them, but the revelation of these laws, their 
bearing upon industrial operations, their intimate relation to 
success and failure—these are matters of new knowledge, and 
result from the marvellous intellectual achievements of that 
century which posterity will surely know as the golden age 
of science, 
In my dictionary I find a profession defined as ‘a calling 
