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 



