$< ——— 
DECEMBER 31, 1903] 
NATURE 
21 
but there is a new crop of them every year. The want of 
education of these men is very harmful to the country, and 
Huxley, Lockyer, Armstrong, Ayrton, Magnus, and other 
educational experts have written at great length upon the 
subject over and over again. If I thought that the ex- 
pression technical education were understood at Oxford, I 
might, perhaps, try to ventilate this part of my subject, 
but it is quite misunderstood, and as these writers have 
failed to make any impression I think it better to let it 
alone. 
Fifty years ago the Prince Consort started many good 
things agoing, and probably the most important was the 
Science and Art Department, the science classes of which 
under Sir John Donnelly forty years ago, greatly developed 
by Sir William Abney since, have given a better education 
in natural science to hundreds of thousands of poor boys 
than Oxford gives even now. I feel sure that it is this 
that has saved our industries from the jealous, hungry, per- 
sistent scientific foreigner. Wherever there is an owner of 
works whose common sense triumphs over his defective 
education, he gives a free hand to a manager who has been 
taught in these classes or in one of the technical colleges 
now springing up. These technical colleges are the natural 
outcome of Sir John Donnelly’s work. I am glad to think 
that their methods are far removed from the soul-destroying 
methods of Germany; they are gradually becoming more 
and more perfect as British institutions. They illustrate the 
British experimental method of tackling an important 
problem. The one bar to their success is that the boys 
from all the schools of this country, primary and secondary, 
but particularly from those schools which are more immedi- 
ately under Oxford influence, are quite unfitted by 
their school training to benefit by technical college teach- 
ing. The time of the professors and instructors is greatly 
wasted in correcting evils that are due to the schools. I 
think on the whole, however, that middle class England is 
slowly waking up to the importance of education. Every 
Kind of education she has seen in the past has seemed to 
ther not worth striving for, and her sleep has been very 
sound and very prolonged. But a kind of education is now 
being exhibited to her which seems as if it might give a fine 
sort of mental training, and as soon as middle class England 
sees this matter clearly as a thing worth having, the rule of 
old Oxford over many of our schools will cease. For Oxford 
thas not merely induced neglect of science; she has been its 
active enemy pretending friendship. What schoolmaster 
from Oxford is there who does not see his existence 
threatened by science? Consequently, middle class England 
has been paying large premiums with its sons and yet see- 
ing them fail to obtain employment, whereas board school 
‘boys are successful enough in reaching lucrative positions, 
although they have paid no premiums, and have been earn- 
ing wages all their lives. 
It is not the schoolmasters, it is the engineers who have 
been educating England. The engineer is always thinking 
of utility, of the value of time, of the fact that a man has 
only one life in which to do what good it is possible for him 
to do. So he reads novels and poetry and history ; he enjoys 
painting and music; he travels and sees other people, other 
nations and their monuments. He cultivates and exercises 
‘the whole of his mental and emotional machinery so that 
‘he may become more perfect as a student ot what Goethe 
‘called *‘ the living mantle of God.” 
Everybody speaks of how the engineer has created what 
is called modern civilisation, has given luxuries of al] kinds 
‘to the poorest people, has provided engines to do all the 
slave labour of the world, has given leisure and freedom 
from drudgery, and chances of refinement and high thought 
and high emotion to thousands instead of units. But few 
seem to see that the engineer is educating the imagination 
and poetic faculty of England. Every unit of the popula- 
tion is becoming familiar with scientific ideas, for he can 
hardly take a step without becoming acquainted with 
romantic steam engines and electromotors, with telegraphs 
and telephones and steamships, with drainage and water- 
works, with railways, electric tramways and motor- 
cars. Every shop window is filled with the products of 
engineering enterprise. It is getting to be rather difficult 
for people to have any belief in evil spirits and witchcraft, 
and this is probably the most enormous intellectual stride 
NO. 1783, VOL. 69] 
that the great body of the human race has ever made in any 
half-century. It has been made in spite of the persistent 
opposition of Oxford. 
It is due to Oxford that the interest taken in natural 
science by the richer classes, by men of expensive education, 
does not seem to be much greater now than it was thirty 
years ago. Some of them are called scientific if they go 
to hear lectures illustrated with fireworks, or if they 
assume as their eyes glance over a quasi-scientific article 
in a magazine that they are taking an interest in science. 
But among the less rich classes, the people who work with 
their brains, there is an interest now in science which is 
increasing in amount by the compound interest law. This 
new interest is recognised in the fine idea of Sir Norman 
Lockyer, so well talked about this summer, to form a great 
British Guild of Science the members of which might in- 
clude almost every adult man or woman of brains in our 
Empire. His object is to organise the efforts now being 
made everywhere to interest people in science, to develop 
education in scientific method in every school in the country. 
I feel sure that this Guild will some time be formed success- 
fully, and that it will do enormous service to the world. 
Its being successful in our own time depends mainly, I 
think, on the energy and persistence of Sir Norman Lockyer 
himself, and he certainly is an energetic man. May I ask 
if Oxford means, in her place of fancied security, merely to 
look“on at great scientific movements? Or may it even be 
that she will use her autocratic authority to put all these 
movements down? Will she, in her pride, champion 
another lost cause? Or has she a sufficient number of 
young able men rich in the sort of enthusiasm possessed 
by William of Waynflete or William of Wykeham, by the 
pupils of Grocyn who did not lecture .o Erasmus, or of Colet, 
the Dean of Eastminster. Just think of it you Oxford men, 
you who have entered on such an enormous heritage, you 
who have been supposed to stand for centuries at the head of 
the intellect of England. Are you now going to stand 
aside or are you going to oppose the greatest intellectual 
movement that has ever taken place in this world—or are 
you going to take your natural places in the foremost files 
of time? 
If Oxford taught science through a student’s own re- 
search, if Oxford gave a broad general culture suitable for 
all sorts of men of all sorts of minds, there is hardly any 
middle class man in England who would not be glad to 
send his son to Oxford. Even now the prestige of Oxford 
and the social advantages that it offers overweigh in the 
mind of many a parent all the intellectual disadvantages. 
A man must be very impudent or very bold, or he must 
have much of the martyr in him, to criticise corporations 
like those which exist in Oxford. He must feel his cause 
to be infinitely right, because Oxford men have always been 
famous for their command of rhetorical weapons. There 
is hardly a man worthy the name of scholar in Oxford 
who has not a better command of such weapons than I. 
Think of the time when Oxford had fallen from her high 
estate in scholarship, so that Boyle and Atterbury had the 
same sort of ignorance of Greek which Oxford men now 
have of natural science; yet were these impostors so clever 
that they set all the world laughing at Bentley, the greatest 
scholar of a hundred years. Am I to be the fresh victim 
of the Bull of Phalaris? 
Call it impudence if you please, but Oxford ought to be 
told what some outsiders think in this matter. She that 
represents all that is best in England, does indeed in some 
respects represent what is worst. Every young Oxford man 
is like a knight who sees only how beautiful is the lady 
whose colour he wears, and he forgets that the lovely body 
does not always cover the soul of Una; sometimes it hides 
the evil witch Duessa. 
I do not address average men. 
young men whose names are known now only in 
Oxford, whose names will in the future be carried 
on trumpet blasts over the world and for long time to come. 
Surely you aim at the study of those great eternal truths 
about man and nature which are hidden from the common 
view by prejudices; and surely you know that Oxford pre- 
judices, however consoling they may be to your self-respect, 
however secure they keep you now from adverse criticism, 
are after all mere formulas and of only limited application, 
both in time and place. 
I speak to those clever 
