ADDRESS. a 
gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be 
enlightened.’ It was only in 1870 that our Parliament established a 
system of national primary education. Secondary education is chaotic, 
and remains unconnected with the State, while the higher education of 
the universities is only brought at distant intervals under the view of the 
State. All great countries except England have Ministers of Education, 
but this country has only Ministers who are the managers of primary 
schools. We are inferior even to smaller countries in the absence of 
organised State supervision of education. Greece, Portugal, Egypt, and 
Japan have distinct Ministers of Education, and so also among our 
Colonies have Victoria and New Zealand. Gradually England is gathering 
materials for the establishment of an efficient Education Minister. The 
Department of Science and Art is doing excellent work in diffusing 
a taste for elementary science among the working classes. There are 
now about 78,000 persons who annually come under the influence of its 
science classes, while a small number of about two hundred, many of them 
teachers, receive thorough instruction in science at the excellent school 
in South Kensington of which Professor Huxley is the Dean. I do not 
dwell on the work of this Government department, because my object is 
chiefly to point out how it is that science lags in its progress in the United 
Kingdom owing to the deficient interest taken in it by the middle and 
_ upper classes. ‘The working classes are being roused from their indiffer- 
ence. They show this by their selection of scientific men as candidates at 
the next election. Among these are Professors Stuart, Roscoe, Maskelyne, 
and Riicker. It has its significance that such a humble representative of 
science as myself received invitations from working-class constituencies 
in more than a dozen of the leading manufacturing towns. In the next 
Parliament I do not doubt that a Minister of Education will be created 
as a nucleus round which the various educational materials may crystallise 
in a definite form. 
III. Science and Secondary Education. 
Various Royal Commissions have made inquiries and issued recom- 
_ mendations in regard to our public and endowed schools. The Com- 
missions of 1861, 1864, 1868, and 1873 have expressed the strongest 
4 disapproval of the condition of our schools, and, so far as science is 
concerned, their state is much the same as when the Duke of Devon- 
_ Shire’s Commission in 1873 reported in the following words :—‘ Con- 
_ sidering the increasing importance of science to the material interests of 
_ the country, we cannot but regard its almost total exclusion from the 
_ training of the upper and middle classes as little less than a national mis- 
fortune.’ No doubt there are exceptional cases and some brilliant examples 
of improvement since these words were written, but generally throughout 
the country teaching in science isa name rather than a reality. The 
Technical Commission which reported last year can only point to three 
schools in Great Britain in which science is fully and adequately taught. 
