716 REPORT— 1902. 



in sucli a college as this can see excellent specimens (sometimes several in one town) 

 in Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Notting- 

 ham, Edinburgh, and other great cities. There the fortunate manufacturers have 

 given many hundreds of thousands of pounds for instruction in applied science 

 <, engineering). In America the equipment of such schools is much more thorough, 

 and there are large staffs of teachers, for fortunate Americans have contributed tens 

 •of millions of pounds for this kind of assistance to the rising generation. Germany 

 and Switzerland compete with America in such preparation for supremacy in 

 manufacture and engineering, and nearly every country in the world is more and 

 more recognising its importance as they see the great inventions of Englishmen 

 like Faraday and Perkin and Hughes and Swan developed almost altogether in 

 those countries which believe in education. Even one hundred thousand pounds 

 ■would provide Queen's College, Belfast, with the equipment of an engineering 

 school worthy of its traditions and position, and Belfast is a city in which many 

 large business fortunes have been made. 



It is interesting to note that the present arrangements of the Royal University 

 of Ireland, with which this College is affiliated, are such that most ot the successful 

 graduates in engineering of Queen's University would now be debarred from 

 taking the degree. Even in London University, Latin is not a compulsory subject 

 for degrees in science ; Ireland has taken a step backwards towards the Middle 

 Ages at the very time when other countries are stepping forward. 



Well-equipped schools of applied science are getting to be numerous, but I am 

 6orry to say that only a few of the men who leave them every year are really 

 likely to become good engineers. The most important reason for this is that the 

 students who enter them come usually from the public schools; they cannot write 

 English ; they know nothing of English subjects; they do not care to read any- 

 thing except the sporting news in the daily papers ; they cannot compute ; they 

 know nothing of natural science ; in fact, they are quite deficient in that kind of 

 general education which every man ought to have. 



I am not sure that such ignorant boys would not benefit more by entering 

 works at once than by entering a great engineering school. They cannot follow 

 the College courses of instruction at all, in spite of having passed the entrance 

 examination by cramming. Whereas after a while they do begin to understand 

 what goes on in a workshop ; and if they have the true engineer's spirit, their 

 workshop observation will greatly correct the faults due to stupid schoolwork.' 



Perhaps I had better state plainly my views as to what general education is 

 best for the average English boy. The public schools of England teach English 

 through Latin, a survival of the time when only special boys were taught at all, 

 and when there was only one language in which people wrote. Now the average 

 boy is also taught Latin, and when he leaves school for the army or any other 

 pursuit open to average boys he cannot write a letter, he cannot construct a 

 grammatical sentence, he cannot describe anything he has seen. The public- 

 school curriculum is always growing, and it is never subtracted from or rearranged. 

 There is one subject which ordinary schoolmasters can teach well — Latin.* 



' When I was young I remember that there were many agricultural colleges in 

 Ireland; they have all but one been failures. Why? Because the entering pupils 

 were not prepared by early education to understand the instruction ; this had done 

 as much as possible to unfit them. 



- Only one subject — Latin — is really educational in our schools. I do not mean 

 that the average boy reads any Latin author after he leaves school, or knows any 

 Latin at all ten years after he leaves school. I do not mean that his Latin helps 

 him even slightly in learning any modern language, for he is always found to be 

 ludicrously ignorant of French or German, even after an elaborate course of instruc- 

 tion in these languages. I do not mean that his Latin helps him in studying English, 

 for he can hardly write a sentence without error. I do not mean that it makes him fond 

 of literature, for of ancient literature or history he never has any knowledge except 

 that Caesar wrote a book for the third form, and on English literature his mind is a 

 blank. JSut I do mean that as the ordinary public-school master is really able to give 

 a boy easy mental exercises through the study of Latin, this subject is in quite a 



