SECTION L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 
PRESIDENT OF THE Section.—Rev. H. B. Gray, D.D. 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 26. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
The Educational Factors of Imperialism. 
Amone all civilised races and in all epochs of the world’s history there has 
existed an inveterate belief that the particular age in which men live is 
fundamentally distinct from those that have preceded it. 
Even in the most stagnant periods the illusion has prevailed that the 
present day is a period of flux and movement more or less organic, and as 
such either to be welcomed or to be deplored. 
Notoriously difficult, however, as it is to gauge the temper of an age 
while we live in its midst, yet the phenomena in England at the beginning 
of the twentieth century seem so unmistakably marked, that even a super- 
ficial thinker can hardly fail to recognise the spheres in which the symptoms 
of change and unrest are clearly operating. They are surely in these two 
—the sphere of education and the sphere of Imperial sentiment. 
It may not appear inapposite, therefore, if, meeting as we do in this city 
_of phenomenal growth and infinite enterprise, our thoughts were to be 
directed in my inaugural address on the Science of Education towards 
discovering what may be either called the Imperial factors in education, or 
conversely, and perhaps more properly, the educational factors in 
Imperialism. 
It may be perhaps safely said in this great Dominion what might 
possibly be disputed in the academic groves of our ancient English univer- 
sities, that there was no width of educational outlook within our own little 
island until the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. 
The only strongholds of learning which presumed to give the lead to 
English secondary education were to be found on the banks of the Isis and 
the Cam. In these antique, I hesitate to say antiquated, fastnesses, the 
‘ grand old fortifying classical curriculum’ was, till lately, regarded as the 
main, if not the only, highroad to educational salvation. They preserved, 
indeed they preserve to this day, almost the same entrance bars against 
admission to their thresholds as existed in pre-Reformation days. And, 
conformably with the pursuit of these ideal studies, the vast mass of their 
emoluments were, and still are, appropriated to the pursuit of the ancient 
models of education. 
The result of this monopoly on the lower rungs of the educational ladder 
has been obvious, and, to a scientific thinker, lamentable. The curricula 
of the Public Secondary schools have been narrowed, or rather have never 
been widened coincidently with the development of new spheres of know- 
ledge and enterprise. The students in those institutions have been 
dominated from above, for just as ‘where the carcase is, there will the 
