716 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 
eagles be gathered together,’ so where the emoluments have been, thither 
do the cleverest students concentrate their intellectual forces. 
The ambition of the ablest boys has been inevitably and exclusively 
concentrated on a single line of study, and (as often happens in the minds 
of the young) other no less humane but entirely unendowed departments of 
human knowledge have been laughed down and despised. Opprobrious 
epithets even have been bestowed on the study of the natural sciences, while 
those modern linguistic achievements which opened the door to the treasures 
of French and German literature are still nothing accounted of in the great 
schools of England. 
But (more marvellous than all) even the scientific acquisition of and 
familiarity with the literature of the mother tongue have been entirely 
neglected, because no room could be found for it in a time-table, three- 
quarters of which is confined for the great mass of boy students in the 
historic schools of England (whatever their tastes and capabilities) to the 
exclusive study of the grammar, literature, and composition in the 
languages of ancient Greece and Rome. And the particular methods 
pursued in this confined curriculum have rendered the course more 
straitened still. The acquisition of the literatures of the two dead 
languages and of the great thoughts buried with them have given place to 
a meticulous study of the subtleties of scholarship, and students are taught 
to wanton in the abnormalities of the words and phrases in which those 
literatures were enshrined, so that in the mind of the classical scholar the 
form has become, or at any rate became till quite lately, more important 
than the substance. 
Nor is this all. Those who cannot find any stomach for such drenching 
doses of medizval learning are actually driven away prematurely as lost 
souls from those moss-grown seats of learning, which we acclaim as the 
great public schools of England; and, with moral characters only half- 
fledged, have either been condemned to the limbo of private tuition or sent 
as ‘submerged tenths’ to find, or lose, their fortunes in the great depen- 
dencies and dominions of the Empire like that in which I am speaking 
to-day. There has been no serious attempt made till the twentieth century 
by the leaders of our best-known places of secondary education to discover 
the bents and aptitudes of the boys committed to their charge and to give 
them any educational chance, if they have not possessed that particular 
kind of perception which could find its way through the subtleties of a 
Euripides or a Horace. Boys have been entirely denied the opportunity 
of showing their mental powers in any other sphere of learning. How 
many unsung Hampdens or mute inglorious Miltons of mechanical genius 
have been lost to the world by the non-elastic systems prevailing (even now) 
in our best-known educational institutions, is a tremendous responsibility 
for conscientious trainers of the young to contemplate and atone for. 
In how many, or rather how few, places of learning in England, at the 
present time, can the establishment of scientifically equipped carpentering 
and engineering shops be found, in which a young mind which finds it im- 
possible to digest the crude morsels of Latin and Greek grammar can find 
resource and development? In how few schools has the connection between 
mind and hand and eye been scientifically trained? Such establishments, 
even in the first decade of the twentieth century, can be counted on the 
fingers of one hand. 
And yet, in spite of it all, the surprising fact remains—a fact which 
speaks volumes for the innate vigour and originality of the English race— 
that, out of the stream of young men which flows out annually from our 
public schools * and colleges, so many accommodate themselves as happily 
_. + It should be noted in the forefront of this address that the expression 
“public schools’ is used throughout in its English (not in its more proper and 
American) sense—i.e., as the educational centres of the upper classes 
