Some Axioms of Corporate Education. 53 



of equipping its subjects for the business of the life of a governing an( J 

 warrior class, in the public assembly, law courts and battle-field. Music, 

 gymnastic and rhetoric were no cloister studies but, in every one, the 

 student was hardening thew and sinew of body and mind for contest in 

 various fields of activity. The Greek had no illusions about the education 

 of the peasant or slave either. He saw to it that he too was as 

 thoroughly trained as his master, but in a way suited to the particular 

 business in pottery, leather, stone, iron, silver or manuscript-making in 

 which he was to produce masterpieces which have been the despair of the 

 world to equal ; neither Stoa nor Stadium was his schoolroom, however. 

 The Greek, in short, was distinctly commonsense in his methods of 

 education, and the fact that Greek literature has become a part of 

 University curricula does not by any means bring these codes into line 

 with Greek education, any more than the fact that Latin was a sort of 

 ancient volapuk makes it by any means the best of ancient tongues for 

 drawing out the humanities. For the matter of that had Arabic, for 

 example, happened along instead we should, in our classical studies, have 

 had an infinitely richer mine of learning than the, in most departments, 

 rather poor literary remains of the Latins offer, the merit of whose 

 rhetoric, drama, verse, and history is mostly in their pale reflection of the 

 excellencies of Greek makers. 



It would, however, have brought our education system much 

 nearer into line with Greek methods of culture had we concen- 

 trated upon the cultivation or creation of a living native literature 

 instead of dead foreign ones. As it happened the Norman, by evil 

 communications in his Gaulish home, had lost touch with his own 

 native tongue and its sagas, while the Saxon, with whom he came into 

 contact in England, seems never to have had the vivacity to produce 

 much in the way of literature. Worse still, the animosity of attack and 

 reprisal and difference of religious allegiance closed out his sympathies, 

 as we have seen, from the literature which did exist, especially that of 

 the Keltic races which might have supplied the soil element so important 

 in giving vital worth to a national culture. 



Thus the way was left clear for " Learning " to come to mean 

 " Latinity " and the struggle to begin between humane instinct and polite 

 tradition which has gone on from Chaucer down to Mr. Kipling. The 

 struggle between various schools of education is just a phase of it. made 

 acute in these days by the pressing necessity of a citizenship efficient in 

 competition with other nations. The first condition for the attainment of 

 such efficiency is that the system of training should be racy — a natural 

 development of the powers natural to a race. With patience and deter- 

 mination it is possible to make a bear a dancing animal, but he'll dance 

 awkwardly however severely you train him. He is not much gifted that 

 way. You may try to make linguists of the people of South Britain and 

 have a certain modified success, but the Slav will beat him out of sight, 

 because he has the natural facility, which the mixed race we call the 

 English does not possess. The latter has other faculties quite as worthy 



r 



