594. TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L 
to become a great writer, a great philosopher, a great politician, a ruler of men. 
One of the curses of intellectual England is due to schoolmasters keeping 
men at school and treating them as boys to the age of twenty or twenty-one. 
They take scholarships as stall-fed cattle take prizes at agricultural shows. 
Our famous writers had, like Burns, no school education, or else only a short 
school education. Boys went to the University too early after the Renaissance, 
and Bacon entered Cambridge at the age of thirteen. Shakespeare, thank God, 
was only at a grammar school, and is supposed not to have completed even that 
short course of school work. Even Ben Jonson, who was so proud of his learning 
and rather scorned Shakespeare for his ‘small Latin and less Greek,’ had only 
a short school education. Phineas Fletcher went to Cambridge at sixteen. 
Massinger went to Oxford at eighteen. Of the school time of some of our most 
original writers we have but little information, but that it must have been short 
we have indirect proof. Beaumont’s first play was produced at the age of 
twenty-one. Waller entered Parliament and wrote his first poem at eighteen. 
Dryden went to Oxford at seventeen. Milton went to Cambridge at seventeen. 
Addison went to Oxford at fifteen. The whole of Pope’s school education was 
four and a half years. Swift went to Dublin University at fifteen. Goldsmith, 
after a most erratic school time, entered Dublin when he was fifteen. Our present 
school system is to keep a boy with his nose to the classics grindstone from the 
age of eleven to the age of twenty, and copies the German system. The result 
is the same in Germany and England. Genius is very common in both countries, 
but 99 per cent. of it is destroyed by the schools. It is, however, when we come 
to study the average boy—nineteen in twenty of all boys—that the system looks 
most devilish. In Germany it is worse than in England. There even the average 
boy submits, and plods hard all the time, because there is a great reward for him 
—a diminution in his time of military service. Well, the result for the average 
German boy is that he becomes stupefied, dull, and loses all initiative. The 
average English boy gets much less of these evil effects, because he neglects his 
schoolroom work and keeps his mind active and his soul alive by means of football 
and cricket. It is from this great characteristic, that knowledge and wisdom come 
from doing and not from abstract reasoning, that the British race rules the world. 
We learn all that induces common sense from observation and experiment. I often 
used to observe that a boy whose face was attractive because of its brightness and 
intelligence in the cricket field, seemed when he entered my classroom as if an 
isolating veil of unintelligence suddenly covered his face. He had settled for 
life that he could not understand the classroom work, and he refused to make any 
more efforts. Even the clever boy’s soul is to some extent protected by his sports, 
so that in every way less harm is done in England than in Germany. Still, the 
system produces, even from clever boys, only clever, dull men, fit to be barnacles 
in the public services. The system may be said to give a good training for 
lawyers—the necessary clever kind of lawyer of the Law Courts and Chambers 
who is mute in the House of Commons.’ But it destroys the higher qualities of 
men and makes them narrow. It ought to be remembered that Lord Somers was 
the only great lawyer who was also a great man. Poor boys cannot get this 
1 The acuteness of a lawyer in finding the meaning of a document is very 
wonderful. Almost any mental power can_be cultivated to such a very high 
degree that it almost seems diabolical. A trained person after passing a shop- 
window rapidly is able to describe every object in the window, although the 
objects may be very numerous and curiously different. Yet this same man may 
not be at all clever in other ways. In patent cases a clever judge takes in the 
most elementary scientific knowledge with very great difficulty. The readers of the 
hundreds of newspaper articles of any morning—as like one another as herrings— 
are awed with their display of culture, of depth of thought, of knowledge, and 
with, what is more astounding than anything else, an infinitely perfect Oxford 
olish. Watching the performances of an Oxford man of letters is like watch- 
ing a good billiard player or a skilled musician. His mind is filled with the 
thoughts of other men, pigeonholed ready for use. It is extraordinary that a 
man can have been so educated as to be a good debater, to be able to make a 
fine speech, that he may have taken a degree at Oxford, that he may have passed 
examinations in classics, philosophy, and mathematics, and yet be exceedingly 
ignorant, illogical, and unscientific. 
