PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 595 
training unless they are so unlucky as to get scholarships, or are induced to 
attend University extension lectures; and it results that nearly all our best 
writers, writers with imagination and originality and initiative and _ in- 
dividuality, have been boys of the common people. Although poor boys are 
most frightfully handicapped for the race to distinction, I do not think that the 
poor child is much handicapped by mere heredity, for he is naturally nearly equal 
to a boy of the highest lineage. Natural selection up to the time of the first 
great civilisations, when there were comfortable houses and palaces—say, 100,000 
years ago—together with the effects since then of revolutions and wars of con- 
quest, involving slavery of the conquered, have created a wonderful equality 
among the individuals of mixable races. 
For the average boy at a public school the school work is a terrible uphill grind 
all the time; a soul-destroying, stupefying business, so stupefying that he makes 
no complaint, he merely suffers. He feels that he is a failure, learning nothing 
that can be of spiritual or material value to him in his future life. Of course, 
he can pass examinations; anybody can be crammed to pass an examination, 
but after the examination he forgets what he was supposed to have learnt. 
The present system of education is to be condemned for other reasons. It is 
exasperating that all the most important, the most brilliant, the most expensively 
educated people in England, our poets and novelists, our legislators and lawyers, 
our soldiers and sailors, our great manufacturers and merchants, our clergymen 
and schoolmasters, are quite ignorant of natural science; and it may almost be 
said that in spite of these clever ignorant men, and men like them in other coun- 
tries, through the agency of scientific men, all the conditions of civilisation are 
being transformed. I do not think that a fact of this kind would have been 
neglected by the philosophers of Greece (who scorned to know any other language 
than their own) or the learned men of Rome, but when some of us direct attention 
to it and its neglect by modern philosophers we are sneered at as Philistines. It 
is a curious kind of culture which scorns the lessons of history, the study of man 
in his relation to nature, the study of the enormous new forces which are now 
affecting the relations of nations to one another. How many of our rulers know 
the astounding fact that the cost of the most unskilled work done by man costs 
1,000 times as much as when that work is done by a steam-engine? Hence it is 
that the steam-engine has given means for leisure and high culture, yes, and low 
culture and decadence, to hundreds of people instead of units. And the steam- 
engine enables rulers to spend a hundred times as much money on soldiers and 
sailors and ships and munitions of war as they did two hundred years ago. 
The University man thinks that he can get some knowledge of science by read- 
ing, but without laboratory study he is like the man who said ‘ barley ’ when he 
wanted to escape from the robbers’ cave and ought to have said ‘sesame.’ Do 
you know the ballad about Count Arnaldos, who envied the old helmsman his 
weird and wondrous powers? 
‘Would’st thou,’ thus the helmsman answered, 
‘Learn the secret of the sea? 
Only those that brave its dangers 
Comprehend its mystery.’ 
I know that the ordinary University man thinks, like the wistful Count, that 
he can get all things easily or by mere reading. But, in truth, to read the 
‘Origin of Species,’ or treatises on astronomy or physics or chemistry, is a mis- 
leading performance unless the reader brings to the study that kind of mind 
which has been developed already by his own observation and experiment. 
The University man, ignorant of science, becomes a ruler of our great nation, 
his duty during war and peace being that of a scientific administrator, and with- 
. out turning a hair he fraudulently accepts this important duty for which he is 
utterly unfit. The gods must surely laugh when they see these rulers of ours 
gibing at scientific things, giving important posts to non-scientific men who scorn 
and obstruct the scientific men who are under their orders. If Oxford scholars 
were merely like so many monks in their monastery, living the lives and following 
the studies which they love, I would say nothing. The revenues so used up are, 
I think, of no great importance to the country, and busy men elsewhere can only 
be benefited in knowing that at Oxford and Cambridge there are these lovely 
lamaseries where men are living in serene air apart from the struggles of the 
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