596 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION IL. 
world, living what they think to be the higher kind of life, that of the amateur 
copying the lives of the scholars of Constantinople before they were so mercifully 
scattered in 1453, copying the meditative ways of the divines and hermits of the 
fourth and fifth centuries. Unfortunately the Oxford hermits have by a series 
of accidents become the rulers of the greatest empire that the earth has ever 
seen, and it is very obvious indeed through many other things than the starting 
of South African wars that they are unfit for their job. 
If our rulers were like savage chiefs they might possibly give equal chances to 
candidates for posts; but unfortunately it is as if our leaders possessed great 
negative knowledge of Natural Science, and as if a man’s chances of being 
appointed to a scientific post or of having his advice listened to were in inverse 
proportion to his scientific qualifications. Scientific men look around them and 
see that everything is wrong in the present arrangements, but they also see that 
it is useless to give advice which cannot be understood by our rulers. And, 
indeed, I may say that when by accident a scientific man is appointed on a 
committee there is a negative inducement for him to do anything. 
Many men enter the services by examination, and it is always through 
cramming that they pass. In some cases the examination is supposed to be in 
science. In truth, the scientific habit of thought, the real study of science, 
the very fitness of a boy for entrance to the service, would unfit him for 
passing these abominable unscientific examinations. For some army posts, 
further scientific food is provided by the Government for the classical or modern 
language or science dummies after they enter the service. If one wishes to hear 
how evil this system of pretended education is, let him ask the opinion of some 
of the professors who are condemned to help in carrying it out. The whole 
system is foolishness from top to bottom, and the men prepared by the system 
cannot see how abominable it is, even when they are afterwards trying to 
improve it; well mannered mediocrity is everywhere successful and reproduces 
itself. 
I have been dwelling upon the consequences of letting aristocratic University 
men who are to be rulers of the country have an education which involves no 
study of natural science. Besides these men we have a larger number of middle- 
class men who will succeed their fathers in the management, not merely of landed 
estates, but of much more valuable estates in the manufacture and distribution of 
things. With them there is the same contempt for books, for learning, and the 
same absence, not merely of knowledge and of natural science, but of those 
scientific habits of thought and methods of approaching problems which experi- 
mental research tends to produce. These men become the owners of factories the 
spirit of which ought to be scientific research; the competing factories in Ger- 
many, France, and America are run by men of scientific method, but our owners 
discourage reform in every possible way. The rule of thumb of their fathers and 
grandfathers is good enough for them. Their factories are so badly arranged 
that the works cost of any manufacture is twice what it ought to be and the time 
taken is twice as great. They take eagerly to all sorts of quack remedies for bad 
trade; they are the easy victims of fraudulent persons. These are the men who 
discourage all education in the people employed by them, managers, foremen, and 
workmen. They are what I call unskilled workmen—that is, unskilled owners of 
works—and it is the University and the whole system of their education which is 
to blame for their unskilfulness. It is astounding how quickly unskilled owners 
of works are being eliminated, but there is a new crop of them every year. 
The want of education of these men is very harmful to the country. 
But I get too angry when I think of what our Universities might do in the 
great world of natural science and of the futility of almost all their studies. And 
this anger is greater when I think that the Universities rule the schools. The 
general higher education of the community is being altogether neglected, the 
general culture of professional men is being neglected; and in the case of pro- 
fessions involving applications of physical science, useless obligatory subjects 
are insisted upon, so that for these professions the University is a harmful 
institution. Medical students have so much hard work in various kinds of 
grammar subjects required for matriculation that they must be forgiven for their 
utter ignorance of natural science. But an outside Philistine may also be forgiven 
when he suggests that the whole country might benefit if the school training of 
medical students put them more in sympathy with scientific discovery. It is a 
