PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 597 
well known fact that there are medical men in lucrative practice, said to have 
the highest University qualifications, who tell you frankly that they do not 
believe in bacteriology ! 
A great many young men from the secondary schools are now entering the 
engineering profession. By engineering 1 mean any kind of applied physical 
svience. Every important town in Great Britain has established at least one 
great technical college at large cost in building and apparatus, with staffs 
of professors and teachers (always badly paid), and it is found that for 
their first two years the students have to be kept at great cost to the country 
learning those simple principles of science which they ought to have learnt at 
school. It is found that they are not only ignorant, but they have none of the 
habits of thought and scientific method which school laboratory work induces. 
The clever ones, if they leave school at seventeen, recover from the effects of a 
school education which prepared men only for being lawyers or clergymen ; but the 
average man finds that he has been prepared only to be a hewer of wood and a 
drawer of water to the real engineer. It is found in most cases that the success- 
ful students are those who have attended primary schools where no boy is com- 
pelled to learn any language other than English, and where every boy does 
laboratory work in mathematics and natural science. There can be no doubt that 
poor boys have now an enormous advantage over the sons of rich men, for even 
when the fees of the day classes are largé the evening class fees are small, and 
the poor boys attending the latter are getting to be very fit for higher study in 
natural science. 
The English school system has outlived the medieval conditions which pro- 
duced it. In old days the only way to knowledge was through Latin: all 
writing was in Latin. The result then was pretty much what it is now; lawyers, 
clergymen, and schoolmasters had to know some Latin after school life ; the 
average man forgot anything he had learnt. A few very clever men did read, 
but the average monk or priest was a very ignorant person. 
English people know the worthlessness of the public school system in the 
mental training of the average boy. Why, then, do they submit to it? However 
conservative they may be, they would not submit to this worthless system merely 
because it is hallowed by a history of 500 years. 
The fact is, this worthless system continues because in some occult way it 
seems to have a connection with something of real importance, public school form. 
There is really no connection. When, in my youth, I was a master at one of the 
great English public schools, like everybody else I was a frightful prig in 
regard to public school form. Eton form or Harrow form or Rugby form or 
Clifton form was the thing at each of these schools which was thought to be of 
more value than anything else in the world. Dr, Arnold, of Rugby, taught the 
trick of manufacturing it. It is in itself a splendid thing. The public school 
boy is trained in self-possession, modesty, cleanliness, truthfulness, and courage. 
At school his health in body and morals is all important. He learns to lead and 
also to obey. But the average resulting man is exceedingly ignorant ; he neither 
reads nor writes, and he has little reasoning power except what his sports have 
developed. This form is essentially aristocratic. It is based on superiority of 
position or birth or caste. A man’s place is fixed, his attitude to people of 
higher or lower rank is fixed. He needs no self-assertion, and he cannot become 
a ‘ bounder,’ that is, a ‘cad’; but in Thackeray’s sense he is usually a * snob,’ 
and in various directions he may be a prig. By prig, I mean a man who cannot 
get outside convention and so cannot exercise his own common sense. One 
defect is that public school form when combined with poverty cannot 
make much money by its own ability, and if it does not starve it must 
join the valets or the grooms. Its strength lies in convention and 
habit and the belief that poor people are not men but a lower kind of 
animal who may be pitied as we pity a suffering dog. Such pity can never 
raise the people or reform abuses. In the middle ages young gentlemen of 
England had the same sort of education. It was probably best in Plantagenet 
times, when indeed a well trained young gentleman was not only very healthy and 
courageous, but he had not much chance of becoming lazy. A man was proud of 
his heavy armour, and he was trained to act vigorously when carrying it. They 
were chivalrous to each other, but, alas! to people outside their own class they 
