TRANS ACTIONS OF SECTION L. 745 



as good and bad? is answered — in the briefest possible way indeed, and in the 

 barest outline — but yet adequately, if the answer proves to be valid and to cover 

 all the ground. 



The principal part of this paper is devoted to trying to show this with as 

 much brevity as is compatible with clearness, and insisting particularly on the 

 vital importance of having the same fundamental principle in politics as in 

 ethics. 



No theory of conduct, of course, can escape the question, Why should we 

 accept it? How do we know that it is true? This is a matter of method, and 

 the theory here advocated is prepared with a very impressive answer — an answer 

 which, when set out at length, offers also a solution of the very fundamental 

 inquiry : Why should I do what I see to be right? 



There remains for further consideration our complicated third question : How 

 ought ethics and politics to be taught? This I make an attempt to answer 

 very briefly, and endeavour incidentally to indicate various interesting con- 

 nections between teaching of history and instruction in the theorj' of conduct, 

 and to point out some of "the immensely valuable services which systematic ethics 

 and politics can render not only to history, but also to that many-sided life of 

 man which is the subject of historical study. 



7. Education and British Ideals. By Professor E. S. Conway, Litt.D. 



Many complaints have been heard in the course of the present War that 

 British education is being proved inferior to German in point of technical 

 training. Even if this be granted, it does not prove that the German system 

 as a whole is better than ours. The Germans had, no doubt, applied to war 

 all the resources of modern scipnce ; yet the object of education is not merely 

 to make good tools but to teach men for what ends to use them. No system 

 is sound which does not, as Plato taught, awaken some intelligent affection for 

 great ideals of conduct, and these could only come from the literary side of train- 

 ing. Now one of the ideals which the literars' side of Briti.sh education has 

 nourished is absent from the Prussian mind, though not from the older and 

 humaner traditions of Southern and Western Germany, and it is Prussia that 

 has directed German education for the last forty years. This ideal is the love 

 of freedom, understanding by freedom free government. The desire and respect 

 for this is by no means spontaneotis in human nature. Has any scientific dis- 

 covery conferred vaster benefits on mankind than that of freedom in this sense? 

 It was the Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. who first introduced free 

 government into the world, and saved it at the outset, at great cost to their 

 own generation, from being crushed by Oriental tyrannv. From them the faith 

 in freedom has passed in a clearly traceable line through Koman literature and 

 throTigh the Roman municipal system to all the communities of the world in 

 which freedom has taken root, including even the Hanse republics, for, as 

 Freeman pointed out, our Teutonic ancestors hated the very idea of a town, 

 and the notion of a charter granted by the Emperor came straight down from 

 the Roman Empire. No educational changes, therefore, could be approved 

 which injured this great tradition of British training. The University of 

 Manchester has shown its faith in it by founding side by side with the fourth 

 Chair of History a fourth Chair of Classical Studies, devoted to Imperial Latin. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBEB 9. 

 The following Report and Papers were read : — 



1. Report on Museums. — See Reports, p. 262. 



