E.— GEOGRAPHY. 105 



surprise that a geographer reads in the newspapers that one of the first 

 public acts of the new Nationalist Government in China is to arrange with 

 the ' foreign devils ' for the supply of the same ill-distributed but indis- 

 pensable element in the daily food of its subjects. After five years of 

 anarchy the salt supply must have run rather low. 



That this kind of correlation between historical and geographical 

 studies is more widely valued and practised than formerly is shown by 

 the large current output of what are generally described as Outlines of 

 History or Histories of Civilisation. Of this whole class the characteristics 

 are three. The first is the very wide range with which these books attempt 

 to deal, in respect both of area and of period. If they do not always 

 * survey mankind from China to Peru,' they frequently begin with the 

 Ice Age and end with the Great War. They deal, that is, with what 

 Mr. Wells elsewhere describes as Mankind in the Making and Mr. Marvin 

 as the Living Past or the Unity of Civilisation. Secondly, they are con- 

 cerned mainly with social, economic and cultural achievements, originating 

 among, and generally affecting, the population of this or that natural 

 region as a whole ; and to keep the broad lines of this presentation clear 

 they pass over much detail the chronological interest of which made it 

 attractive to those earlier historians whose monuments are the eighteenth- 

 century Art de verifier les Dates and Clinton's Fasti Hellenici. Thirdly, 

 they relegate biographical material to biographies, and the details of 

 political history to the special large-scale histories of particular states and 

 periods. The focus of human interest has shifted from individuals to 

 populations. If they have one defect in common, it is that they not only 

 forswear hero-worship, but obliterate leadership as a historical factor. 



Precept and Example : ' Historical and Geographical Instances.' 



I set out to speak about ancient geography in modern education ; 

 and if I seem to have spoken about almost anything else hitherto, it is 

 with the object of presenting certain considerations in regard to modern 

 education, and also to ancient geography, which seem to me fundamental, 

 and also so obvious that if I carry general agreement in regard to them, 

 what I really wish to submit follows as an easy conclusion. 



We boast, and rightly, that we try to make education practical and 

 useful ; that it is a means to an end ; and that its end is the establishment 

 of successors to ourselves at least as intelligent, efficient, responsible — 

 free, in the old Greek sense of freedom (eleutheria) as ' grown-up-ness ' — 

 as we are ourselves ; and, as we severally hope, a great deal more intelligent, 

 efficient, responsible and free, than most of our own fellow-citizens. With 

 this end in view we expose the pupil-that-is and the citizen-that-is-to-be 

 to a graduated sequence of experiences and occasions, selected to give 

 appropriate opportunities for that exercise of his natural abilities, that 

 almost continuous process of reasonable response to his surroundings, 

 which we call life ; which (short of criminal oppression) we cannot prevent 

 the growing child from exercising, but which by neglect or mistake or 

 mere muddle, which is bred of both, can be, so easily, exercised carelessly, 

 perversely, irresponsibly, with results familiar to us all. 



Now those selected sequences of occasions and experiences, which we 



