106 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



call educational courses, are of three clearly defined sorts, corresponding 

 with the three principal groups of sciences and aspects of all knowledge 

 with which I began. If I take them now in reverse order it is because 

 I shall only come down to detailed criticisms and proposals in dealing 

 with sciences historical and distributional. 



In the first place, then, we train the citizen-to-be in citizenship, which 

 I take to be the modern technical term for what a Roman called civilitas, 

 and some pioneers of our own Renaissance and Reformation called conse- 

 quently civility. For a Roman, a man was civis when he was what in 

 Irish cottages is called ' biddable,' apt to ' take notice ' — as advertisements 

 to trespassers say — of the fact that he has neighbours like himself, with 

 reasonable desires, habits, conveniences, like his own ; and that, in brief, 

 a man gets most out of life as he puts most into it, in his doings among 

 such neighbours. A man who has the qualities, outlook and will of a 

 civis is described as civilis, and also as liber — a more difficult word, probably 

 related to the Greek word for ' grown-up-ness ' already mentioned ; so 

 that civilitas and libertas were aspects of the same quality of ' citizenship.' 

 To propagate these qualities was to ' civilise ' ; and from their exercise 

 resulted — and results — ' civilisation.' To elicit them among the spon- 

 taneous impulses, efforts, aspirations of younglings who, being bred of 

 ' civil ' stock, have presumably the root of the matter in them, is the 

 primary task of education ; to confront them with elementary social 

 facts, in nursery and kindergarten ; to give occasions for estimating values, 

 duties and rights, for dealing with situations and problems in which 

 they necessarily comport themselves as ' members of a realm of ends,' 

 as citizens in a city which grows with their growth. 



What the statutes and bylaws, so to speak, of that adolescent com- 

 munity are to be depends, as we know, only partly on political and moral 

 principles, and far more largely on custom. But as custom is of necessity 

 both regional and temporal, it is to historical and geographical considera- 

 tions that we recur when we are challenged to explain our own code, or 

 to excuse those inconsistencies in it which are naturally more obvious to 

 novices and newcomers from the ' next generation ' than to old-stagers 

 and ' men of the world ' like ourselves. For these purposes we have 

 recourse to records and traditions, reinforcing or mitigating precept by 

 historical illustration ; appealing from abstract to concrete, from morality 

 to hero-worship, as ancient teachers have done before us, in parable or 

 tragic drama. Of history it is notoriously the besetting sin to moralise 

 and become didactic ; and against this tendency it is worth while to 

 consider any reasonable precaution. 



Secondly, we have to present analytically the principal factors in the 

 processes which make up the pageant of external nature and the methods 

 by which they are detected, measured, controlled, and applied to human 

 ends. Here, as we have already seen, questions of distribution cannot 

 arise : ' fire burns here as in Persia.' But from the moment when pure 

 science passes over into any kind of practical application, considerations 

 of place and time reappear ; for in wild Nature all processes and all 

 material resources are regional ; and it is fundamental in human inter- 

 ference with the order of Nature that it displaces things and disarranges 

 that order. All agriculture is displacement and replacement of natural 



