218 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
States and thence, somewhat battered rather than bettered in the process, 
back to our own country. In psychology, at any rate, if any book or 
system held the field, it was the elder James Mills’ ‘ Analysis of the 
Phenomena of the Human Mind’ first published in 1829—and condemned 
to-day as a decayed fortress of the superstitions of Faculty Psychology and 
a discredited associationism. 
That everything educational was in a profoundly unsatisfactory state 
everyone at pains to investigate took for granted. So gloomy is the 
picture drawn that one is driven to wonder how there were any educated 
persons at all, and particularly so many able to write such good English 
or construct such closely thought out and impressive arguments. The 
two Universities and the only two, Oxford and Cambridge, were targets 
for savage criticism ; the endowed public schools such as Eton, Winchester, 
Harrow, etc., were held to be expensive nurseries of vice, incompetence, 
and pedantry ; the old Grammar Schools were dilapidated, starved and 
useless ; elementary education simply did not exist. Every established 
institution was threatened ; we were recklessly flinging our doors open 
to an ignorant, irreligious and irresponsible democracy, without any 
adequate institutions or administrative machinery to cope with the 
dangers and needs of a new political nation. 
The England that created the British Association concentrated, you 
will find, its attention on four main educational problems—what was to 
be done with the Universities? How were the public schools to be 
reformed ? How can this illiterate democracy be cured of its intolerable 
and dangerous ignorance? Where and how was the money to be found ? 
And immediately, by this concentration, leaped straight into the educa- 
tional vortex. Ofthe University aspect of the problem I will say practically 
nothing now or hereafter, because meeting as we do to-day in London, 
the foundation of the University of London and its significance naturally 
deserves separate treatment on this Centenary occasion, and I leave it to 
the competent hands of Dr. Deller. But nothing illustrates better than 
the creation of University College and King’s College the power of the 
utilitarian group and the reaction of the established Church of England 
to the challenge that University College implied. 
But go back to that contemporary literature, even if your mind is full 
of 1931 and its controversies, and at once, if the vocabulary and the 
environment be very different, you are on familiar—painfully familiar— 
ground. Here, for example, are three questions always coming up in the 
literature of the day and on which tons of ink were spent: What is the 
object of Education? If it is not mere knowledge, what is it? The 
formation of character or the formation of a Christian character and a 
- Christian citizen, and if not, what then ? To whom is this duty to be left— 
the individual conscience of the parent, the Church as the depository of 
Christian truth, or the State, with a compulsory power and the right to 
represent the civil mind ? 
Let me quote here a couple of sentences from the Quarterly Review of 
July 1829: ‘Does any man believe that to furnish the future weaver or 
carpenter with the education of a scholar or a man of science will make 
him more contented in the sphere in which he is thrown? The more 
fitted he is for a higher station in Society, the greater the effort of mind to 
dct een 
