220 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



of the achievements and ideals of mankind, proclaim the failure of education 

 and walk the world as a standing reproach to it. 



It follows that education, for all men and women, for the artisan and 

 labourer as well as for the ' educated classes,' must find ample room for a 

 liberal, cultural element. If its aim is to make men and citizens as well 

 as bread-winners, to develop what Shakespeare calls beings of infinite 

 capacity, and to help them to live intelligently in the world which they 

 inhabit, then handicraft, technical skill, physical training belong to such 

 an education, if the body is to achieve its perfection, and hand and eye to 

 develop their powers ; but so also does science, if we are to understand 

 something of the physical universe ; and so do literature, history and, in 

 an untechnical sense, philosophy. Some people may feel that the cultural 

 subjects are unsuitable for the masses. That is a possible view. But to 

 hold it is to accept the most ruthless of class systems, to say that men differ 

 not only in degree but in kind, and that the majority are incapable of 

 studies without which there can be no intelligent idea either of the universe 

 or of the greatness of the human spirit. If a man is incapable of these 

 studies, he is not, in the Shakespearean sense, a man. And if the majority 

 of the electorate is incapable of them, we must either abandon democracy 

 or resign ourselves to be governed by an electorate which can never 

 know what a state should be. Ancient tradition and political instinct may 

 preserve such a democracy from disaster, but not only will its stability 

 be precarious but its political and spiritual life will be poor. The bad 

 film and the betting news will be its relaxation ; the bad press its 

 literature; passion, prejudice, the catchword and the slogan, will be 

 its masters. 



To this — and it is a danger to society as great as war, if less spectacular 

 — humanistic studies are the great, perhaps the only, antidote. Here are 

 written all the ideals and adventures of mankind. Literature contains the 

 visions which his dreaming mind has conceived in solitude ; history 

 exhibits these visions applied to life and tested by fact. Here is seen man 

 in a remote past climbing with stumbling footsteps out of savagery ; 

 then, with progress so gradual that we hesitate to give it the name, with 

 endless experiments, aberrations, collapses, false starts, surmounting the 

 obstacles which Nature, his fellow-beings, his own physical and moral 

 limitations put in his path ; moving on through the rise and fall of nations, 

 shifts of power, changes of creed and opinion, complete failure or half 

 success, making his way by rare glimpses of light or in thick darkness, and 

 obstinately pursuing a good, dim to discern and difficult to achieve. The 

 lesson of these studies is Sursum corda : they are a perpetual rebuke 

 to the feeble vision and failing faith from which all men suffer, and 

 to the selfcontented spiritual mediocrity which is a special danger 

 of democracy ; without them men know neither themselves nor their 

 possibilities. 



How far does our education make men and citizens ? The measure 

 of its success defines our achievement, its shortcomings indicate what 

 remains to be done. It has achieved much. Between the Forster 



