EDUCATION AND THE STATE 233 



is a great deal to be said for sending a clever boy to Oxford or 

 Cambridge. There are not only the exhibitions and scholarships, 

 but there is the rubbing shoulders with the coming generation, 

 which puts a man in touch with his contemporaries as hardly 

 anything else can do. A very good scientific education is to be 

 had at both Cambridge and Oxford, especially Cambridge now " 

 (Life, ii, 318). 



The relation of the State to both elementary and inter- 

 mediate education is discussed in a letter to Sir John 

 Donnelly (dated October 1, 1892) : — 



" As to intermediate education, I have never favoured the 

 notion of State intervention in this direction. 



" I think there are only two valid grounds for State meddling 

 with education : the one the danger to the community which 

 arises from dense ignorance ; the other the advantage to the 

 community of giving capable men the chance of utilizing their 

 capacity. 



" The first furnishes the justification for compulsory elementary 

 education. If a child is taught reading, writing, drawing, and 

 handiwork of some kind ; the elements of mathematics, physics, 

 and history, and I should add of political economy and geo- 

 graphy, books will furnish him with everything he can 

 possibly need to make him a competent citizen in any rank 

 of life. 



" If with such a start, he has not the capacity to get all he 

 needs out of books, let him stop where he is. Blow him up 

 with intermediate education as much as you like, you will only 

 do the fellow a mischief and lift him into a place for which he 

 has no real qualification. People never will recollect, that mere 

 learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while 

 energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn and cannot 

 be taught, are everything. . . . 



" I quite agree with you, therefore, that it will play the deuce 

 if intermediate education is fossilized as it would be by any Act 

 prepared under present influences. The most I should like to 

 see done, would be to help the youth of special literary, 

 linguistic and so forth, capacity, to get the best training in their 

 special line " (Life, ii, pp. 319-20). 



