EDUCATION : A SUPwVEY OP RECENT EDUCATIONAL THEORY. 175 



educational for their content and their style. For what is called 

 social efficiency it would seem evident that the periods treated 

 by Carlyle and Lecky, by Motley and Prescott, by Froude and 

 Macaulay, are much more impoitant than those which form the 

 subjects of Thucydides and Xenophon, Livy and Tacitus ; their 

 language is the same as that which the student means habitually 

 to speak and write ; each of t'lese — and there are many more 

 who could be named with them — is qualified to be a favourite 

 author, and so furnish employment for the leisure of later life ; 

 and each opens out an almost unlimited field for research to such 

 as are qualified to pursue it. The amount that can be known 

 of the persons or events with whom and which the Greek and 

 Roman historians deal is strictly limited, and has long ago been 

 tabulated and indexed ; but as we approach modern times 

 materials become more copious, and the possibilities increase of 

 adding to knowledge as well as re-stating or hypothetically 

 supplementing w^at is known. 



Into the selection of historical departments local conditions 

 must naturally enter ; for though the world and its conditions 

 are rightly described as our common inheritance, certain parts 

 of it are more definitely the inheritance of one community than 

 of another, and knowledge of the mode whereby that community 

 came to possess its portion and how it has administered it may 

 reasonably be expected in its members. 



The study of foreign languages must also be largely influenced 

 by local considerations, though doubtless sentimental considera- 

 tions will in part dictate the curriculum. The close association 

 of this country with France and Belgium for so many years is 

 likely both to popularise and to facilitate the study of French in 

 this nation ; the practice of conducting certain lessons in the 

 French language would probably be the most effective method of 

 rendering the young accustomed to understand and express 

 themselves in it. Sentiment is likely to restrict the study of 

 German, which some of our most distinguished writers even 

 before the war thought unnecessary. Learned and perhaps 

 scientific bodies are preparing to carry on their operations after 

 the war without German aid, and this may well cease to be 

 a school subject. On the other hand, both sentiment and 

 utility would suggest the introduction into the school programme 

 of one or more of the languages of Greater Britain. No pheno- 

 menon connected with the war has more profoundly moved 

 the British nation than the attitude taken up by India at its 



