I have already mentioned housing and improved conditions of labour. It is hardly necessary in this city and in this hall to dwell upon these. You all realise the truth of the saying that "the wretched dwelling," and we might add the wretched workshop, "is the purveyor of the public-house."

But I wish in conclusion to say one word on the education of the people in the taste for a higher kind of enjoyment, a department in which the possibilities of development are not yet so fully realised as they ought to be and there is much general misunderstanding.

It is apt, for instance, to be regarded as a question that concerns primarily the School Board and the elementary school teacher, who should aim, it is said, more than they do at cultivating the taste for reading, music, and drawing, as well as for healthy outdoor games among the children. Perhaps the schools can do more than they do at present in these directions; but to expect them with their limited time and staff to turn out the children of the poorer classes in crowded city districts with the tastes that only the best of the middle-class children with infinitely better chances acquire, is not (I submit) reasonable. It is like expecting a court suit from a rag of flannel. It is wonderful what the modern school teacher can do with the cloth he has; but it is wofully scrimp, and there seems no immediate prospect of his getting more. But there is another direction in which we may look for assistance in the meantime.

We are told that the town and county councils are going to have secondary education entrusted to them under the new Education Bill. Here is a form of secondary education which is already in their hands— the education which can be conveyed to adult citizens

through judicious arrangements for rational enjoyment. It is a great opportunity. We have recently had an Industrial Exhibition in Birmingham, which was crowded every evening for ten successive weeks. Nothing struck observant visitors to that exhibition more forcibly than the proof it afforded of the lamentable want of cheap and respectable places of indoor recreation in our city and neighbourhood. If you had gone to Glasgow during the time of the great exhibition a few weeks ago, you would have been struck with the same thing-only more forcibly still. There was there a hundred times the space, but there was also a hundred times the crowd. It was not a crowd of strangers. That was the remarkable thing. It was the citizens of the place itself, not the people from a distance who made the crowd, and who came there evening after evening, not to see what they make themselves or what other people make in their workshops, but to see one another, to hear some good music, to look at some good drawing or colouring, to have a meal or merely a drink and a pipe in pleasanter surroundings than any publichouse can yet supply.

In this field there is no need for further experiment. The experiments have been made. The results are unmistakable. Some municipalities have already begun to apply them. Glasgow among others. It already has a system of great winter gardens. East and West and South in the city ten thousand people listen to municipal concerts every Saturday afternoon which do not cost the ratepayers a penny. The city has just built a magnificent new art gallery, not second to the National Gallery itself. As a result of the recent exhibition a new concert hall and winter garden is

likely to be added to the municipal resources of enjoyment. More and better results still will follow when the City Council has the courage to attack the problem of the people's refreshment so closely bound up with the people's recreation. Unfortunately in Glasgow there is the same hesitation and even opposition on the part of some temperance reformers as there is elsewhere to a bold and clearly called-for move. It cannot be (can it?) that temperance people are going to become an obstruction to progress in this, one of the most hopeful of all directions. And yet unless they show themselves prepared to put themselves in line with the teaching of experience and the general progress of ideas, there is a real danger.

I have tried to show what readjustments are required if we would escape this danger-appealing to no academic logic, but to the far more trenchant logic of events. The conclusion which these seem to force upon us (to repeat it) is that no programme of reform is likely to be successful in the coming century, or at all to meet the situation which does not

(1) take a broad and tolerant view of the ideal to be aimed at;

(2) which does not include a large measure of collective control, perhaps collective management of the sale of intoxicants;

(3) which does not include such indirect methods as the improvement, on the one hand, of the homes and, on the other, of the public enjoyments of the people.

In no department of public work is it truer that "New occasions teach new duties,

Time makes ancient good uncouth."

Ν

VIII.

A LIBERAL EDUCATION.1

IN selecting this subject I have been guided by two

reasons. I desired in the first place to use this opportunity to speak more particularly to the students of the College; in the second to dwell a little, in view of the new development that is before us, on some of the wider objects for which a University exists. This seems the more desirable in view of the prevalence of narrower ideas, arising, on the one hand, from the pressure that is being constantly brought to bear upon an institution of this kind by the practical needs of a great industrial and commercial centre, and, on the other, from traditional views concerning the scope of University teaching and the subjects with which it may legitimately deal. In one of George Gissing's novels the hero is represented as standing in the Fountain Square of Birmingham and pointing out the Mason College to a friend, to whom he explains that it is a place "where young men are taught a variety of things, including discontent with small incomes." The jibe illustrates sufficiently the suspicion prevalent among the advocates of the older system that the promoters of technical departments harbour sinister designs upon their cherished ideal of education as culture and humane learning.

1 Opening lecture of the last session of the Arts and Science Faculties in Mason University College, transformed into the University of Birmingham in 1900.

Standing as we here do at the meeting-point between the old and the new, it is of no little importance that we should try to understand the relation that exists between these two objects-that which (with all their defects) has occupied, and rightly occupied, the attention of the great educational organisations of the past, and that which seems likely to occupy, and rightly to occupy, the attention of those who are entrusted with the organisation of higher education in the future. Perhaps the most pressing need of all at the present moment is that we should recognise it as the teaching at once of theory and experience, that there is after all no antagonism between these two great ends-that which we might call the useful and practical and that which we might call the spiritual and ideal. Not only the best theory, but the actual facts that are pressed home to us by the present position of manufacture and commerce in this country point in the same direction. They go to prove that the best technical and practical results are attained on the basis of a broad, liberal education, and further that those studies themselves which serve most directly the material needs of a great community can be so taught and as a matter of fact are so taught by the best teachers-as to raise the industrial services for which they are a preparation into the rank of liberal professions.

In laying emphasis, then, on what I call a liberal education, I must not be understood to be opposing it to technical, but merely to be endeavouring to point out that if we would make the best of our present splendid educational opportunity, we must clearly grasp the fact that, besides the services a University can perform in improving commerce and manufacture as a means to life, it has an important underlying function