with you which is only transient, I can but ness of head, thoroughgoing completeness, offer you some few general conclusions contempt of compromise, and moral backwhich have forced themselves on me during bone, no set of people were ever started my own experience, in the hope that you into life more generously provided. You may find them not wholly useless. And as did not make these things; it takes many it is desirable to give form to remarks which generations to breed high qualities either might otherwise be desultory, I will follow of mind or body; but you have them, they the train of thought suggested by our pres- are a fine capital to commence business ence at this place and the purpose which with, and, as I said, Noblesse oblige. brings you here. You stand on the margin So much for what you bring with you into of the great world, into which you are about the world. And the other part of your to be plunged, to sink or swim. We will equipment is only second to it: I mean consider the stock-in-trade, the moral and your education. There is no occasion mental furniture, with which you will start upon your journey.

to tell a Scotchman to value education. On this, too, you have set us an example which we are beginning to imitate: I only wish our prejudices and jealousies would let

your education, whether in the parish school or here at the university, there is little to be desired. It is fair all round to poor and rich alike. You have broken down, or you never permitted to rise, the enormous barrier of expense which makes the highest education in England a privilege of the

In the first place you are Scots; you are come of a fine stock, and much will be expected of you. If we except the Athe-us imitate it thoroughly. In the form of nians and the Jews, no people so few in number have scored so deep a mark in the world's history as you have done. No people have a juster right to be proud of their blood. I suppose, if any one of you were asked whether he would prefer to be the son of a Scotch peasant or to be the heir of an Indian rajah with twenty lacs of ru-wealthy. The subject-matter is another pees, he would not hesitate about his answer: we should none of us object to the rupees, but I doubt if the Scot ever breathed who would have sold his birthright for them. Well, then, Noblesse oblige; all blood is noble here, and a noble life should go along with it. It is not for nothing that you here and we in England come, both of us, of our respective races; we inherit honourable traditions and memories; we inherit qualities inherent in our bone and blood, which have been earned for us, no thanks to ourselves, by twenty generations of ancestors; our fortunes are now linked together for good and evil, never more to be divided; but when we examine our several contributions to the common stock, the account is more in your favour than in ours.

thing. Whether the subjects to which, either with you, or with us, the precious years of boyhood and youth continue to be given, are the best in themselves, whether they should be altered or added to, and if so, in what direction and to what extent, are questions which all the world is busy with. Education is on everybody's lips. Our own great schools and colleges are in the middle of a revolution, which, like most revolutions. means discontent with what we have, and no clear idea of what we would have. You yourselves cannot here have wholly escaped the infection, or if you have, you will not escape it long. The causes are not far to seek. On the one hand there is the immense multiplication of the subjects of knowledge, through the progress of science, More than once you saved English Prot- and the investigation on all sides into the estantism; you may have to save it again, present and past condition of this planet for all that I know, at the rate at which our and its inhabitants; on the other, the equalEnglish parsons are now running. You ly increased range of occupations, among gave us the Stuarts, but you helped us to which the working part of mankind are now get rid of them. Even now you are teach-distributed, and for one or other of which ing us what, unless we saw it before our our education is intended to qualify us. It eyes, no Englishman would believe to be is admitted by everyone that we cannot any possible, that a member of Parliament can longer confine ourselves to the learned lanbe elected without bribery. For shrewd-guages, to the grammar and logic and phi

The demands which intelligent people imagine that they can make on the minds of students in this way are something amazing. I will give you a curious illustration of it. When the competitive examination system was first set on foot, a board of examiners met to draw up their papers of

countries were suspended in favour of schol-instruction in everything which human bears wandering in pursuit of knowledge. At ings have done, thought, or discovered; home, at his college, the scholar's fare was all history, all languages, all sciences. the hardest, his lodging was the barest. If rich in mind, he was expected to be poor in body; and so deeply was this theory grafted into English feeling that earls and dukes, when they began to frequent universities, shared the common simplicity. The furniture of a noble earl's room at an English university at present may cost, including questions. The scale of requirement had the pictures of opera-dancers and racehorses and such like, perhaps five hundred pounds. When the magnificent Earl of Essex was sent to Cambridge, in Elizabeth's time, his guardians provided him with a deal table covered with green baize, a truckle bed, half-a-dozen chairs, and a wash-hand basin. The cost of all, I think, was five pounds.

first to be settled. Among them a highly distinguished man, who was to examine in English history, announced that, for himself, he meant to set a paper for which Macaulay might possibly get full marks; and he wished the rest of the examiners to imitate him in the other subjects. I saw the paper which he set. I could myself have answered two questions out of a dozen. You see what was meant. The scholar And it was gravely expected that ordinary was held in high honour; but his contribu- young men of twenty-one, who were to be tions to the commonwealth were not appre-examined also in Greek and Latin, in moral ciable in money, and were not rewarded philosophy, in ancient history, in mathewith money. He went without what he could not produce, that he might keep his independence and his self-respect unharmed. Neither scholarship nor science starved under this treatment: more noble souls have been smothered in luxury than were ever killed by hunger. Your Knox was brought up in this way, Buchanan was brought up in this way, Luther was brought up in this way, and Tyndal, who translated the Bible, and Milton and Kepler and Spinoza, and your Robert Burns. Compare Burns, bred behind the plough, and our English Byron !

This was the old education, which formed the character of the English and Scotch nations. It is dying away at both extremities, as no longer suited to what is called modern civilization. The apprenticeship as a system of instruction is gone. The discipline of poverty- not here as yet, I am happy to think, but in England-is gone also; and we have got instead what are called enlarged minds.

matics, and in two modern languages, were to show a proficiency in each and all of these subjects, which a man of mature age and extraordinary talents, who had devoted his whole time to that special study, had attained only in one of them.

Under this system teaching becomes cramming; an enormous accumulation of propositions of all sorts and kinds is thrust down the students' throats, to be poured out again, I might say vomited out, into examiners' laps; and this when it is notorious that the sole condition of making progress in any branch of art or knowledge is to leave on one side everything irrelevant to it, and to throw your undivided energy on the special thing you have in hand.

Our old Universities are struggling against these absurdities. Yet, when we look at the work which they on their side are doing, it is scarcely more satisfactory. A young man going to Oxford learns the same things which were taught there two centuries ago; but, unlike the old scholars, I ask a modern march-of-intellect man he learns no lessons of poverty along with what education is for; and he tells me it is it. In his three years' course he will have to make educated men. I ask what an tasted luxuries unknown to him at home, educated man is: he tells me it is a man and contracted habits of self-indulgence whose intelligence has been cultivated, who which make subsequent hardships unbearaknows something of the world he lives in ble: while his antiquated knowledge, such -the different races of men, their langua- as it is, has fallen out of the market; there ges, their histories, and the books that is no demand for him; he is not sustained they have written; and again, modern by the respect of the world, which finds science, astronomy, geology and physiology, him ignorant of everything in which it is political economy, mathematics, mechanics interested. He is called educated; yet, if -everything in fact which an educated circumstances throw him on his own reman ought to know. sources, he cannot earn a sixpence for himEducation, according to this, means self. An Oxford education fits a man

extremely well for the trade of gentleman. | trasted picture: the broad river of modern I do not know for what other trade it does discovery flowing through town and hamlet, fit him as at present constituted. More science shining as an intellectual sun, and than one man who has taken high honours knowledge and justice, as her handmaids, there, who has learnt faithfully all that the redressing the wrongs and healing the misUniversity undertakes to teach him, has eries of mankind. Then, rapt with inbeen seen in these late years breaking spired frenzy, the musical voice, thrilling stones upon a road in Australia. That was with transcendent emotion-'I seem,' the all which he was found to be fit for when orator said, 'I seem to hear again the echo brought in contact with the primary reali- of that voice which rolled over the primeval ties of things. chaos, saying, "Let there be light."

It has become necessary to alter all this; but how and in what direction? If I go into modern model schools, I find first of all the three R's, about which we are all agreed; I find next the old Latin and Greek, which the schools must keep to while the Universities confine their honours to these; and then, by way of keeping up with the times, abridgments,' text-books,' elements,' or whatever they are called, of a mixed multitude of matters, history, natural history, physiology, chronology, geology, political economy, and I know not what besides; general knowledge which, in my experience, means general ignorance: stuff arranged admirably for one purpose, and one purpose only to make a show in examinations. To cram a lad's mind with infinite names of things which he never handled, places he never saw or will see, statements of facts which he cannot possibly understand, and must remain merely words to him this, in my opinion, is like loading his stomach with marbles; for bread giving him a stone.

As you may see a breeze of wind pass over standing corn and every stalk bends and a long wave sweeps across the field, so all that listening multitude swayed and wavered under the words. Yet, in plain prose, what did this gentleman definitely mean? First and foremost, a man has to earn his. living, and all the 'ologies will not of themselves enable him to earn it. Light! yes, we do want light, but it must be light which will help us to work and find food and clothes and lodging for ourselves. A modern school will undoubtedly sharpen the wits of a clever boy. He will go out into the world with the knowledge that there are a great many good things in it which it will be highly pleasant to get hold off; able as yet to do no one thing for which anybody will pay him, yet bent on pushing himself forward into the pleasant places somehow. Some intelligent people think that this is a promising state of mind, that an ardent desire to better our position is the most powerful incentive that we can feel to energy and industry. A great political economist has defended the existence of a luxuriouslyliving idle class as supplying a motive for exertion to those who are less highly favoured. They are like Olympian gods, condescending to show themselves in their Empyrean, and to say to their worshippers, Make money, money enough, and you and your descendants shall become as we are, and shoot grouse and drink champagne all the days of your lives.'

It is wonderful what a quantity of things of this kind a quick boy will commit to memory, how smartly he will answer questions, how he will show off in school inspections, and delight the heart of his master. But what has been gained for the boy himself, let him carry this kind of thing as far as he will, if, when he leaves school, he has to make his own living? Lord Brougham once said he hoped a time would come when every man in England would read Bacon. No doubt this would be a highly influenWilliam Cobbett, that you may have heard tial incitement to activity of a sort; only it of, said he would be contented if a time must be remembered that there are many came when every man in England would sorts of activity, and short smooth cuts to eat bacon. People talk about enlarging wealth as well as long hilly roads. In civithe mind. Some years ago I attended a lized and artificial communities there are lecture on education in the Free Trade many ways, where fools have money and Hall at Manchester. Seven or eight thou-rogues want it, of effecting a change of possand people were present, and among the session. The process is at once an intelspeakers was one of the most popular orators of the day. He talked in the usual way of the neglect of past generations, the benighted peasant, in whose besotted brain even thought was extinct, and whose sole spiritual instruction was the dull and dubious parson's sermon. Then came the con

lectual pleasure, extremely rapid, and every way more agreeable than dull mechanical labour. I doubt very much indeed whether the honesty of the country has been improved by the substitution so generally of mental education for industrial; and the three R's, if no industrial training has gone

along with them, are apt, as Miss Nightingale observes, to produce a fourth R of rascaldom.

But it is only fair, if I quarrel alike with those who go forward and those who stand still, to offer an opinion of my own. If I call other people's systems absurd, in justice I must give them a system of my own to retort upon. Well, then, to recur once more to my question. Before we begin to build, let us have a plan of the house that we would construct. Before we begin to train a boy's mind, I will try to explain what I, for my part, would desire to see done with it.

I will take the lowest scale first.

you will, but let it be knowledge which will lead to the doing better each particular work which a boy is practising, and every fraction of it will thus be useful to him; and if he has it in him to rise, there is no fear but he will find opportunity. The poet Coleridge once said that every man might have two versions of his Bible; one the book that he read, the other the trade that he pursued ; he could find perpetual illustrations of every Bible truth in the thoughts which his occupation might open to him. I would say, less fancifully, that every honest occupation to which a man sets his hand would raise him into a philosopher if he mastered all the knowledge that belonged to his craft. -I

I accept without qualification the first principle of our forefathers, that every boy Every occupation, even the meanest born into the world should be put in the way don't say the scavenger's or the chimneyof maintaining himself in honest independ-sweep's-but every productive occupation ence. No education which does not make which adds anything to the capital of manthis its first aim is worth anything at all. kind, if followed assiduously with a desire There are but three ways of living, as some to understand everything connected with it, one has said; by working, by begging, or is an ascending stair whose summit is noby stealing. Those who do not work, dis- where, and from the successive steps of guise it in whatever pretty language we which the horizon of knowledge perpetually please, are doing one of the other two. A enlarges. Take the lowest and most unpoor man's child is brought here with no skilled labour of all, that of the peasant in will of his own. We have no right to con- the field. The peasant's business is to make demn him to be a mendicant or a rogue; the earth grow food; the elementary rules of he may fairly demand therefore to be put in his art are the simplest, and the rude practhe way of earning his bread by labour. tice of it the easiest; yet between the worst The practical necessities must take prece- agriculture and the best lie agricultural dence of the intellectual. A tree must be chemistry, the application of machinery, the rooted in the soil before it can bear flowers laws of the economy of force, and the most and fruit. A man must learn to stand up-curious problems of physiology. Each step right upon his own feet, to respect himself, of knowledge gained in these things can be to be independent of charity or accident. immediately applied and realized. Each point It is on this basis only that any superstruct- of the science which the labourer masters will ure of intellectual cultivation worth having make him not only a wiser man but a better can possibly be built. The old apprentice- workman; and will either lift him, if he is ship therefore was, in my opinion, an ex- ambitious, to a higher position, or make cellent system, as the world used to be. him more intelligent and more valuable if he The Ten Commandments and a handicraft remains where he is. If he be one of Lord made a good and wholesome equipment to Brougham's geniuses, he need not go to commence life with. Times are changed. the Novum Organon; there is no direction The apprentice plan broke down: partly in which his own subject will not lead him, because it was abused for purposes of tyr-if he cares to follow it, to the furthest bounanny; partly because employers did not care to be burdened with boys whose labour was unprofitable; partly because it opened no road for exceptional clever lads to rise into higher positions; they were started in a groove from which they could never afterwards escape.

dary of thought. Only I insist on this, that information shall go along with practice, and the man's work becomes more profitable while he himself becomes wiser. He may then go far, or he may stop short; but whichever he do, what he has gained will be real gain, and become part and parcel

Yet the original necessities remain un-of himself. changed. The Ten Commandments are as obligatory as ever, and practical ability, the being able to do something and not merely to answer questions, must still be the backbone of the education of every boy who has to earn his bread by manual labour.

Add knowledge afterwards as much as

It sounds like mockery to talk thus of the possible prospects of the toil-worn drudge who drags his limbs at the day's end to his straw pallet, sleeps heavily, and wakes only to renew the weary round. I am but comparing two systems of education, from each of which the expected results may be equally