shall have to give a negative answer, just so long as we do not look upon all these as the truly disciplinary studies, and the elements of all these as the true elementary studies, the very school-studies fitted, above all others, for maturing the youthful mind, and filling it with true wisdom. So long as we insist upon approaching them through the operose and roundabout method of dead-language studies, schooldays will flee away, and the object will not be accomplished. The great vice of our education, as has been well said, is its indirectness.

Combining the ideas which I have thus presented-1. That the study of foreign languages as languages, whether dead or living, holds a place in our present education-philosophy quite out of proportion to its real value and importance, and that it is the discipline of philosophy which we are indirectly aiming at, behind and through the discipline of language; 2. That it is through one tongue and not many that that discipline can best be imparted, inasmuch as that is the only one that can or will ever, by the majority of men, be really mastered; and, 3. That now, for the first time, there is the possibility, through the progress of modern linguistic science, of a scientific and systematic study of the mother-tongue-I arrive at the conclusion that we are presently to have, as a substitute for the exclusive or almost exclusive use of classical languages and literatures, as the main disciplinary element in liberal education, a systematic study of the English language and a recognition of its literature as primary, not secondary. And surely it is a strange phenomenon, if it be true, as a foreign scholar has recently maintained,' that the sovereignty of the world is hereafter to belong to the English language; and if it be true, as I think may well be maintained, that with this conquering language we possess the world's foremost literature, it is a strange phenomenon that we think them so little worthy of systematic study, give them a place so subordinate as instruments of our own liberal culture, that to-day we must go to the Germans for a good English grammar; to the French for the best, if a very defective, history of our literature. To my mind, no more striking illustration could be given of our want of a true education-philosophy.

How has it happened that we still lack such a philosophy? The answer to that question brings me to my next point, and the third new ingredient in the liberal education of the future, the element contributed by republicanism. I have said that the science of education was still in its infancy; I believe that it is only as a part of republican institutions that it can reach maturity. For the only true liberal education is the education of man as man; the only truly liberal system is that which can be applied to a whole nation, and such a system is only possible as a part of republican institutions. And, when we consider how short a time we have been living under them, and how crude and imperfect they still are, it is not strange that they have not yet pro1 De Candolle.

duced what will be rather one of their maturest than one of their earliest fruits, a truly liberal education-system.

The history of our errors in regard to liberal education is a very plain one. They are the legacy of the mother-country from which we came, a mother-country which is just beginning to correct her own errors, even by the light of our limited experience. I wish to point out and emphasize the fact that republicanism revolutionizes our very conception of liberal education. All forms of liberal education of the past, and preeminently the one we borrowed from England, were forms of exclusive class-education. The idea of caste was involved in their very conception, to such a degree that the phrase, the liberal education of the people, was a contradiction in terms. The antithesis was, popular versus liberal education. There was the illiberal or servile education of the masses, designed to fit them for the humble station in which it had pleased Providence to place them, and to content them therewith; there was the liberal education of the exclusive learned professions, and the exclusive aristocratic class, which was liberal by virtue of its being the education of the rulers and not the ruled.' Now, republicanism, by converting the people into rulers, transfers to them the claim to a liberal education, which shall be universal. A transfer of the power alone, without a transfer of the privilege and the opportunity necessary to prepare for the exercise of it, cannot but be disastrous. If republicanism is to remain republicanism, and not degenerate into oligarchy or plutocracy, or end in anarchy, there must be one homogeneous education-system for all, and that one the highest attainable. The line of demarcation between liberal and illiberal must be obliterated, and what cannot be called liberal will be seen to be no education at all, but only a miserable counterfeit, by which privileged classes strive to perpetuate obsolete distinctions and indefensible abuses. For a republic, there can be but one system, and one set of schools; its education, begun on the lowest benches of its national primary schools, will one day be completed in the halls of its national universities. There will be no question as to the relative dignity of protected and unprotected professions, or callings, or classes, but all will

...

3 "Religious teaching, from Episcopal charges down to the lessons of the Sundayschool, was, for a long time, as most of us can remember, in the habit of assuming that true religion was identified with government by the upper classes. . . . We may safely say that neither from Catholic nor from Protestant theology could we extract any formal witness in favor of the acquisition of political power by the humbler and more numerous classes. But the lower classes have not been content to stay in their places. Whatever the Church has taught, democracy has advanced irresistibly. Privilege after privilege has been wrenched out of the grasp of the favored classes, power has gradually descended, by the steps of the social stairs, until it has joined hands with the last class at the bottom. At the present time, it is a confessed fact, whether we like it or not, that the workingclass, if it had peculiar interests, and were unanimously resolved to promote them, might dictate the policy of the empire."—(Rev. J. Llwellyn Davies, "Theology and Morality," pp. 10, 12.)

be reckoned liberal which train and educate the faculties of man as man.1

Now, the only conception of a liberal education that will satisfy these new conditions, the only conception of an education capable of becoming national and universal, at the same time that it is liberal, is that of a training of the national mind through the mother-tongue as the chief, and other tongues as the subordinate instruments, in the elements of all those branches of knowledge which, used in their rudiments as elements of general training, will develop, in their higher stages, into the objects of professional pursuits. Is there any other distinction than this between general and professional? In the infancy of knowledge, all callings, trades, and professions, are mysteries, whose secrets are carefully guarded from the uninitiated. Every mechanic belongs to his trade-guild, and has his trade-secrets. When Philip of Burgundy destroyed the little town of Dinant, in the Low Countries, the art of making copper vessels became, for the time being, a lost art. With the progress of general intelligence mystery falls away from simpler occupations, but still attaches to

1

1 Nothing seems to me more thoroughly unrepublican and illiberal than the ground taken, by some who profess to be preeminently the advocates of liberal learning, against the promotion of higher education by grants from the state. Let the state promote the advancement of elementary education, they say, but for higher institutions to handle government moneys is only to touch pitch, and therewith be defiled. The distinction represents a remnant of aristocratic feeling, aud springs from the idea that it is the duty of the educated, as a higher class, to take a paternal care for the masses; not the duty of the people, as a self-governing community, to give itself a liberal education. One cannot well see a higher function to be performed by the people, acting as a body, than to promote, by public action, its own higher education. If a line is to be drawn, beyond which its action should not reach, where shall it be drawn? Shall the people be allowed to promote the teaching of the three R's, and the four rules of arithmetic, but be forbidden to meddle with any thing beyond them? And in whose hands is the higher education to remain, in a country which has no established church? Is its progress forever to remain at the fitful mercy of an unenlightened and unsystematic private charity? The question as to the right means and methods of governmental action is undoubtedly a grave one, but no educational waste of state or national resources is ever likely to equal the waste arising from the capricious absurdity of private endowments. We have, indeed, of late, been startled by revelations of government corruption, but they have but a poor notion of the capacities of republicanism who are scared by them into that meanest of all political theories, the doctrine that the sole function of a government is merely to enact the part of head constable.

A far juster view is that propounded by one of the best of England's teachers. "As the condition of social, and, to some extent, political independence," says the Rev. Mark Pattison, "is necessary to prevent material interests from stifling and absorbing studies, so the condition of sympathy with the general mind is necessary both to sustain the required activity and to make the university a proper seminary for the education of the national youth. The nation does not hire a number of learned men to teach its children: it itself educates them, through an organ into which its own best intellect, its scientific genius, is regularly drafted. This education is, in short, nothing but the free action of life and society, localized, economized, and brought to bear."-(" Oxford Essays for 1855," p. 259.)

VOL. IV.-2

what are called the learned professions. The layman has nothing to do with the study of the science of theology: that must be expounded to him by his priest. The layman has nothing to do with the science of medicine: he must be cured, or, more probably, killed, secundum artem, by his physician. The layman has nothing to do with the science of the law: it is his business to get into lawsuits, and it is the lawyer's secret how to extricate him. But these superstitions, the relics of an age of popular ignorance, are in their turn disappearing, as just ideas of what constitutes real knowledge begin to penetrate the minds of the whole people. It is seen that, so far from being mysterious, such knowledge is the very substance and material of sound education for all men; and the layman will no longer allow himself to be led blindfold by priest, or lawyer, or physician, for there is no longer any magical sacredness in their callings. And thus it comes about that a knowledge of physiology, which will help save the patient from any need of a physician; a knowledge of law, that shall obviate the necessity for lawsuits; a knowledge of political science and history worthy of men who have become their own rulers; a knowledge of political economy, that shall raise the honorable calling of the merchant to the dignity of a liberal profession; a knowledge of theology that shall save us the degrading spectacle of the unchristian quarrels of bigoted and superstitious sects-are reckoned more and more to be essential elements in all education. It is only on sound general knowledge, disseminated through the whole people by a liberal education of the whole people, that we shall ever build up professions, in regard to which we are not forced to entertain a doubt as to whether they are not on the whole more of a curse to us than a blessing.' And an education of this sort must be begun in the primary school, must have for its instrument the mother-tongue. It cannot be based on the study of Greek particles, or any amount of skill, either in the reading or the manufacture of Latin verses.

It is sometimes said that we, who have received this liberal education we decry, are ungrateful in thus decrying it, and unconscious of, and insensible to, all the benefits we derive from it. I am conscious of no ingratitude in agreeing with an eminent Scotchman who discusses these subjects, when he says, in speaking of knowledge and studies such as I have been enumerating: "I am sure no one seriously applies himself to such studies without wishing that he had given to them many hours in his youth which he fooled away, in obedience to his 'pastors

"We need diffused knowledge in the community to sustain soundness of public opinion, and prevent the perversion of separate sciences into black arts and professional secrets." (Prof. Newman, on the Relations of Free Knowledge to Modern Sentiments.) The affirmation of Prof. Seeley is destined, I fear, to find an illustration in the experience of this country, "that a people will never have a supply of competent politicians until political science . . is made a prominent part of the higher education.”—Inaugu.

...

ral Address on the Teaching of Politics.

and masters,' in learning what he has now forgotten, and to recall which he would not now take the trouble to raise his little finger. I was the docile and diligent receiver of such training as, in my youth, a "classical school" and our oldest New-England college had to give, and surely it is from no vanity that I say that I was also a recipient of their honors; and it is from the melancholy feeling that my formal education was so barren and empty when looked at from the standpoint of real life, and real thought, and real mental training, that I am so earnest an advocate of changes that I believe will give to future generations the reality instead of the pretense of an education.

I come now to the study of Physical Science, as from this time forward destined to play a wholly new part in our system of liberal education. Nowhere, save in that astonishing document, the Syllabus of his holiness Pope Pius IX., can any education-philosophy be found so benighted as not to recognize its value and importance. Yet I am far from believing that its true place, as a factor in the new education, has yet been determined. While, on the one hand, among the old high-and-dry advocates of the grindstone-system, certain merits and a subordinate place are beginning to be grudgingly allowed it, we are in danger, on the other hand, in this new country of ours, whose vast material resources are waiting for development through its instrumentality, rather of overrating than underrating its purely educational function. It is not as an economical instrument for the development of material wealth that I have here to deal with it, though that is a very important aspect, but considered as a factor in a system of education, and, as such, I claim for it no monopoly, but only a place as the indispensable complement to those ethical and linguistic studies which have heretofore monopolized the title of a liberal education, and which, from the absence of science from that form of education, have been reduced to their present effete and impotent condition. It is to the incorporation into it of the study of science that we are to look as the source of new life-blood.

You will not expect me to attempt to deal here with the great subject which forever occupies the minds of speculative thinkers, and never more than at the present moment-the true relations of the world of matter and the world of mind. That is too large a subject to be dealt with, though upon right views regarding it will greatly depend the correctness even of our educational theories. I will only say, that though I am as far as possible from being an adherent of any form of materialism, yet I believe that physical science is destined to be the great instrument of these modern days to give new forms to our philosophy and our theology—to give new forms to the same everlasting problems, but not to give us new philosophy or new theology. It will but cast old truths in new moulds, while it explodes old super

1 Mountstuart, E. Grant Duff, Inaugural Address as Rector of the University of Aberdeen, p. 22.