small scale on which these republics are laid out, to which the earlier years of his life were almost exclusively devoted.

Idea of Progress Wanting.

There is another great fault in this exclusive direction of the mind of youth to antiquity, and that is, that their conception of knowledge wants entirely that which is our leading conception in the present day. I do not think that you will find any where in the study of antiquity that which is now in everybody's mouth-the idea of progress. The notion of the ancients was that knowledge was a sort of permanent fixed quantity-that it could not be increased that it was to be sought for; and if a man wanted to seek for knowl edge he did not sit down and interrogate Nature, and study her phenomena, and also analyze and inquire, but he put on his seven-leagued boots and traveled to Egypt or Persia, or as far as he possibly could, in the expectation of finding some wise man there who could tell him all about it. That was the case with Plato, and almost all the great men of antiquity. Now it is no small fault of the modern system of education that it withholds that conception, the key of modern society-that is, not to look at things as stationary, but to look at the human race as, like a glacier, always advancing, always going on from good to better, from better to worse, as the case may be an endless change and development that never ceases, although we may not be able to mark it every day. That conception is entirely wanting in the antique world; and therefore it is not too much to ask that that idea should be imparted to youth before we give so much time to study the state of society in which it is wholly wanting. I won't detain you with any discussion in this place on the morals and metaphysics of the ancients. I suspect that they knew as much of the mental sciences as we do now-neither much more nor much less; and, without speaking disrespectfully of them, we may say this, that no two of them had the same opinion on the same subject. Then we are dosed with the antiquities of the ancients. Every man is expected to know how many Archons there were at Athens, though he does not know how many Lords of the Treas ury there are in London; he must know all the forms of their courts, though he knows hardly the names of our own. He must be dosed with their laws and institutions—things excessively repulsive to the young mind—things only valuable for comparing with our own institutions, of which he is kept profoundly ignorant.

Ancient Geography.

A large portion of time is spent in studying divisions of countries that have long ceased to exist, or have any practical bearing on the world. Of course, if you are to study the language of the ancients, these things must be learned; but is it not melancholy to think how much modern geography is sacrificed to this knowledge? There is nothing in which young men are more deficient than in geography. I shall just mention a few things within my own knowledge. Take, for instance, Australia. It is very rare to find a person who knows where the colonies of Australia are. The island of Jaya is said to have been given up by Lord Castlereagh at the Treaty of Vienna to the Dutch because he could not find it in the map, and was ashamed to confess his ignoI remember a very eminent member of the House of Commons indeed -I will not mention his name-who made a speech in which it was quite

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manifest to me that he thought that Upper Canada was nearest the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and Lower Canada was higher up the river. If I were to ellt you his name you would be astonished. Well, we are going to make an expe dition to Abyssinia. The whole thing depends upon the nature of the country. Now, what do we know about it? There is a great deal to be known about it. A great many men have traveled there, and a great deal has been written about it. It is as much as most men can do to find it on the map, and very few know a single town in it. I have amused myself trying to see how few men know where Gondar, the capital of this country, is situated on the map; and as the prisoners we are going to attempt to rescue can probably only be reached by going there, and so to Magdala, it is nearly as important to know where it is as to know that Halicarnassus was the capital city of Caria, or that there were twenty-three cities of the Volscians in the Campagna of Rome. There is another illustration I may give. The name of the place is in the Bible, and we might have hoped better things. You will remember that Mr. Bright in last session of Parliament denominated certain gentlemen by a name derived from a cave. Well, I assure you, gentlemen, there was not one person in twenty whom I met who knew any thing about the Cave of Adullam, and I was under the melancholy and cruel necessity of explaining it to them, and of pointing the arrow that was aimed against my own breast. After all, gentlemen, education is a preparation for actual life, and I ask you—though no doubt the memory is exercised and the faculties are sharpened by these studies in some degree-whether they really in any degree fulfill that condition. I say there is nothing so valuable for a man as to avoid credulity. If he discounts a man's bill, he should inquire before he does it. But what we are taught by this kind of study, our attention being so much placed upon words, is to take every thing for granted. We find a statement in Thucydides, or Cornelius Nepos, who wrote 500 years afterwards, and we never are instructed that the statement of the latter is not quite as good as the former. And so with other things. The study of the dead languages precludes the inquiring habit of mind which measures probability, which is one of the most important that a man can acquire.

Deficiencies in the Education of a Public School or University Man.

I will now give you a catalogue of things which a highly-educated man-one who may have received the best education at the highest public schools, or at Oxford-may be in total ignorance of. He probably will know nothing of the anatomy of his own body. He will not have the slightest idea of the difference between the arteries and the veins, and he may not know whether the spleen is placed on the right or the left side of his spine. He may have no knowledge of the simplest truths of physics, and would not be able to explain the barometer or thermometer. He knows nothing of the simplest laws of animal or vegetable life. He need not know, he very often does not know, any thing about arithmetic, and that ignorance sticks to him through life; he knows nothing of accounts, he does not know the meaning of double entry, or even a common debtor and creditor account. He may write an execrable hand; good clear writing-perhaps the most important qualification a gentleman or man of business can possess-is totally neglected. He may be perfectly deficient in spelling. I knew an eminent person who got a first-class honor, and in his essay-a most excellent English essay-there were forty-six

mis-spellings. He may know nothing of the modern geography of his own country; he may know nothing of the history of England. I knew an instance not long ago of a gentleman who had attained high honors at the University, and who became a contributor to a periodical, in which it was suggested he should illustrate some fact by reference to Lord Melbourne's Ministry. He said he had never heard of Lord Melbourne. He need know nothing whatever of modern history-how the present polity of Europe came into effect. He need know nothing of medieval history, and that is a matter of serious importance, because important results have flowed from ignorance of that history. Great schisms have arisen in the Church of England from absurdly-exaggerated ideas of the perfection of every thing in that dreadful period; and the state of gross ignorance in which people are left as to these times seems almost to lead them to suppose that the best thing that modern society could aim at would be to return to the state of things which existed when the first crusade was projected. He may be in a state of utter ignorance of the antiquities or the law of England; he knows the laws and antiquities of Greece and Rome. The English laws and antiquities are bound up with our freedom and history, and are important to every day's business; but he knows about them nothing whatever. We have, I here say boldly, a literature unparalleled in the world. Which of our great classical authors is a young man required to read in order to attain the highest honors our educational institutions can give him? He studies in the most minute manner the ancient writings of Rome or Greece. But as for Chaucer and Spenser, or the earlier classics, the old dramatists, or the writers of the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and Charles I, he knows nothing of them; and the consequence is that our style is impoverished, and the noble old language of our forefathers drops out of use, while the minds of our young men are employed instead in stringing together scraps of Latin poets learned by heart, and making them into execrable hexameters. Then as for modern languages There is some feeble sort of attempt to teach them, but nothing effective; and yet surely, if English is to have a preference over modern languages, as it ought to have, modern languages ought to have a preference, as far as the practical affairs of life are concerned, over ancient languages. I have been with a party of half-a-dozen first-class Oxford gentlemen on the Continent, and not one spoke a word of French or German; and if the waiter had not been better educated than we, and known some other language than his own, we might all have starved. That is not nearly all, but that is enough. I think you will agree with me that, as Dr. Johnson said of the provisions of the Highland inn, the negative catalogue is very copious, and I therefore sum up what I have to say on this point by making this remark, that our education does not communicate to us knowledge, that it does not communicate to us the means of obtaining knowledge, and that it does not communicate to us the means of communicating knowledge.

These three capital deficiencies are undoubted; and what makes these so painful is the thought of the enormous quantities of things eminently worth knowing in this world. I have spoken only of modern history, of modern languages; but what are modern history and languages compared with the boundless field that nature opens out-with the new world which chemistry is expanding before us-with the old world that geology has called again into existence with the wonderful generalization with regard to plants and ani

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mals, and all those noble studies and speculations which are the glory and distinction and life-blood of the time in which we live, and of which our youth remain, almost without exception, totally ignorant? It is not too much to say, that the man who becomes really well educated must begin his education after it has closed. After all had been done for him that the present miserable, contracted, and poor system can do, he has to begin and educate himself over again, with a feeling that he has wasted the best and most precious years of his life on things neither useless nor unprofitable in themselves, but which were the mere by-paths or appanages to the knowledge which constitutes the mental stock of a man of erudition.

Influence of Educational Endowments.

How are we to account for this phenomenon-how, with physical science in the state that it is, with such a history as ours, with such a literature as ours, with such a literature as that of modern Europe before us, we should turn aside from this rich banquet, and content ourselves with gnawing at mouldy crusts of speculations which have passed away upwards of two thousand years? How are we to account for this? It is easily accounted for. It is mainly the fault of educational endowments. When the educational endowments of Universities were made, there really existed no English literature. Modern history had not begun; mediæval history was only to be found in meagre annals of monkish chroniclers. Physical science was not in existence at all; and there really was nothing to direct the mind except Latin and Greek, and Aristotelian logic. No blame, therefore, attaches to those noble and philanthropic persons who made these foundations. The blame is in those who, after the immense expansion of knowledge, have not found means to expand the objects to which these endowments may apply in a similar proportion. Nor does any blame attach to our Universities, considered strictly as such-meaning by a University a body that ought to examine and test the advancement of its pupils; because our Universities do give examinations, and are willing, I am sure, to give them on any subject on which pupils can be found. But the blame lies with the Government of this country, because these endowments which are now exclusively given to Latin, Greek, and mathematics, are really, in my opinion, public property, for the use of which the State, as representing the public, is responsible. So long as they answer the end that endowments should answer, they should be let alone. When they do not, it is our business to reform them. Now what end do they answer? The end that they answer is this-they give an enormous bounty, an enormous premium, on the study of the dead languages, and of pure mathematics. Well, the studies of the dead languages, and of pure mathematics, are noble and valuable studies, and if that was all I would not object. But you know very well you can not give a premium to one study without discouraging another, and though their first effect is to give a premium to these studies, their collateral and far more important effect is to discourage, and, I would say, prevent, all those other studies which appear to me infinitely more worthy of a place in education. If a young man has talent, and is in want of money, as any young man is apt to be, and wants to turn his talent to advantage, suppose he devotes himself to physical science in Oxford, he can gain a first-class, whatever good that will do him. But there is hardly an endowment open to him; whereas, if he gave the same trouble to Latin and

Greek, he might be a Fellow of half a dozen different colleges with the most perfect ease. How can you expect these studies to get fair play, when they are so handicapped, when the whole weight of these endowments, amounting to about half a million annually, is thrown into the scale of the dead languages, and the study of pure mathematics? The fault lies, therefore, with the Government, which has not reformed these endowments; and the remedy; as it appears to me, is that these endowments should be emancipated from this narrow application, so that the emoluments that are to be obtained for learning, may be impartially distributed among all the branches of human knowledgenot proscribing the subjects to which I have alluded, but not giving them these invidious preferences over all the rest.

The same thing applies to our public schools. They are really adventure schools, kept by masters for their own profit. There is a foundation which forms the nucleus, and that foundation is generally for the purpose of teaching Latin and Greek, and that overrules and dominates the schools. The remedy is in the hands of parents; but these schools have got a good-will such as no other institution in the country has got. A man that has been at a school, however badly taught he has been, however much he has been flogged, always goes away with an affection for it. He forgets his troubles. It is a time that appears to us all very pleasant in the retrospect; and as these troubles are to be undergone not again by himself, but by his son, he always sends him there. No doubt, if we could only secure a fair stage and no favor for all the different branches of instruction, the thing would remedy itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not think it is any part of the duty of Government to prescribe what people should learn, except in the case of the poor, where time is so limited that we must fix upon a few elementary subjects to get any thing done at all. I think it is the duty of the parents to fix what their children should learn. But then the State should stand impartial, and not by endowments necessarily force education into these channels, and leave those others dry. And, therefore, what I would press is, that somehow or other the endowments should be so recast as to give all subjects-physical science, modern history, English history, English law, ancient languages, ancient literature, ancient history, ancient philosophy, all a fair and equal start.

You will say, How is it possible for this to be done? I don't presume to say what is the best way of doing it, but I can tell you one way it can be done, because I have done it myself. I was Secretary to the India Board at the time when the writerships were thrown open to public competition. We had of course the problem to solve then, because if we had restricted them to Latin and Greek, of course we should have excluded a great number of very meritorious candidates-gentlemen, for instance, coming from the Scotch Universities, who, though very well versed in the philosophy of mind, and many other valuable studies, would not have been able to compete perhaps successfully in classics with boys trained in the English public schools. And therefore we had to attempt to do something of the kind that I have endeavored to point out to you as being necessary to do. In order to solve the problem of education, I, with the assistance of Lord Macaulay and other eminent men, prepared a scale which has since, with very little change, been the scale upon which these offices have been distributed; that is, we took every thing that we could think of that a well-educated man could learn.. We took all the languages: we took