but faintly guess, though we may clearly foresee their direction, is it absolutely ordained that centuries hence, even to the very end of time, our remotest posterity shall learn precisely what their ancestors learned, in default of anything else, and be taught precisely as their ancestors, in the infancy of the teaching art, were taught? Had we to begin anew, to construct anew the educational edifice, few, perhaps, would say that it ought to be a faithful copy of the old? Can the present system, then, be not merely the result of historic causes, necessary and even useful in its season, but the fulfilment of providential decree, which must be binding now, henceforward, and for evermore? If not, then it is wise to inquire whether the time has not arrived for introducing changes which may facilitate and promote farther gradual change hereafter. I venture to think that this time has arrived, and that, in the interest of whatever is good in the old system itself, it is well to modify what it is impossible long to preserve unchanged. The present system is clearly untenable, and its doom is, I think, a question of time only. It is because I attach a high value to the educational influence of Greek and Latin, in proper place, and time, and mode, that I presume to invite the attention of this department to the questions stated in the programme-" Why? When? For whom?" These three questions are intimately blended. None of them can, apart from the others, be fully answered. On the first, the reasons why, I need not enlarge. They have been lately stated, for the ten thousandth time, but with unusual freshness and force, by Mr. Bonamy Price, who, being himself a bright example of the good effects of such culture, is modest enough to assume that most others to whom it is applied are quite as good as he. But on all those reasons it suffices to remark that not one of them applies to any but to an advanced school-age, when only can the youth really appreciate the high work in which he is engaged. The wretched reality which experience reveals is in contrast, at once ludicrous and painful, with the glowing picture painted by Mr. Price.

As regards the second and third questions, taken always in conjunction with the first, I can only briefly say, as the result of my own experience and reflection, that by deferring these studies to a later period of life, by thus reducing the number of those to whom. this instruction is administered, and the amount of time devoted to it, as well as the area over which it is spread, a greater amount of good would, on the whole, be achieved. Fewer persons would learn Latin and Greck, but those few would learn them more thoroughly and with greater profit. The fact that now, after all the expenditure of time and labour, so small a proportion of those taught exhibit even fair attainments, is conclusive against the present system, which sacrifices the many needlessly and wrongly for the sake of a select few. Nor can it be justly said, though it is often said, that even if no great knowledge of the tongues, and no knowledge of the literatures, have been acquired, still a useful training has been gone through, and the mental powers have been strengthened and suppled

by exercise. I much fear that the influence is quite the other way, and tends to discouragement, apathy, distaste for learning, mental compression, and mental torpor. "The labour we delight in phy sics pain." Intellectual occupation, in which the intellect is a willing agent, not a drudging slave, and intellectual progress, are needful for even moral health. Mental vacuity is at the root of much moral mischief; and congenial mental work is one of the best preventives of the vices which idleness ever fosters.

In discussing this subject, we are too apt to fix our attention on the favourable exceptions, the small minority who seem to have really derived advantage from the process through which they have passed, and we are tempted to forget that it is to "the mass" that education ought to be adapted, and by its success with the mass that every system must be tested. What should we say if a Sheffield cutler were to boast that five, or even ten, per cent. of his knives were sharp, and strong, and bright? We should be disposed to inquire about the remaining ninety, and to draw no favourable inference as to their cutting power.

Again, we are often confronted by a distinction which, though sound enough in itself, has little real application here. Instruction, we are told, is one thing, education is another; even of instruction the imparting of knowledge is not the chief part, while of education it is but a small and a very subordinate part. Very true; but it by no means follows that those subjects which are capable of what is called useful application in actual life are devoid of educational influence in the process of their acquisition. The question is really much less one of subject than of method. Any subject may be taught intellectually, suggestively, improvingly, or in a dull, mechanical, stupifying way. Because much present teaching of Latin and Greek is of this latter kind, I do not argue against all teaching of Latin and Greek. But, on the other hand, I contend that it is most unjust to speak, for example, of physical science as a mere congeries of detached facts-the learning of which can give no beneficial training to the mind, no real exercise to any of its powers, except to memory. Were our scholars and our teachers themselves better instructed in such subjects, they would find, I think, that the processes of observation, generalisation, and induction, through which a pupil may carefully led, afford a mental discipline of the highest value, and do much to train to habits of mental accuracy, cautious inquiry, conscientious balancing of probabilities, steady and honest work. It may be that even in training power, the words of dead men are not equal to the works of the living God!

Again, it is not unusual to speak and write as if outside of the charmed circle of Greek and Roman letters, all were barren, arid, prosaic, commonplace, mechanical and cold. The very exclusiveness with which the term "classics" is popularly restricted to Latin and Greek is a standing monument of this fallacy. Are such writers 25 Shakspere, and Milton, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson, in our own tongue, or in others, as Göthe, and Schiller, and Dante, and Ariosto,

and Rousseau, and De Staël, incapable of inspiring literary enthusiasm, or exercising critical taste? The case would not be altered were any amount of indebtedness to the ancients proved against the moderns.

Even if the superiority of Greek and Latin over all living tongues be admitted (and I may say, in passing, that, without large qualifi cations, I cannot admit it), it is not a necessary sequence that those other languages are not important means of mental discipline, if rightly taught, as well as of high utility in the affairs of life. The whole question is comparative. It is not what subjects are, in one or other way, useful; but what subjects are, upon the whole, the most useful in degree, as in kind; which are the indispensable, and which the merely advantageous or ornamental. Now, I cannot but hope and believe that, in this matter, the progress of opinion is tending towards this conclusion, that those subjects most useful to the poor as well as to the rich, to women as well as to men, those most akin to the deep unity of our common human nature, are the subjects to which attention ought, in every case, to be directed first and chiefly; that the essentials of education (not confounding essential with necessary, as we often do) are in all cases the same, and based on those things in which we all agree, not on those in which we differ. In urging the other day, in this place, that the education of girls ought, in all essential respects, to be assimilated to that of boys, I did not mean that it should be made like to that of boys, as it now exists. May heaven forbid! but rather that each should borrow from the other whatever it has of good, and that both should grow towards a common and still distant ideal. So with the rich and the poor; the great substratum ought, it seems to me, to be in both cases alike; it being the enviable privilege of the former to superadd whatever other culture their greater leisure and ampler means may enable them to obtain.

According to the length of time given by the pupil to the school would be the gradation and development of his studies. No boy, leaving any school, say at the age of even twelve years, would be ignorant of his own language as a means of communication, by writing as well as by speech, of the elements of natural science, especially of his own bodily structure and of the laws of conduct, without some dawning but ever brightening perception of the inter-dependence of all human interests rightly understood, and without some purpose, strengthening "with the suns," to guide his own life accordingly, to seek his own blessing in blessing others, to do good to others by improving himself; unable to observe, and think and reason, but able to repeat snatches of Latin grammar rules, to decline certain nouns and adjectives, to conjugate certain verbs, a kind of knowledge which I venture to think extremely unimportant, unless it be carried forward to higher attainments, methodised and utilised by study of its literature.

A boy prolonging his stay at school beyond the period necessary for acquiring the amount and sort of knowledge and of training at

which I have but hinted, would, besides deepening and widening and fixing his knowledge of those subjects, and confirming his mental and moral habits, extend his range of study, and acquire more or less of one or more modern tongues, say French and German, the teaching being ever reflected upon that of the ver nacular, and would take up other branches which it is impossible for me here to specify in detail.

Lastly, these youths who should prolong still farther their school period would, in reduced numbers, with faculties well disciplined, with a love of congenial mental exercise-such as every human being has in greater or in less degree, if it be not crushed by bad teaching or by neglect-with a clear perception of the use, as well as of the pleasure of learning, with minds maturer and more vigorous, enter on the study, say, first of Latiu and then of Greek. The progress now so slow, painful, unequal, and irregular, would be vastly more rapid, pleasant, uniform, and sure. Cramming of the memory, now declared to be indispensable with the very young, would, at a later age, be superseded by intelligible explanation, and intelligent perception of principles; the authors read would be better comprehended, better appreciated, more enjoyed; the knowledge of words, constructions, idioms would grow swiftly, insensibly, day by day; the judgment and taste first exercised on the writings of their own country's authors, would be brought easily to bear on those of Rome and Greece; the beauties of Homer, and Horace, and Virgil, and Sopho cles, and Livy, and Thucydides, would not, as now, be wasted on dull and unwilling ears, but would be really felt; and all the good effects, intellectual, æsthetic and moral, which-in the hands of a skilful teacher, with a heart in his bosom-and not merely a mass of learned lumber in his head-such studies can undoubtedly be made to yield, would really be accomplished, and not merely imagined, and in the great majority of cases imagined falsely-to be accomplished. Fewer persons would then be taught Latin and Greek; but more persons would learn them than now-they would learn them with greater case, satisfaction and advantage in many ways.

This they would do without neglect, nay, to the gain of other studies, now too much neglected. Those who could not carry on a training in Latin and Greek to any really useful point, would not have wasted their time, but would have gained that kind and amount of knowledge and discipline, to which Latin and Greek may be a most admirable complement, but for which their verbal elements are a most wretched substitute.

Let no one, therefore, denounce me as "an enemy of Latin and of Greek," "a foe to liberal culture," "a low utilitarian,” “an advocate of cramming as opposed to training-of bread and butter sciences, in opposition to education worthy of the name; or pelt me with any other verbal missiles, such as, in this controversy, are too freely used. I am, I confess, a strict utilitarian; but it is a high and broad, not a low and narrow, utility for which I contend; imagination itself I maintain to be truly and nobly useful. I am at heart a friend to Latin

and Greek. I would not lightly part with my own knowledge of either, though it might have been far less dearly purchased.

I would, it is true, save multitudes from the mistake, the misery, and the mischief of merely pretending to learn them; but I would make the teaching real and fruitful wherever it is attempted, and I would put no limit to the height or depth to which it should be carried by those so disposed. I may, of course, be in error as to the proposed means, but I am quite certain that the end I aim at is the improvement, and the binding together, of all classes of the community by a rational and generous education, common to all in its main principles and essential features, but capable of wide diversities in its later developments, according to the means, the talents, the dispo sitions, the destinations, social or professional, of its individual members, male or female, rich or poor.

THE

THE ECONOMICAL VALUE OF EDUCATION.

The Politico-Economical Value of a Sound Elementary Education of the Wage-Class. By the REV. J. LETTIS SHORT. THE phases of the education question are as numerous as they are important. The safest and the most impregnable ground for the advocates of the education of the wage-class is the broad one on which it is maintained that, God having given to each human being a specific amount of intellectual and moral faculty, society is bound, by the most solemn obligations, to cultivate and unfold it by means of a sound elementary education, and then to send it into life to work out the best results it can effect for its individual possessor, and through him, for society at large. Our duty and our interest are equally involved in the prosecution of this course. Unfortunately for the common weal, the blindness and the selfishness of man have alike impeded the great result, and an appeal has to be made to lower motives to aid its coming.

I hope to show that a sound elementary education of the wageclass has a politico-economical value that is inestimably great, even if viewed simply in relation to the special education of that class received during their apprenticeship to their various trades and manufactures-a view of its value that is specially contracted, because any extension of it beyond these limits would demand a treatise that should embrace the primary causes of the vast advances of recent civilisation, those advances, as I believe, having chiefly grown out of the better, but still most imperfect, education of the mass of men that has prevailed during the last fifty years.

What, now, is the object in view when a boy is apprenticed to a tradesman or manufacturer? It is not, I grant you, his initiation into the convenient, impressive, and powerful expressions of mental action that are embodied in books and the fine arts; but it is his