lication to life, and to that end it is admirably fitted. I am not
intending to compare in detail the value of one study with that of
another. I make no pretence at estimating their relative potentialities.
That proceeding may be left to the ignorance or the intolerance of the
man of one idea. He will settle it for us, and we will duly disregard
him. It is, for example, not the cultivated scientist, not the wise
scientist, who urges those huge and exorbitant claims which are
sometimes advanced for physical science in these days--for electricity
and chemistry and _ologies_. The true scientist may perhaps prefer that
his kine should be the fat kine--for he is but human--but he does not
desire them to be the only kine and to eat up all the rest.

But, though we are not to compare all the possibilities of this and that
study, we can appeal to one unquestionable fact. When it comes to the
tasks of citizenship, to settling human questions for legislation and
the arguments of justice, to intelligent voting and the like, the
student of those human documents which we call literature is found more
often to the front than the student of anything else whatsoever. It
would be worth while, if we had the time, to make a list of the great
statesmen and great initiators who have been men of letters or of
literary culture. Not physical science, not the region of mathematics,
seem to have equipped the mind so fully for this complex, this
motive-determined department of life.

Literature deals with man and the mind of man, and, whether it be right
or no to hold that "the proper study of mankind is man," we must
acknowledge that man, and the workings of his mind and spirit, play the
preponderating part in the region of social order and social happiness.
It is literature and no other study which embraces the wide, the
all-round, the long-practised survey "of man, of nature, and of human
life" necessary for a luminous intelligence.

A Huxley will remind us that, in any case, what we are bound to study is
"not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways, and the
fashioning of the affections and the will." Doubtless we must observe as
well as read. But our own observation of life, however shrewd, is
insufficient; it is narrow and partial. We see but the minutest fraction
of time and the minutest fraction of humanity. It is from literature
that we learn most vividly and most efficaciously all that can really be
known "of men and the