ot know what we are aiming at. Our school and
university systems aim at present at an austere standard of mental
discipline, and then fail to enforce it, by making inevitable
concessions to the mental weakness inherited from long generations
trained upon the system of starvation. The system, indeed, too often
reminds me of an old picture in Punch, of genteel poverty dining in
state; in a room hung with portraits, attended by footmen, two
attenuated persons sit, while a silver cover is removed from a dish
containing a roasted mouse. The resources that ought to be spent on a
wholesome meal are wasted in keeping up an ideal of state. Of course
there is something noble in all sacrifice of personal comfort and
health to a dignified ideal; but it is our business at present to fill
the dish rather than to insist on the cover being of silver.

One very practical proof of the disbelief which the public has in
education is that, while the charges of public schools have risen
greatly in the last fifty years, the margin is all expended in the
comfort of boys, and in opportunities for athletic exercises; while
masters, at all but a very few public schools, are still so poorly paid
that it is impossible for the best men to adopt the profession, unless
they have an enthusiasm which causes them to put considerations of
personal comfort aside. It is only too melancholy to observe at the
University that the men of vigour and force tend to choose the Civil
Service or the Bar in preference to educational work. I cannot wonder
at it. The drudgery of falling in with the established system, of
teaching things in which there is no interest to be communicated, of
insisting on details in the value of which one does not believe, is
such that few people, except unambitious men, who have no special
mental bent, adopt the profession; and these only because the imparting
of the slender accomplishments that they have gained is an obvious and
simple method of earning a livelihood.

The blame must, I fear, fall first upon the Universities. I am not
speaking of the education there provided for the honour men, which is
often excellent of its kind; though it must be confessed that the
keenest and best enthusiasm seems to me there to be drifting away from
the literary side of education. But while an old and outworn humanist
tradition is allowed to prevail, while the studies of the average
passman are allowed to be diffuse, desultory, and aimless, and of a