lief after the less quiet and more
mannered graces of some of the rest.

Opinions may differ more as to the value of the book as a lesson, or
as an argument. Mr Arnold had started with a strong belief in the
desirableness--indeed of the necessity--of State-control of the most
thoroughgoing kind in education; and he was not at all likely to miss
the opportunity of fetching new weapons from the very arsenals and
_places d'armes_ of that system. He was thoroughly convinced that
English ways generally, and especially the ways of English schools and
colleges, were wrong; and he had, of course, no difficulty in pointing
triumphantly to the fact that, if the institutions of Continental
countries differed in some ways from each other, they all differed in
nearly the same way from ours. It may undoubtedly be claimed for
him--by those who see any force in the argument--that events have
followed him. Education, both secondary and university in England,
_has_ to a large extent gone since on the lines he indicates; the
threatened superiority of the German bagman has asserted itself even
more and more; the "teaching of literature" has planted a terrible
fixed foot in our schools and colleges. But perhaps the weight usually
assigned to this kind of corroboration is rather imaginary. That a
thing has happened does not prove that it ought to have happened,
except on a theory of determinism, which puts "conduct" out of sight
altogether. There are those who will still, in the vein of
Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge that the system which gave us the men
who pulled us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with the
system which gave France the authors of the _debacle_; that the
successes of Germany over France in war have no necessary connection
with education, and those of Germany over England in commerce,
diplomacy, &c., still less. They will even go further--some of
them--and ask whether the Continental practices and the Arnoldian
principles do not necessitate divers terribly large and terribly
ill-based assumptions, as that all men are _educable_, that the value
of education is undiminished by its diffusion, that all, or at least
most, subjects are capable of being made educational instruments, and
a great many more.

On the other hand, they will cheerfully grant that Mr Arnold never
succumbed to that senseless belief in examination which has done, and
is doing, such infinite harm. But they will add to the debit side that
the ac