the only
competent judges in such matters. Newton and Cuvier lowered themselves
when the one accepted an idle knighthood, and the other became a
baron of the empire. The great men who went to their graves as Michael
Faraday and George Grote seem to me to have understood the dignity of
knowledge better when they declined all such meretricious trappings.

But it is one thing for the State to appeal to the vanity and ambition
which are to be found in philosophical as in other breasts, and
another to offer men who desire to do the hardest of work for the most
modest of tangible rewards, the means of making themselves useful to
their age and generation. And this is just what the State does when it
founds a public library or museum, or provides the means of scientific
research by such grants of money as that administered by the Royal
Society.

It is one thing, again, for the State to take all the higher education
of the nation into its own hands; it is another to stimulate and to
aid, while they are yet young and weak, local efforts to the same
end. The Midland Institute, Owens College in Manchester, the newly
instituted Science College in Newcastle, are all noble products of
local energy and munificence. But the good they are doing is not
local--the commonwealth, to its uttermost limits, shares in the
benefits they confer; and I am at a loss to understand upon what
principle of equity the State, which admits the principle of payment
on results, refuses to give a fair equivalent for these benefits; or
on what principle of justice the State, which admits the obligation
of sharing the duty of primary education with a locality, denies the
existence of that obligation when the higher education is in question.

To sum up: If the positive advancement of the peace, wealth, and the
intellectual and moral development of its members, are objects which
the Government, as the representative of the corporate authority of
society, may justly strive after, in fulfilment of its end--the good
of mankind; then it is clear that the Government may undertake to
educate the people. For education promotes peace by teaching men the
realities of life and the obligations which are involved in the very
existence of society; it promotes intellectual development, not only
by training the individual intellect, but by sifting out from the
masses of ordinary or inferior capacities, those who are competent
to increase the general welfare by occupying hig