ocacy from advanced chemistry to shorthand and book-keeping.
Much that writers on these lines have to urge against the present
system is perfectly sound and reasonable. Many of their claims will
have to be recognised in the educational system of the future. But the
admission of their claim as a whole, of the claim of "efficiency" to be
the true and rightful heir of the old classical education, would be, to
speak without exaggeration, the greatest disaster that could possibly
befall this country.

What was wanted then was a conception of education at once "liberal"
and "modern," and such the writers found in "politics," using that word
in its widest Platonic sense. The classical education set out to study
the ancient world, and in the case of most of its pupils achieved
little more than the dry elements of two dead languages. The study of
the modern world has so far usually meant no more than the study of how
to make a little money out of it; the trail of commercialism has been
drawn over our Modern Sides. Why should not the modern world be
studied in the same noble and disinterested spirit as that in which the
best of the old teachers studied the world of Greece and Rome? It is
surely worthy of such study. Only perhaps by such study in our schools
can its wounds be healed. The central subject of a liberal education
should be "To-day," the great difficulties amongst which we are all
groping, the great problems awaiting solution, the great movements,
capitalism and socialism, imperialism and internationalism, freedom and
authority, that are battling for mastery or negotiating for a workable
compromise. The value of the classics lies wholly in the contribution
that classical art, philosophy, and history can make to the enrichment
of our minds for the study of our own problems. The value of modern
history lies in the inspiration of its great men, and the warning of
its tragic experiences. The value of "Divinity" is only found when we
face the fundamental question, Are we to apply Christianity in our
political and economic relations to-day, or are we not? But over and
above this reorientation of subjects already scheduled in the orthodox
time-table, there is the new subject within which all these (except
Divinity, which is fundamental) must be regarded as merely
contributory, and that subject is "politics," the treatment, elementary
yet thorough, vigorous yet many sided, of the great questions of the
day, with al