of any one office
or calling, it enables him to act his part in each of them with better
grace and more elevated carriage; and, if happily planned and conducted,
is a main ingredient in that complete and generous education which fits a
man 'to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices,
both private and public, of peace and war.' "(23)

8.

The view of Liberal Education, advocated in these extracts, is expanded by
Mr. Davison in the Essay to which I have already referred. He lays more
stress on the "usefulness" of Liberal Education in the larger sense of the
word than his predecessor in the controversy. Instead of arguing that the
Utility of knowledge to the individual varies inversely with its Utility
to the public, he chiefly employs himself on the suggestions contained in
Dr. Copleston's last sentences. He shows, first, that a Liberal Education
is something far higher, even in the scale of Utility, than what is
commonly called a Useful Education, and next, that it is necessary or
useful for the purposes even of that Professional Education which commonly
engrosses the title of Useful. The former of these two theses he
recommends to us in an argument from which the following passages are
selected:--

"It is to take a very contracted view of life," he says, "to think with
great anxiety how persons may be educated to superior skill in their
department, comparatively neglecting or excluding the more liberal and
enlarged cultivation. In his (Mr. Edgeworth's) system, the value of every
attainment is to be measured by its subserviency to a calling. The
specific duties of that calling are exalted at the cost of those free and
independent tastes and virtues which come in to sustain the common
relations of society, and raise the individual in them. In short, a man is
to be usurped by his profession. He is to be clothed in its garb from head
to foot. His virtues, his science, and his ideas are all to be put into a
gown or uniform, and the whole man to be shaped, pressed, and stiffened,
in the exact mould of his technical character. Any interloping
accomplishments, or a faculty which cannot be taken into public pay, if
they are to be indulged in him at all, must creep along under the cloak of
his more serviceable privileged merits. Such is the state of perfection to
which the spirit and general tendency of this system would lead us.

"But the professional character is not the only one which a person e