btain greater knowledge for bread-winning
purposes. From that point of view science would be most likely to feed
the classes. Secondly, the improvement of one's knowledge of political
economy, and history, and facts bearing upon the actual political work
and life of the day. Thirdly, was the desire of knowledge as a luxury
to brighten life and kindle thought. I am very much afraid that, in
the ordinary temper of our people, and the ordinary mode of looking at
life, the last of these motives savours a little of self-indulgence,
and sentimentality, and other objectionable qualities. There is a
great stir in the region of physical science at this moment, and it is
likely, as any one may see, to take a chief and foremost place in the
field of intellectual activity. After the severity with which science
was for so many ages treated by literature, we cannot wonder that
science now retaliates, now mightily exalts herself, and thrusts
literature down into the lower place. I only have to say on the
relative claims of science and literature what Dr Arnold said:--"If
one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children
might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to
the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. This,
however, I believe cannot be; wherefore, rather than have it the
principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that
the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles
set in the bright blue firmament" (Stanley's _Life of Arnold_, ii.
31). It is satisfactory that one may know something of these matters,
and yet not believe that the sun goes round the earth. But if there
is to be exclusion, I, for one, am not prepared to accept the rather
enormous pretensions that are nowadays sometimes made for physical
science as the be-all and end-all of education.

Next to this we know that there is a great stir on behalf of technical
and commercial education. The special needs of our time and country
compel us to pay a particular attention to this subject. Here
knowledge is business, and we shall never hold our industrial
pre-eminence, with all that hangs upon that pre-eminence, unless we
push on technical and commercial education with all our might. But
there is a third kind of knowledge, and that too, in its own way, is
business. There is the cultivation of the sympathies and imagination,
the quickening of the moral sensibilities, and