Education is another subject which shows how difficult it is to move the sluggish ultra-conservative instincts of the English mind in the direction of progress, when not stimulated by political conflict. What is education? The word tells its own story; it is to _draw out_, not to _cram in_; to unfold the capacities of the growing mind, strengthen the reasoning faculty, create an interest in the surrounding universe; in a word, to excite a love of knowledge and impart the means of acquiring it. For the mass of the population, education is necessarily confined in a great measure to the latter object. The three R’s—reading, writing, and arithmetic—are indispensable requisites, and the acquirement of these, with perhaps a few elements of history and geography, absorbs nearly all the time and opportunity that can be afforded for attendance at school. For any culture beyond this the great majority must depend on themselves in after life. But there are a large number of parents of the upper and middle classes who can and do keep their children at school for eight or ten years, and spend a large sum of money in giving them what is called a higher education. What is there to show for this time and money, even in the case of the highest schools, which ought to give the highest education? On the credit side, a little Latin and less Greek, plenty of cricket and athletics, good physical training, and, best of all, on the whole a manly, honourable, and gentlemanlike spirit. But on the debit side, absolute ignorance, except in the case of a few unusually clever and ambitious boys, of all that a cultivated man of the nineteenth century ought to know. No French, no German, and, what is worse, no English. The average boy can neither write his own language legibly nor grammatically, and, if he goes straight from a public school into a competitive examination, stands an excellent chance of being plucked for spelling. And, what is worst of all, he not only knows nothing, but cares to know nothing; his reasoning faculty has never been cultivated, and his interest in interesting things has never been awakened. What is the first lesson he has had to learn? ‘Propria quæ maribus dicantur mascula dicas,’ that is, words appropriated to males are called masculine—a lesson which elicits as much reasoning faculty, and creates as much interest, as if he had been made to commit to memory that things made of gold are called golden. Suppose instead of this that the lesson had been that two volumes of hydrogen combine with one volume of oxygen to form water. The exercise to the memory is the same, but how different is the amount of thought and interest evoked, especially if the experiment is made before the class and each boy has to repeat it for himself! How many new subjects of interest would this open up in the mind of any lad of average intelligence! How strange that there should be airs other than the air