The _purity_ of nationality in a man’s ideas is only compatible with pure ignorance. An English agricultural labourer may be purely English. The gentleman’s son who learns Latin and Greek becomes partly latinised and partly hellenised; if he learns to speak French at all well he becomes, so far, gallicised. To preserve the pure English quality you must exclude everything that is not English from education. You must exclude even the natural sciences and the fine arts, as they have been built up with the aid of foreigners and constantly lead to the study of foreign works. These things do not belong to a nation but to the civilised world, and England, as Rebecca said in _Ivanhoe_, is not the world. Her men of science quote foreign authorities continually, her painters and musicians are nourished, from their earliest youth, on continental genius. But although it is impossible for an educated man to preserve the _purity_ of his mental nationality, that is, its exclusive and insular character, although it is impossible for him to dwell in English ideas only when foreign ideas are equally accessible to him, the fact remains that the educated mind still includes far more of what is English than the uneducated one. The man who is called “half a foreigner” because he knows a foreign language may be more largely English than his critic. A rich man may hold foreign securities and yet, at the same time, have larger English investments than his poorer neighbour. Even with regard to affection, there are Englishmen who love Italy far more passionately than I have ever loved France, yet they love England as if they had never quitted their native parish. The _Saturday Review_ was once good enough to say that I am “courteously careful not to offend.” It is satisfactory to be told that one has nice literary manners, but I have never consciously studied the art of avoiding offence, and in a book like this it does not seem possible to avoid it. People are more sensitive for their nation than they are even for themselves. They resent the simplest truths, though stated quite without malice, if they appear to be in the least unfavourable. One evening, at Victor Hugo’s house in Paris, a few of his friends met, and the conversation turned by accident on a book of mine, _Round my House_, then recently published. Gambetta, who was present, was in a mood of protestation because I had said that the French peasants were ignorant, and Victor Hugo was inclined to take their part. The sentiment of patriotism was very ardent and sensitive in Gambetta, so he could not allow a foreigner to say anything that seemed unfavourable to France. Yet the French themselves have shown that they were aware of the ignorance prevalent in their own country by their praiseworthy efforts to remedy it. CONTENTS PART I.--EDUCATION CHAP. PAGE 1. PHYSICAL EDUCATION 1