The fact is, that the English do not know what education means. At the public schools, and at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, education has become, to a great extent, a social matter. You go to these places to learn, certainly; but you also go with a view to the formation of a desirable and influential acquaintance, and to get upon your forehead the mark which is supposed to make glorious the public-school and university-bred Englishman. As a general rule, that mark is altogether imperceptible to the eyes of the unelect, who, if the truth must be told, discover the university man not so much by his manners or conversation as by his ineptitudes. When one comes to consider the principles upon which the public-school and university system are worked, one is quite prepared to admit that, were it not for the element of snobbery patent in the system, English public schools and universities alike would in the long run have to be disestablished. As it is, they are the conventional resort of aristocratic adolescence, and permitted to exist only on condition that, if a low middle-class person can find the money and keep up the style, he, too, may join the angelic host. To the man of temperament, to the scholar, to the man who loves learning for learning's sake, the English universities have precious little to offer. After Oxford and Cambridge, one turns to London and the non-resident foundations, all of them, I believe, modern. Here, as it seems to me, the English err again. Broadly speaking, these institutions, wittingly or unwittingly, devote their energies to the preparation of young men for the Civil Service. If you are an English board-school teacher at L80 a year and you discover that a second-class clerk in the Circumlocution Department commences at L300 a year, and that, roughly, the examination to be passed is the same as for matriculation at London, you naturally go in bald-headed for matriculation at London. For the learning you get by these efforts you have not the smallest respect. If, on presenting yourself for examination by the Civil Service Commissioners, you come out sufficiently high on the list to secure an appointment, well and good. If not, your labour has been wasted. It is this spirit which is at the bottom of the English ignorance. With them, learning, education, is a means to an end, and not in the least its own exceeding great reward. Hence a properly educated Englishman is almost as rare as a blue rose. For the masses--the rascally lower orders, that is to say--there are the board schools. Here for thirty years past has been enacted about the sweetest travesty of education that the mind of man could conceive. For the teaching of the children of the rascally lower orders, the wise English Government, with the assistance of the wise English school boards, has invented what is to all intents and purposes a new type of man. And his name shall be called Schoolmaster. He began Heaven knows how. But