The truth is that the wide-reaching purpose of University Extension will seem visionary or practicable according to the conception formed of education, as to what in education is essential and what accidental. If I am asked whether I think of shop-assistants, porters, factory-hands, miners, dock or agricultural laborers, women with families and constant home duties, as classes of people who can be turned into economists, physicists, literary critics, art connoisseurs,--I admit that I have no such idea. But I do believe, or rather, from my experience in England I know, that all such classes can be _interested_ in economic, scientific, literary and artistic questions. And I say boldly that to interest in intellectual pursuits is the essential of education, in comparison with which all other educational purposes must be called secondary. I do not consider that a child has been taught to read unless he has been made to like reading; I find it difficult to think of a man as having received a classical education if the man, however scholarly, leaves college with no interest in classical literature such as will lead him to go on reading for himself. In education the interest is the life. If a system of instruction gives discipline, method, and even originating power, without rousing a lasting love for the subject studied, the whole process is but a mental galvanism, generating a delusive activity that ceases when the connection between instructor and pupil is broken off. But if a teacher makes it his first business to stir up an interest in the matter of study, the education becomes self-continuing when teacher and pupil have parted, and the subject becomes its own educator. If then it be conceded that the essence of education is to interest, does it not seem a soberly practical purpose that we should open up to the whole nation without exception an interest in intellectual pursuits?