Nevertheless, there is an education that owes nothing to streets, or to work-shops, or to games of chance. It was not in the “full, vivid, instructive hours of truancy” that Stevenson acquired his knowledge of the English language, which he wrote with unexampled vigour and grace. It is not “human contact” that can be always trusted to teach men how to pronounce that language correctly. This is an educational nicety disregarded by a practical and busy world. One of the best-informed women I ever knew, who had been honoured by several degrees, and who had turned her knowledge to good account, could never pronounce the test word, America. One of the ablest and most influential lawyers I ever knew, a college man with an imposing library, came no nearer to success. The lady said “Armorica,” as if she were speaking of ancient Brittany. The gentleman said “Amurrica,” probably to make himself intelligible to the large and patriotic audiences which he addressed so frequently and so successfully. The license allowed to youth may be held accountable for such Puck’s tricks as these, as well as for grammatical lapses. A superintendent of public schools in Illinois has decided on his own authority that common usage may supplant time-worn rules of speech; and that such a sentence as “It is I,” being “outlawed” by common usage, need no longer be forced upon children who prefer to say “It is me.” Because the direct products of education are so limited, and the by-products of such notable importance, we permit ourselves to speak contemptuously concerning things which must be learned from books, without any deep understanding of things which must be learned from people armed with books, and backed by the authority of tradition. When Goethe said that the education of an Englishman gave him courage to be what nature had made him, he illuminated, after his wont, a somewhat shadowy subject. William James struck the same note, and amplified it, not too exhaustively, in “Talks to Teachers”: “An English gentleman is a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a creature who, for all the emergencies of life, has his line of behaviour distinctly marked out for him in advance.” If this be the result of a system which, to learned Germans, lucid Frenchmen, and progressive Americans, has seemed inadequate, they may revise, or at least suspend, their judgment. And Englishmen who have humorously lamented the wasted years of youth (“May I be taught Greek in the next world if I know what I _did_ learn at school!” said the novelist, James Payn), need no longer be under the obligation of expressing more dissatisfaction than they feel.