of loyalty; in England, in the name of liberty. All respectable names; but none of them will in the long run save its invoker, if he persists in disregarding the inevitable laws which govern the life of modern society.

Every one is accustomed to hear that France paid the horrors of her great Revolution as the price for having a tabula rasa upon which to build a new civil organisation. But what one learns when one goes upon the Continent and looks a little closely into these things, is, that all the most progressive states of the Continent have followed the example of France, and have transformed or are transforming their civil organisation. Italy is transforming hers by virtue of the great opportunity which the events of the last eight years have given her. Prussia transformed hers from 1807 to 1812, by virtue of the stern lesson which her disasters and humiliation had then read her. Russia is at this moment accomplishing a transformation yet more momentous. The United States of America came into the world, it may be said, with a tabula rasa for a modern civil organisation to be built on, and they have never had any other. What I say is, that everywhere around us in the world, wherever there is life and progress, we find a civil organisation that is modern; and this in States which have not, like France, gone through a tremendous revolution, as well as in France itself.

Who will deny that England has life and progress? but who will deny also that her course begins to show signs of uncertainty and embarrassment? This is because even an energy like hers cannot exempt her from the obligation of obeying natural laws; and yet she tries to exempt herself from it when she endeavours to meet the requirements of a modern time and of modern society with a civil organisation which is, from the top of it to the bottom, not modern. Transform it she must, unless she means to come at last to the same sentence as the Church of Sardis: Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.' However, on no part of this immense task of transformation have I now to touch, except on that part which relates to education. But this part, indeed, is the most important of all; and it is the part

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whose happy accomplishment may render that of all the rest, instead of being troubled and difficult, gradual and easy.

About popular education I have here but a very few words to say. People are at last beginning to see in what condition this really is amongst us. Obligatory instruction is talked of. But what is the capital difficulty in the way of obligatory instruction, or indeed any national system of instruction, in this country? It is this: that the moment the working class of this country have this question of instruction really brought home to them, their self-respect will make them demand, like the working classes on the Continent, public schools, and not schools which the clergyman, or the squire, or the mill-owner, calls my school.' And what is the capital difficulty in the way of giving them public schools? It is this: that the public school for the people must rest upon the municipal organisation of the country. In France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the public elementary school has, and exists by having, the commune and the municipal government of the commune, as its foundations, and it could not exist without them. But we in England have our municipal organisation still to get; the country districts, with us, have at present only the feudal and ecclesiastical organisation of the Middle Ages, or of France before the Revolution. This is what the people who talk so glibly about obligatory instruction, and the Conscience Clause, and our present abundant supply of schools, never think of. The real preliminary to an effective system of popular education is, in fact, to provide the country with an effective municipal organisation; and here, then, is at the outset an illustration of what I said, that modern societies need a civil organisation which is modern.*

* France has now 37,500 communes, and nearly 37,500,000 inhabitants; about one commune, therefore, to every 1,000 inhabitants. The mayor of the commune is named by the Crown, and represents the State, the central power; the municipal council, of which the mayor is president, is elected by universal suffrage of the

commune.

We have in England 655 unions and about 12,000 parishes; but our communes, or municipal centres, ought at the French rate to be 20,000 in number. Nor is this number, perhaps, more than is required in order to supply a proper basis for the national organisation of our elementary schools. A municipal organisation being once given, the object should be to withdraw the existing elementary schools from their present private management, and to reconstitute them on a municipal basis.

We have nearly all of us reached the rotion that popular education it is the State's duty to deal with. Secondary and superior instruction many of us still think should be left to take care of themselves. Well, this is what was generally thought, or at any rate practised, in old times, all over Europe. I have shown how the State's taking secondary instruction seriously in hand dates, in Prussia, from Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1809; in the same year, a year for Prussia of trouble and anxious looking forward, he created the University of Berlin. In Switzerland the State's effective dealing with all kinds of public instruction dates from within the last thirty years; in Italy it dates from 1859. In all these countries the idea of a sound civil organisation of modern society has been found to involve the idea of an organisation of secondary and superior instruction by public authority, by the State.

The English reader will ask: What inconvenience has arisen in England from pursuing the old practice? The investigations of the Schools Enquiry Commission, I feel sure, will have made it clear that we have not a body of 65,000 boys of the middle and upper classes receiving so good an instruction as 65,000 boys of the same classes are receiving in the higher schools of Prussia, or even of France. The English reader will not refuse to believe, though no Royal Commission has yet made enquiries on this point, that we have not a body of 6,300 university students in England receiving so good an instruction as the 6,300 matriculated students in the Prussian universities, or even as the far more numerous students in the French faculties, are receiving. Neither is the secondary and superior instruction given in England on the whole so good, nor is it given, on the whole, in schools of so good a standing. Of course, what good instruction there is, and what schools of good standing there are to get it in, fall chiefly to the lot of the upper class. It is on the middle class that the inconvenience, such as it is, of getting indifferent instruction, or

This is not the place to enter into details as to the manner in which such a withdrawal is to be effected; I will remark only that all reforms which stop short of such a withdrawal and reconstitution are and must be mere patchwork.

getting it in schools of indifferent standing, mainly comes. This inconvenience, as it strikes one after seeing attentively the schools of the Continent, has two aspects. It has a social aspect, and it has an intellectual aspect.

The social inconvenience is this. On the Continent, the upper and middle class are brought up on one and the same plane. In England the middle class, as a rule, is brought up on the second plane. One hears many discussions as to the limits between the middle and the upper class in England. From an educational point of view these limits are perfectly clear. Half-a-dozen famous schools, Oxford or Cambridge, the army or navy, and those posts in the public service supposed to be posts for gentlemen; these are the schools all or any one of which give a training, a stamp, a cast of ideas, which make a sort of association of all those who share them, and this association is the upper class. Except by one of these modes of access an Englishman does not, unless by some special play of aptitude or of circumstances, become a vital part of this association, for he does not bring with him the cast of ideas in which its bond of union lies. This cast of ideas is naturally for the most part that of the most powerful and prominent part of the association, the aristocracy. The professions furnish the more numerous but the less prominent part; in no country, accordingly, do the professions so naturally and generally share the cast of ideas of the aristocracy as in England. This cast of ideas, judged from its good side, is characterised by a high spirit, by dignity, by a just sense of the greatness of great affairs,— all of them governing qualities; and the professions have accordingly long recruited the governing force of the aristocracy, and assisted it to rule. Judged from its bad side, this cast of ideas is characterised by its indisposition and incapacity for science, for systematic knowledge. The professions are on the Continent the stronghold of science and systematic knowledge; in England, from the reason above assigned, they are not. They are also in England separate, to a degree unknown on the Continent, from the commercial and industrial class with which in social standing they are naturally on a level. So we have amongst us the spectacle

of a middle class cut in two in a way unexampled anywhere else; of a professional class brought up on the first plane, with fine and governing qualities, but without the idea of science; while that immense business class, which is becoming so important a power in all countries, on which the future so much depends, and which in the leading schools of other countries fills so large a place, is in England brought up on the second plane, cut off from the aristocracy and the professions, and without governing qualities.

If only, in compensation, it had science, systematic knowledge! The stronghold of science should naturally be in a nation's middle class, who have neither luxury nor bodily toil to bar them from it. But here comes in the intellectual inconvenience of the bad condition of the mass of our secondary schools. On the Continent, if the professions were as aristocratic in their indifference to science as they are here, the business class, educated as it is, would at once wrest the lead from them, and would be fit to do so. But here in England, the business class is not only inferior to the professions in the social stamp of its places of training, it is actually inferior to them, maimed and incomplete as their intellectual development is, in its intellectual development. Short as the offspring of our public schools and universities come of the idea of science and systematic knowledge, the offspring of our middle class academies probably come, if that be possible, even shorter. What these academies fail to give in social and governing qualities, they do not make up for in intellectual power.

If this is true, then that our middle class does not yet itself see the defects of its own education, perceives no practical inconvenience to itself from them, and is satisfied with things as they are, is no reason for regarding this state of things without disquietude. He that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead;' sooner or later, in spite of his self-confidence, in spite of his energy, in spite of his capital, he must so remain, by virtue of nature's laws. But if the English business class can listen to testimonies that in the judgment of others, at any rate, its inferior education is beginning to threaten it