[Page:  82] The example of art accumulation and art instruction is thus naturally followed in other respects.  For the commercial information of the public, varied representative exhibitions—­primarily, therefore, international ones—­naturally suggest themselves; while so soon as expansion of imperial and colonial interests comes upon the first plane, a corresponding permanent Exhibition is naturally instituted.  But when thus advancing commercial instruction, we must also recognise the claims of industry in all its crafts and guilds, and in fact the technical instruction of the community generally.  Hence the past, present, and promised rise of technical institutes upon increasing scales of completeness.

In the rise of such a truly encylopaedic system of schools, the university cannot permanently be forgotten.  Since from the outset we have recognised the prime elements of the school in observation and memory, the testing of these by examinations—­written, oral, and practical—­however improvable in detail, must be fairly recognised, and the examining body or university has therefore to be adopted as the normal crown of our comprehensive educational system.  Teaching, however is found to be increasingly necessary, especially to examination, and for this the main field left open is in our last column, that of People.  Their lore of the past, whether of sacred or classical learning, their history, literature, and criticism, are already actively promoted, or at any rate adequately endowed at older seats of learning; while the materials, resources, conditions and atmosphere are here of other kinds.  Hence the accessibility of the new University of London to the study of sociology, as yet alone among its peers.

Hence, beside the great London, maritime, commercial and industrial, residential and governmental, there has been growing up, tardily indeed, as compared with smaller cities, yet now all the more massively and completely, a correspondingly comprehensive system of schools; so that the historic development of South Kensington within the last half century, from International Exhibitions of Work, Natural History Museums of Place onwards to its present and its contemplated magnitude, affords a striking exemplification of the present view and its classification, which is all the more satisfactory since this development has been a gradual accretion.

Enough then has been said to show that the rise of schools, their qualities and their defects, are all capable of treatment upon the present lines; but if so, may we not go farther, and ask by what means does thought and life cope with their defects, especially that fixation of memory, even at its best, that evil side of examination and the like, which we often call Chinese in the bad sense, but which we see arises so naturally everywhere?

[Page:  83] J—­FROM “SCHOOL” TO “CLOISTER”