It would not be polite to mention actual names; but take by way of example such a district as Dickens’s “Coketown,” or Disraeli’s “Wodgate,” or George Eliot’s “Milby,” or any of those towns which Cobbett expressively called “Hell-Holes.”  Let the State establish in each of those places a qualified and accredited teacher for adult students.  The teacher may, if necessary, be paid in part by voluntary subscription; but it is, in my view, all-important that he should have the sanction and authority of the State to give him a definite place among local administrators, and to the State he should be responsible for the due discharge of his functions.  In Coketown or Wodgate or Milby his lecture-room would be a real Oasis—­“a fertile spot in the midst of a desert.”  Even if it has not been our lot to dwell in those deserts, we all have had, as travellers, some taste of their quality.  We know the hideousness of all that meets the eye; the necessary absorption in the struggle for subsistence; the resulting tendency to regard money as the one subject worth serious consideration; the inadequate means of intellectual recreation; the almost irresistible atmosphere of materialism in which life and thought are involved.  The “Oasis” would provide a remedy for all this.  It would offer to all who cared to seek them “the fairy-tale of science,” the pregnant lessons of history, the infinitely various joys of literature, the moral principles of personal and social action which have been thought out “by larger minds in calmer ages.”

That there may be practical difficulties in the way of such a scheme I do not dispute.  The object of this chapter is not to elaborate a plan, but to exhibit an idea.  That the amount of definite knowledge acquired in this way might be small, and what Archbishop Benson oddly called “unexaminable,” is, I think, quite likely.  A man cannot learn in the leisure-hours left over by exhausting work as he would learn if he had nothing to think of except his studies and his examination.  But Education has a larger function than the mere communication of knowledge.  It opens the windows of the mind; it shows vistas which before were unsuspected; and so, as Wordsworth said, “is efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier.”

IV

LIFE, LIBERTY, AND JUSTICE

When an article in a newspaper produces a reply, the modest writer is gratified; for he knows that he has had at any rate one reader.  If the reply comes to him privately, he is even better pleased, for then he feels that his reader thinks the matter worthy of personal discussion and of freely exchanged opinion.  I have lately written an article on “Life and Liberty” as proposed by some earnest clergymen for the English Church, and an article on Mr. Fisher’s Education Bill, in which I avowed my dislike to all attempts on the part of the State to teach religion.  Both these articles have brought me a good deal of correspondence, both friendly and hostile.  The term allotted to human life does not allow one to enter into private controversy with every correspondent, so I take this method of making a general reply.  “Life and Liberty” are glorious ideals, but, to make the combination, perfect, we must add Justice.  Hence my title.