To compare small things with great, I have had a similar experience.  Not long ago I wrote a paper designed to set forth the pretty obvious truth that increase in knowledge is not in itself a good.  It evoked much criticism, and the critics once again exemplified our truly English habit of denouncing what we have not read.  If these quaint people were to be believed, I was an enemy of education in general and of elementary education in particular.  I hope that they will be as much relieved as were Mr. Balfour’s critics when they discover that I am, and all my life have been, a zealous supporter of education, and, to some extent, an expert in it.

If the world could be exhaustively divided into two classes-the Educated and the Uneducated—­I suppose that I should be included in the former, though I anticipate an inevitable sarcasm by allowing that I should find myself perilously near the dividing-line.  It is more to the purpose to say that, whatever my own educational deficiencies, I have always been keenly interested in the education of other people, and have preached incessantly that the State has a sacred duty to its boys.  If I leave the education of girls on one side, I do so, not because I consider it unimportant, but because I know nothing about it.

Information, as the great Butler said, is the least part of education.  The greatest is the development of the child’s natural power to its utmost extent and capacity; and the duty of so developing it must be admitted by everyone who ponders our Lord’s teaching about the Buried Talent and the Pound laid up in the Napkin.  Unless we enable and encourage every boy in England to bring whatever mental gifts he has to the highest point of their possible perfection, we are shamefully and culpably squandering the treasure which God has given us to be traded with and accounted for.  We shall have no one but ourselves to blame if, as a Nemesis on our neglect, we lose our present standing among the educated peoples of the world.  I always get back to the ideal of the “Golden Ladder,” reaching from the Elementary Schools, by Scholarships or “free places,” to the Secondary Schools, and from them again to the Universities.  This ideal is, unlike some ideals, attainable, and has in repeated instances been attained.  Again and again the highest mathematical honours of Cambridge have been won by Elementary Schoolboys, and what is true of mathematics might also be true of every branch of knowledge.  I say advisedly that it “might” be true:  whether or not it will be depends on our handling of quite young boys.

The pedagogic notion under which people of my time were reared was that every boy must learn exactly the same things as every other boy, and must go on learning them till his last day at school, whether that day arrived when he was fourteen or eighteen.  “We must catch up every man, whether he is to be a clergyman or a duke, begin with him at six years of age, and never quit him till he is twenty; making