Of theology, the middle class schoolboy gets rather less than poorer children, less absolutely and less relatively, because there are so many other claims upon his attention.  I venture to say that, in the great majority of cases, his ideas on this subject when he leaves school are of the most shadowy and vague description, and associated with painful impressions of the weary hours spent in learning collects and catechism by heart.

Modern geography, modern history, modern literature; the English language as a language; the whole circle of the sciences, physical, moral, and social, are even more completely ignored in the higher than in the lower schools.  Up till within a few years back, a boy might have passed through any one of the great public schools with the greatest distinction and credit, and might never so much as have heard of one of the subjects I have just mentioned.  He might never have heard that the earth goes round the sun; that England underwent a great revolution in 1688, and France another in 1789; that there once lived certain notable men called Chaucer, Shakspeare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller.  The first might be a German and the last an Englishman for anything he could tell you to the contrary.  And as for science, the only idea the word would suggest to his mind would be dexterity in boxing.

I have said that this was the state of things a few years back, for the sake of the few righteous who are to be found among the educational cities of the plain.  But I would not have you too sanguine about the result, if you sound the minds of the existing generation of public school-boys, on such topics as those I have mentioned.

Now let us pause to consider this wonderful state of affairs; for the time will come when Englishmen will quote it as the stock example of the stolid stupidity of their ancestors in the nineteenth century.  The most thoroughly commercial people, the greatest voluntary wanderers and colonists the world has ever seen, are precisely the middle classes of this country.  If there be a people which has been busy making history on the great scale for the last three hundred years—­and the most profoundly interesting history—­history which, if it happened to be that of Greece or Rome, we should study with avidity—­it is the English.  If there be a people which, during the same period, has developed a remarkable literature, it is our own.  If there be a nation whose prosperity depends absolutely and wholly upon their mastery over the forces of Nature, upon their intelligent apprehension of, and obedience to, the laws of the creation and distribution of wealth, and of the stable equilibrium of the forces of society, it is precisely this nation.  And yet this is what these wonderful people tell their sons:—­“At the cost of from one to two thousand pounds of our hard earned money, we devote twelve of the most precious years of your lives to school.  There you shall toil, or be supposed to toil; but there you shall