not learn one single thing of all those you will most want to know, directly you leave school and enter upon the practical business of life.  You will in all probability go into business, but you shall not know where, or how, any article of commerce is produced, or the difference between an export or an import, or the meaning of the word ‘capital.’  You will very likely settle in a colony, but you shall not know whether Tasmania is part of New South Wales, or vice versa.

“Very probably you may become a manufacturer, but you shall not be provided with the means of understanding the working of one of your own steam-engines, or the nature of the raw products you employ; and, when you are asked to buy a patent, you shall not have the slightest means of judging whether the inventor is an impostor who is contravening the elementary principles of science, or a man who will make you as rich as Croesus.

“You will very likely get into the House of Commons.  You will have to take your share in making laws which may prove a blessing or a curse to millions of men.  But you shall not hear one word respecting the political organization of your country; the meaning of the controversy between freetraders and protectionists shall never have been mentioned to you:  you shall not so much as know that there are such things as economical laws.

“The mental power which will be of most importance in your daily life will be the power of seeing things as they are without regard to authority; and of drawing accurate general conclusions from particular facts.  But at school and at college you shall know of no source of truth but authority; nor exercise your reasoning faculty upon anything but deduction from that which is laid down by authority.

“You will have to weary your soul with work, and many a time eat your bread in sorrow and in bitterness, and you shall not have learned to take refuge in the great source of pleasure without alloy, the serene resting-place for worn human nature,—­the world of art.”

Said I not rightly that we are a wonderful people?  I am quite prepared to allow, that education entirely devoted to these omitted subjects might not be a completely liberal education.  But is an education which ignores them all, a liberal education?  Nay, is it too much to say that the education which should embrace these subjects and no others, would be a real education, though an incomplete one; while an education which omits them is really not an education at all, but a more or less useful course of intellectual gymnastics?

For what does the middle-class school put in the place of all these things which are left out?  It substitutes what is usually comprised under the compendious title of the “classics”—­that is to say, the languages, the literature, and the history of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the geography of so much of the world as was known to these two great nations of antiquity.  Now, do not expect me to depreciate the earnest and enlightened pursuit of classical learning.  I have not the least desire to speak ill of such occupations, nor any sympathy with those who run them down.  On the contrary, if my opportunities had lain in that direction, there is no investigation into which I could have thrown myself with greater delight than that of antiquity.