That is the mistake:  we do not feed the heart; we are too professional; we concern ourselves with methods and details; we swallow blindly the elaborate tradition under which we have ourselves been educated; we continue to respect the erudite mind, and to decry the appreciative spirit as amateurish and dilettante.  We continue to think that a boy is well trained in history if he has a minute knowledge of the sequence of events—­that is, of course, a necessary part of the equipment of a professor or a teacher; but here again lies one of the fatal fallacies of our system—­that we train from the professorial point of view.  Omniscience is not even desirable in the ordinary mind.  A boy who has appreciated the force of a few great historical characters, who has learnt generous insight into the unselfish patriotism that wins the great victories of the world, who can see the horror of tyranny and the wrongs done to humanity in the name of authority, who has seen how a nation in earlier stages is best ruled by an enlightened despotism, until it has learnt vigour and honesty and truth, who has:  learnt to perceive that political agitation only survives in virtue of the justice which underlies its demands—­a boy, I say, who has been taught to perceive such things, has learnt the lesson of history in a way which a student crammed with dates and facts may have wholly missed.

The truth is that we do not know what we are aiming at.  Our school and university systems aim at present at an austere standard of mental discipline, and then fail to enforce it, by making inevitable concessions to the mental weakness inherited from long generations trained upon the system of starvation.  The system, indeed, too often reminds me of an old picture in Punch, of genteel poverty dining in state; in a room hung with portraits, attended by footmen, two attenuated persons sit, while a silver cover is removed from a dish containing a roasted mouse.  The resources that ought to be spent on a wholesome meal are wasted in keeping up an ideal of state.  Of course there is something noble in all sacrifice of personal comfort and health to a dignified ideal; but it is our business at present to fill the dish rather than to insist on the cover being of silver.

One very practical proof of the disbelief which the public has in education is that, while the charges of public schools have risen greatly in the last fifty years, the margin is all expended in the comfort of boys, and in opportunities for athletic exercises; while masters, at all but a very few public schools, are still so poorly paid that it is impossible for the best men to adopt the profession, unless they have an enthusiasm which causes them to put considerations of personal comfort aside.  It is only too melancholy to observe at the University that the men of vigour and force tend to choose the Civil Service or the Bar in preference to educational work.  I cannot wonder at it.  The drudgery of falling in with the established system, of teaching things in which there is no interest to be communicated, of insisting on details in the value of which one does not believe, is such that few people, except unambitious men, who have no special mental bent, adopt the profession; and these only because the imparting of the slender accomplishments that they have gained is an obvious and simple method of earning a livelihood.