My dear Donnelly,

Best thanks for sending on my letter.  I do not suppose it will do much good, but, at any rate, I thought I ought to try to prevent their making a mess of medical education.

I like what I have seen of Acland.  He seemed to have both intelligence and volition.

As to intermediate education I have never favoured the notion of State intervention in this direction.

I think there are only two valid grounds for State meddling with education:  the one the danger to the community which arises from dense ignorance; the other, the advantage to the community of giving capable men the chance of utilising their capacity.

The first furnishes the justification for compulsory elementary education.  If a child is taught reading, writing, drawing, and handiwork of some kind; the elements of mathematics, physics, and history, and I should add of political economy and geography; books will furnish him with everything he can possibly need to make him a competent citizen in any rank of life.

If with such a start, he has not the capacity to get all he needs out of books, let him stop where he is.  Blow him up with intermediate education as much as you like, you will only do the fellow a mischief and lift him into a place for which he has no real qualification.  People never will recollect, that mere learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.

The technical education act goes a long way to meet the second claim of the State; so far as scientific and industrial capacities are concerned.  In a few years there will be no reason why any potential Whitworth or Faraday, in the three kingdoms, should not readily obtain the best education that is to be had, scientific or technical.  The same will hold good for Art.  So the question that arises seems to me to be whether the State ought or ought not to do something of the same kind for Literature, Philosophy, History, and Philology.

I am inclined to think not, on the ground that the universities and public schools ought to do this very work, and that as soon as they cease to be clericalised seminaries they probably will do it.

If the present government would only give up their Irish fad—­and bring in a bill to make it penal for any parson to hold any office in a public school or university or to presume to teach outside the pulpit—­they should have my valuable support!

I should not wonder if Gladstone’s mind is open on the subject.  Pity I am not sufficiently a persona grata with him to offer to go to Hawarden and discuss it.

I quite agree with you, therefore, that it will play the deuce if intermediate education is fossilised as it would be by any Act prepared under present influences.  The most I should like to see done, would be to help the youth of special literary, linguistic and so forth, capacity, to get the best training in their special line.