tional in his case is this: the system, which has dulled instead of stimulating his intellectual interests, has not impaired his conscientiousness. He feels bound to grapple honestly with the tasks which have so little attraction for him: whence the element of moroseness in his state of mind. Many young men in his place would take their tasks very lightly, and fling themselves heart and soul into the mere pastimes of University life. My young friend gives to these a fair proportion of his time; but the sense of having to devote so great a part of his life to work which does not vividly interest him, for the sake of passing examinations which lead to nothing he specially cares about, weighs upon his mind now and then, and prevents him from feeling the frank enjoyment of Oxbridge, which is, I daresay, common enough among his fellows.

That his intellectual condition is not singular I could prove by a host of witnesses. For the present, the following passage from The Upton Letters may suffice: "I grow every day more "despondent about the education we give at "our so-called classical schools. Here, you 'know, we are severely classical; and to have "to administer such a system is often more

"than I can bear with dignity or philosophy. "One sees arrive here every year a lot of brisk, healthy boys, with fair intelligence, "and quite disposed to work; and at the other "end one sees depart a corresponding set of 'young gentlemen who know nothing, and can "do nothing, and are profoundly cynical about "all intellectual things. And this is the result "of the meal of chaff we serve out to them "week after week; we collect it, we chop it "up, we tie it up in packets; we spend hours "administering it in teaspoons, and this is the "end."

I will not go so far as to say that the youth of whom I write is "cynical" about all intellectual things, but rather that he is unawakened. Nor is it true that he "knows nothing"; the trouble is that most of what he knows is, or seems to him, irrelevant, unnourishing—a “meal of chaff." A good deal of it, no doubt, cannot rightly be so described; but wherever the fault may be, the fact remains that he gets little spiritual nutriment out of it.

"I venture to think," says one of my critics, "that 'Kappa' is wrong psychologically about "his imaginary or typical undergraduate-the "scholar who did brilliantly at school but has

I

"no intellectual interests and chooses friends "of the most unstimulating description. "know the kind of undergraduate well, but "I diagnose his case differently. He is suffer"ing not from a lack of intellectual stimulus 'but from one of the many varieties of over"work. He has put a lot of hard brain labour "into his main business, which happens to have "been classical scholarship, and when that is "done he has no spare energy for studying "architecture or belles-lettres. I suspect that "he reads old Punches."

This diagnosis is doubtless correct; but if it be intended as a defence of the system, I cannot think it successful.

II

THE CHIEF END OF MAN

A CERTAIN amount of education must be merely utilitarian; that is to say, directly subservient to the practical ends of life. This education begins when the child is taught to use a spoon. It continues when the boy learns his letters and his multiplication-table. It ends, for millions of hapless youths, in the acquisition of a trade, handicraft, or business routine, which they go on practising, mechanically and joylessly, until their mechanism is worn out and they are cast on the scrap-heap. Many more happily-situated youths never get beyond the utilitarian stage of education; for though they may "read up Plato and master the Differential Calculus, it is all with a direct view to their worldly advancement, not to the saving of their souls alive.

Their book-reading has no more spiritual value than book-keeping or book-making. But it is generally admitted that the teaching which subserves mere appetite and ambition, even with a little judicious morality thrown in, is inadequate to the real needs of the human spirit. A "liberal education" is one in which the utilitarian element is strictly preliminary and subordinate. If, in the course of these reflections, I have to condemn the ordinary classical curriculum of our public schools, it will not be because it is un-utilitarian, but because it is inefficient as a means to higher ends.

What, then, is the fundamental task of a liberal education? What should be its constant endeavour? Surely to awaken and to keep ever alert the faculty of wonder in the human soul. To take life as a matter of course— whether painful or pleasurable-that is the true spiritual death. From the body of that death

it is the task of education to deliver us.

The infant, fresh from non-existence, or (spite of Wordsworth) oblivious of pre-existence, gazes at the world with wondering eyes. But before he can tell himself of his wonder, it has been swallowed up in familiarity. He has fallen in with the jog-trot sequence of things. There is