they stimulate each other with methodical inquiry and some critical judgment. In the search after truth their minds have found themselves, for this search is the path of life: they are awakened to that sense of our ignorance which forbids us any satisfaction in phrases and conventions; which tells us that none of our axioms is true, though truer than an indolent or gregarious assent, and guards us against the domination of the many positive persons who do not know but only assert; such as the historian of whom Acton said that "a little study of the subject would probably diminish the severity of his judgment and add materially to its weight." For students thus previously developed technical attainment is greatly accelerated.
Thirdly, we may gain time for an enlarged curriculum by requiring more of the secondary schools, and by encouraging our students to come up a little younger. At Cambridge we have decided to offer the First M.B. examination to candidates on entrance, so that they may proceed at once to more advanced methods. In the Sheffield discussion Dr. Dawson Turner was jealous lest thus the literary side should be starved; I have perceived but little on this side to starve, but in any case may we not have an equal jealousy of the literary schoolboy starved of science? The elements of science required for our First M.B. are of the kind which should enter into the formation of every educated man.
Much, then, may be done by preparation, by consolidation, and by adaptation, to fit together university and technical education, mind and dexterity; but no consolidation, no contrivance can make them identical or equivalent. Whatsoever may be the time prescribed by the Medical Council for qualification, the student who desires to build up his faculties and stiffen his judgment by a more universal training must add a year or two to the technical minimum, and this from the beginning of his course. It cannot be tacked on at the end of it.
Is it not, then, deeply to be regretted that a great Lancashire merchant, a man of energy and powerful in material progress, should use his influence to declare that "a university education retards a young man's progress in commercial life by occupying years in the study of classical and other subjects when commercial training would be more
