which possess a laboratory," mathematics in part and literature altogether must be given up. It would be waste of words to point out the fatal tendency of this separative process; to show how mere linguistic training needs the rationalizing aid of scientific study, or how exclusive science hardens and materializes without the refining society of literature; yet such divorce is inevitably due not to the convictions of school-masters, not to the influence of parents, not to the prepossessions of the public, but to the irresistible force of the university system, which makes narrowness of intelligence and imperfect knowledge the only avenues to distinction or to profit.
It is true that an attempt to alter this involves little short of a revolution; but by all accounts a revolution is at hand. It is not for nothing that a parliamentary investigation into the expenditure of college endowments should have been supported by members of the colleges themselves, or that a proposal to distribute college scholarships and exhibitions by a central authority in accordance with the results of the leaving-examination should have emanated from eminent university teachers. For it cannot be too strongly urged that college scholarships stand on very different ground from university prizes or degrees. It is easy for Parliament to lay down rules which shall control the latter once for all; it is not easy to bind the actions of some forty different foundations, each electing its own scholars according to its own idiosyncrasies, or in obedience to the changing wills of bodies in a perpetual state of flux. It may still be audacious, but it is no longer novel, to suggest that, supposing future legislation to retain the college scholarships at all, they should be awarded by the authority of government, in strict connection with leaving-examinations which government shall conduct, and in reward not of special but of general proficiency. For this the scheme of the commissioners virtually contends; into regions beyond this the report before us necessarily does not enter.
It will be seen that we accept, and recommend all teachers to accept, the scheme of the commissioners unreservedly as a working basis of educational improvement. It may not be ideally perfect; it may invite opposition on points of detail; but it is the resultant of all the intellectual forces which have hitherto been brought to bear upon the subject; and, while agreeing with all its witnesses on the principle that wide general training should precede specialization of study, it attains extreme simplicity of arrangement by allotting the first of these to the schools and the last to the universities. Do not let us forget that the cry which has arisen hitherto from all the head-masters on the point of scientific teaching has been a cry for guidance; for commanding and intelligent leadership; for authoritative enlightenment as to the relative value and the judicious sequence of scientific subjects; for information as to text-books, apparatus, teachers. For the first time this cry is met by an oracle whose authority no one will
