By fourteen the power of abstract reasoning and of an analytical treatment of things is in existence, the learner is now less to be moulded and more to be guided than he was. We want now to give this mind we have established, the most stimulating and invigorating training we can, we want to give it a sane coherent view of our knowledge of the universe in relation to itself, and we want to equip it for its own special work in the world. How, on the basis of the Schooling we have predicated, are these ends to be attained?

Now let us first have it perfectly clear that this second stage in development lies no more completely within the idea of College than the former lay completely within the idea of School. In the general discussion of these things we are constantly faced by the parallel error to that we have tried to dissipate in regard to schools, the error that the Professor and his Lecture and (in the case of experimental sciences) his Laboratory make, or can make, the man, just precisely in the same way that the Schoolmaster or Schoolmistress is supposed to be omnipotent in the education of the boy or girl. And, unhappily, the Professor, unless he is a man of quite exceptional mental power for a Professor, shares this groundless opinion. The Schoolmaster is under-educated in regard to his work, and incapable of doing it neatly; the Professor is too often over-specialized and incapable of forming an intelligent, modest idea of his place in education; and the same consequence flows from the defect of either, an attempt to use an improperly large portion of the learner's time and energy. Over-direction, and what one may call intellectual sectarianism, are faults from which few College courses are free to- day. The Professor stands between his students and books, he says in lectures in his own way what had far better be left for other men's books to tell, he teaches his beliefs without a court of appeal. Students are kept writing up their notes of his not very brilliant impromptus, and familiarizing themselves with his mental constitution instead of the subject of study. They get no training in the use of books as sources of knowledge and ideas, albeit such a training is one of the most necessary of all acquisitions for an efficient citizen, and whatever discussion the modern student indulges in is all too often treated rather as presumption to be discouraged than as the most necessary and hopeful of mental processes. Our Universities and Colleges are still but imperfectly aware of the recent invention of the Printed Book; and its intelligent use in this stage of education has made little or no headway against their venerable traditions. That things are only understood by being turned over in the mind and looked at from various points of view is, of course, altogether too modern a conception for our educationists. At the London Royal College of Science, for example, which is an exceptionally new and efficient College, there is no properly organized escape from the orthodoxy of the lecture-theatre, no circulating library whatever available to the students, no library, that is, which will ensure a copious supply and exchange of the best books on each subject, and, consequently, even to look up an original paper that has been quoted or discussed, involves an expenditure of time that is practically prohibitive of the thing as a general practice. [Footnote: There are three very fine libraries in the adjacent South Kensington Museum, especially available to students, but, like almost all existing libraries, they are managed in most respects on lines conceived when a copy of a book was an almost unique thing made specially by the copyist's hand. However much a book is in demand, however cheap its price of publication may be, no library in England, unless it is a modern subscription library, ever gets duplicate copies. This is the cause of the dearness of serious books; they are bought as rarities, and have to be sold in the same spirit. But when libraries learn to buy by the dozen and the hundred, there is no reason why the sort of book now published at 10s. 6d. should not be sold at a shilling from the beginning.] The Professors, being busy and important men, lecture from their particular standpoints, and having lectured, bolt; there is no provision whatever for the intelligent discussion of knotty points, and the only way to get it is to buttonhole a demonstrator and induce him to neglect his task of supervising prescribed "practical" work in favour of educational talk. Let us, therefore, in view of this state of affairs, deal with the general question how a branch of thought and knowledge may be most beneficially studied under modern conditions, before discussing the more particular question what subjects should or should not be undertaken.

Now the full statement not only of what is known of a subject, but of its difficulties, dark places, and conflicting aspects should be luminously set forth in the College text-books, large, well-written, well-illustrated books by one or several hands, continually revised and kept abreast of the advance of knowledge by capable and critical-minded young men. Such books are essential and cardinal in proper modern teaching. The country may be speckled with universities until they are as thick as public-houses, and each may be provided with its score or so of little lecturers, and if it does not possess one or more good general text-books in each principal subject then all this simply means that a great number of inadequate, infertile little text-books are being dictated, one by each of these lecturers. Not the course of lectures, but the sound, full text-book should be the basis of College instruction, and this should be supplemented by a greater or lesser number of more or less controversial pamphlets or books, criticising, expanding or correcting its matter or putting things in a different and profitable way. This text-book should be paralleled in the case of experimental science by a hand-book of illustrative and explanatory laboratory work. Portions of the book could be set for preparation at each stage in the course with appropriate experiments, students could submit difficulties in writing to be dealt with by the Professor in conversational lectures, and the reading of the students could be checked by periodic examinations upon cardinal parts, and supplemented, if these examinations showed it to be necessary, by dissertations upon special issues of difficulty. Upon the matters that were distinctively his "subject," or upon his points of disagreement with the general issues of the book, the Professor might lecture in the accepted way. This is surely the proper method of work for adolescent students in any subject, in philology just as much as in comparative anatomy, and in history just as much as in economics. The cheapening of printing, paper, and, above all, of illustration has done away with the last excuse for the vocal course of instruction and the lecturer's diagrams. But it has not done away with them.

It is one of the most curious of human phenomena, this persistence of tradition against what one might have imagined the most destructive facts, and in no connection is this aspect more remarkable than in all that concerns the higher stages of education. One might think that somewhere in the seventeenth century it would have been recognized at the Seats of Learning that thought and knowledge were progressive things, and that a periodic revision of courses and syllabuses, a periodic recasting of work and scope, a re-arrangement of chairs and of the appliances of the faculties, was as necessary to the continued healthy existence of a University as periodic meals and sleep and exercise are necessary to a man. But even today we are founding Universities without any provision for this necessary change, and the chances are that in a century or so they will present just as much backwardness and illiteracy as do the ordinary graduation organizations of Oxford and Cambridge today, that a hundred years from now the past graduates of ripe old Birmingham, full of spite against newfangled things "no fellow can understand," will be crowding up to vote against the substitution of some more modern subject for "Huxley"—"Huxley" they will call the subject, and not Comparative Anatomy, on the model of "Euclid"—or for the retention of compulsory "Commercial Geography of the Nineteenth Century," or "Longhand Bookkeeping" in the Little Go. (And should any germinating noble founder read these pages I would implore him with all the earnestness that is possible in printed matter, to provide that every fifty years, let us say, the whole of his prospective foundation shall go into solution, shall re-apportion its funds and reorganize the entire mechanism of its work.)

The idea that a text-book should be regularly reset and reprinted is still quite foreign to the Professorial mind, as, indeed, is the idea that the care of text-books and publications is a University function at all. No one is startled by a proposal to apply L800 or L1000 a year to a new chair in any subject, but to apply that sum yearly as a standing charge to the revision and perfection of a specific text-book would seem, even today, quite fantastically extravagant to most University men. Yet what could be more obviously helpful to sound and thorough teaching than for a University, or a group of Universities, to sustain a Professor in each of the chief subjects of instruction, whose business would be neither teaching as it is now understood, nor research, but the critical and exhaustive editing of the College text- book of his subject, a text-book which would stand in type at the University Press, which would be revised annually and reprinted annually, primarily for the use of the matriculated students of the University and incidentally for publication. His business would be not only to bring the work up to date and parallel with all the newest published research and to invite and consider proposals of contributions and footnotes from men with new views and new matter, but also to substitute for obscure passages fuller and more lucid expositions, to cut down or relegate to smaller type passages of diminishing importance and to introduce fresh and more efficient illustrations, and his work would be carried on in consultation with the General Editor of the University Press who would also be a specialist in modern printing and book-making, and who would be constantly taking up, trying, and adopting fresh devices of arrangement, and newer, better, and cheaper methods of printing and illustration. It would not merely raise the general efficiency of the College work of adolescents very greatly to have this series of textbooks living and growing in each subject at one or (better) at several Universities or grouped Universities, but in each subject the periodic change in these books would afford a most valuable corrective to the influence of specialized work by keeping the specialist worker easily in touch with the current presentation of his science as a whole.

The text-book, however good, and the lecturer, however able, are only one of two necessary factors in College work, the reciprocal element is the students' activity. Unless the students are actively engaged not simply in taking in what they are told, but in rearranging it, turning it over, trying and testing it, they are doing little good. We recognize this quite abundantly in the laboratory nowadays, but we neglect it enormously in the more theoretical study of a subject. The facts of a subject if it is a science may be got at in the most thorough way by handling in the laboratory, but the ideas of a subject must be handled in discussion, reproduction and dispute. Examinations, examinations by teachers who understand this very fine art, in which the student is obliged to restate, apply, and use the principles of his subject, are of the utmost value in keeping the mind active and not simply receptive. They are just as good and as vitally necessary as examination papers which merely demand definitions and lists and bald facts are bad. And then there might be discussions—if the Professor were clever enough to conduct them. If the students of a class could be induced to submit propositions for discussion, from which a topic could be selected, and could then be made to prepare for a disputation to which all would have to contribute, with the Professor as a controlling influence in the chair to check facts and logic and to conclude, it would have the value of a dozen lectures. But Professors who are under the burthen of perhaps ninety or a hundred lectures a year cannot be expected to do anything of this sort. Directed reading, conferences on knotty points, special lectures followed by the questioning of the lecturer, discussions upon matters of opinion, laboratory work when needful, fairly frequent test examinations, and a final examination for places, are the proper ingredients of a good modern College course, and in the necessity of leaving the Professor's energies free for the direction of all this really educational work, lies another reason for that complete, explicit, well-arranged text-book upon which I am insisting.

Coming back now from these general propositions about books and teaching to our mass of young people about fifteen years old, our adolescent nation, who have accomplished their Schooling and are ready for the College phase, we have to consider what subjects they are to be taught, and how far they are to go with these subjects. Whether they are to give all or part of their time to these College studies, whether they are going to pursue them in evening classes or before breakfast in the morning or during the livelong day is a question of secondary conveniences that may very well be disregarded here. We are concerned with the general architecture now, and not with the tactical necessities of the clerk of the works. [Footnote: But I may perhaps point out here how integral to a sane man-making scheme is the raising of the minimum age at which children may work. A day will come, I hope, when even the partial employment of children under fifteen will be prohibited, and when, as Mr. Sidney Webb suggested some time ago, employment up to the age of twenty-one will be limited to so few hours a week—his suggestion was thirty—as to leave a broad margin for the more or less compulsory college work and physical training that are becoming essential to the modern citizen.]

We need waste little time nowadays, I submit, in disposing of Encyclopaedic conceptions of College Education, conceptions that played a part in almost all educational schemes—Bentham's stupendous Chrestomathia is the fearful example—before the middle nineteenth century. We are all agreed in theory, at any rate, that to know one subject or group of subjects exhaustively is far better than a universal smattering, that the ideal of education is more particularly "all about something" with "something about everything" in a very subordinate place. The fact remains that the normal curriculum of our higher schools and colleges is a pointless non-educational miscellany, and the average graduate in Arts knows something, but not enough, of science, mathematics, Latin, Greek, literature, and history; he has paid tribute to several conflicting schemes of education, and is a credit to none. We have to get rid of this state of affairs, and we have to provide (i) a substantial mental training which shall lead at last to a broad and comprehensive view of things, and which shall be a training in generalization, abstraction, and the examination of evidence, stimulating and disciplining the imagination and developing the habit of patient, sustained, enterprising and thorough work, and (ii) we have to add a general culture, a circle of ideas about moral, aesthetic, and social matters that shall form a common basis for the social and intellectual life of the community. The former of these two elements must at some stage develop—after two or five or seven or some such period of years, which may be different in different cases—into the special training for the definite function of the individual in the social body, whether as engineer, business manager, doctor, priest, journalist, public administrator, professional soldier, or what not. And before we ask what must constitute (i) it may be well to define the relation between the first and the second section of the College stage of education.

It is (i) that will constitute the essential work of the College, which will be the especial concern of the Professorial staff, which will "count" in examinations, and I conceive it as occupying typically four full working days in the week, four good, hard-driving days, and no more, of the students' time. The remaining three, so far as they are not engaged by physical exercise, military training, and mere amusement, must be given to (ii), which I imagine an altogether more general, discursive, various, and spontaneous series of activities. To put the thing briefly, with the use of a convenient slang word (i), is "grind," and (ii) is general culture, elements that are altogether too greatly confused in adolescent education. A large number of people will consider it right and proper that (ii) on the seventh day of the week should become devotional exercise or religious thought and discussion. I would submit that under (ii) there should be formally recognized certain extremely valuable educational influences that are at present too often regarded as irregular or improper invasions of school and college work, the collegiate debating society, for example, private reading, experimental science outside the curriculum, and essays in various arts. It should be possible to provide a certain definite number of hours weekly in which the student should be required merely to show that he was doing something of a developmental kind, he would have his choice between the Library—every College ought to have a good and not too priggishly conceived Library, in which he might either read or write—or the music master, the debating society, the museum, the art studio, the dramatic society, or any concern of the sort that the College authorities had satisfactory reason for supposing to be alive and efficient. In addition (ii) should include certain minor but necessary studies not included in (i), but pursued for all that with a certain insistence, taught or directed, and controlled perhaps by examinations. If, for example, the acquisition of a foreign language was a part of the preliminary schooling, it could be kept alive by a more fastidious study in the higher grade. For the making of the good, all-round, average citizen (i) will be the essential educational factor, but for the boy or girl with a dash of genius (ii) will rise from the level of culture to that of a great opportunity.

What subject or group of subjects is to constitute (i)? There are at least three, and quite probably beyond the very limited range of my knowledge there are other, arrangements of studies that can be contrived to supply this essential substantial part of the College course. Each suffices completely, and I would hesitate to express any preference for one or the other. Each has its special direction towards certain sorts of adult function, and for that reason it may be suggested that the secondary education of an English-speaking country might very well afford all three (or more) types of secondary course. The small schools might specialize upon the type locally most desirable, the larger might group its triplicate (or quadruplicate) system of sustained and serious courses about a common Library and the common arrangements for Section ii. of the College scheme.

The first of these possible College courses, and the one most likely to be useful and fruitful for the mass of the male population in a modern community, is an expansion of the Physics of the Schooling stage. It may be very conveniently spoken of as the Natural Philosophy, course. Its backbone will be an interlocking arrangement of Mathematics, Physics, and the principles of Chemistry, and it will take up as illustrative and mind-expanding exercises, Astronomy, Geography, and Geology conceived as a general history of the Earth. Holding the whole together will be the theory of the Conservation of Energy in its countless aspects and a speculative discussion of the constitution of matter. A certain minimum of Historical and Political reading and of general "Library" would be insisted upon in Section ii. This could be made a quite noble and spacious course of instruction extending over from three to five years, from fourteen or fifteen up to eighteen or twenty-one (or even longer in the case of those partially employed); its less successful products would drop out—it might be before completion—to take up the work of more or less skilled artisans and technical workers, and its more successful ones would pass some of them into the technical colleges for special industries with a view to business direction, into special study for the engineering trades, for the profession of soldiering, [Footnote: I may perhaps explain that my conception of military organization is a universal service of citizens —non-professional soldiers—who will be trained—possibly in boyhood and youth, to shoot very well indeed, to ride either horses or bicycles, and to take up positions and move quickly and easily in organized bodies, and, in addition, a special graduated profession of soldiers who will be in their various ranks engineers, gunners, special-force men of various sorts, and, in the higher ranks, masters of all the organization and methods necessary for the rapid and effective utilization of the non-professional manhood of the country, of volunteers, militia, or short-service enlistment levies, drawn from this general supply, and of all the machinery of communication, provisioning, and so forth. They will not be necessarily the "social superiors" of their commands, but they will naturally exercise the same authoritative command in warfare that a doctor does in a sick-room.] or for the naval and mercantile services, or into research and the literature of science. Some also would pass on to study for the profession of medicine through more special work in Chemistry and Physiology, and some with a proclivity for drawing and design would become architects, designers of appliances, and the like. The idea of the ordinary development of this course is not so very remote from what already exists in Great Britain as the Organized Science School, but, as with all these courses, it would be done in varying degrees of thoroughness and extension under varying conditions. This is the first of my three alternative College courses.

The second course will probably seem less acceptable to many readers, but all who are qualified to speak will testify to its enormous educational value. It is what one may speak of as the Biological Course. Just as the conception of Energy will be the central idea of the Natural Philosophy course, so the conception of Organic Evolution will be the central idea of the Biological Course. A general review of the whole field of Biology—not only of the Natural History of the present but of the geological record—in relation to the known laws and the various main theories of the evolutionary process will be taken, and in addition some special department, either the Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrata chiefly, or of the plants chiefly, or of several Invertebrated groups chiefly, will be exhaustively worked out in relation to these speculations. The first of these alternatives is not only probably the most invigorating mental exercise of the three but bears also more directly upon the practical concerns of life. Physiology will be taken up in relation to this special exhaustive study, and the "Elementary Physics of the Schooling" stage will be prolonged up into a treatment of Chemistry with especial reference to biological problems. Through such a course as this students might pass to the study of medicine just as well as through Natural Philosophy, and the medical profession would profit by the clash of the two types of student. The biological course, with its insistence upon heredity and physiological facts, would also give the very best and gravest preparation in the world for the practical concerns of motherhood. From it students would pass on illuminated to the study of psychology, philosophical science, and educational method. The training in the discussion of broad generalization, and much of the fact involved, would be a most excellent preliminary to special theological study and also to the advanced study of economics and political science. From this course also artists of various sorts would escape through the avenue of Section ii. which, by the by, would have to involve Historical Reading. So much for my second suggested College course.

The third of these three alternative courses is the History course, done extensively in relation to general geography, economic theory, and the general evolution of the world, and intensively in relation to British or American history, and perhaps to some particular period. Out of it would spring a thorough study of the development of English literature and also of the legal systems of the English-speaking peoples. This course also would be a way of approach to philosophical science, to theology, to the thorough study of economic and political science, and possibly it would contribute a larger proportion of its students to imaginative literature than either of the two preceding courses. It would also be the natural preliminary course to the special study of law and so a source of politicians. In the Section ii. of this course a light but lucid treatment of the great generalizations of physical and biological science would be desirable. And from this course also the artist would break away.

Conceivably there are other courses. The course in Mathematics as one sees it given to the Cambridge Tripos men, and what is called the Classical course, will occur to the reader. Few people, however, are to be found who will defend the exclusively mathematical "grind" as a sound intellectual training, and so it need not be discussed here. The case, however, is different with the classical course. It is alleged by those who have had the experience that to learn Latin and Greek more or less thoroughly and then to stumble through one or two Latin and Greek authors "in the original" has an educational value surpassing any conceivable alternative. There is a mysterious benefit from one's private translation however bad that no other translation however good can impart. Plato, for example, who has certainly in the very best translations, quite perceptibly no greater mind than Lord Bacon, Newton, Darwin, or Adam Smith, becomes god-like to all who pass beyond the Little-Go. The controversy is as old as the Battle of the Books, a quite interminable wrangle, which I will not even attempt to summarize here. For my own part I believe all this defence of the classics on the part of men with classical education is but one more example of that human weakness that splashes Oxford metaphysical writings with needless tags and shreds of Greek and set Demetrius the silversmith bawling in the streets. If the reader is of another opinion there is no need to convert him in this present argument, provided only that he will admit the uselessness of his high mystery for the training of the larger mass of modern men. By his standards they are beneath it. A convention upon this issue between the two parties therefore is attainable. Let us admit the classical course for the parents who like and can afford this sort of thing for their sons and daughters. Let us withdraw all objections to its endowment, unless it is quite excessive endowment. Let the classical be the senior service, and the classical professor, to use his own queer way of putting things, primus inter pares. That will make four courses altogether, the Classical, the Historical, the Biological, and the Physical, for one or more of which all the secondary schools and colleges in that great English-speaking community at which the New Republic aims should be organized. [Footnote: One may, however, suggest one other course as possible under special conditions. There is one sort of art that requires not only a very rigorous and exhaustive training, but also an early commencement, and that is music, at once the most isolated and the most universal of arts. Exceptional gifts in the direction of music will have appeared in the schooling stage, and it is quite conceivable that the college phase for those who are destined for a musical career should have as its backbone a "grind" in the theory and practice of music, with languages and general culture relegated to a Section ii.]

It may be objected that this is an idealized proposal, and that existing conditions, which are, of course, the material out of which new conditions are to be made do not present anything like this form. As a matter of fact, if only the reader will allow for a certain difference in terminology, they do. What I have here called Schooling is, so far as the age of the pupils go, typically presented in Great Britain by what is called the elementary school, and in America by the public school, and certain schools that unanalytical people in England, mistaking a social for an educational difference, seem disposed to class with secondary schools, the inferior Grammar Schools, the cheaper private schools, and what are called Preparatory Schools, [Footnote: As things are, there is no doubt a considerable advantage in the child from a good home going on to a good preparatory school instead of entering a public elementary school, and the passage above must not be misread as a sweeping condemnation of such establishments.] are really also elementary schools. The latter have more social pretension and sometimes far less efficiency than a Government Elementary School, but that is all the difference. All these schools admit of a gradual approximation to the ideal of schooling already set forth in the sixth of these papers. Some are already within a measureable distance of that ideal. And above these elementary schools, above the School grade proper, and answering to what is here called College, there is a great variety of day and evening schools of the most varied description which agree all of them in the presentation of a second phase in the educational process beginning about the age of thirteen to sixteen and going on to nineteen and twenty. In Great Britain such institutions are sometimes called secondary schools and sometimes colleges, and they have no distinct boundary line to separate them from the University proper, on the one hand, or the organized Science Schools and the Higher Grade Board Schools and evening classes of the poorer sort. The Universities and medical schools are, indeed, hampered with work quite similar to that of secondary schools and which the secondary schools have failed to do, the Cambridge undergraduate before his Little-Go, the London University medical student before his Preliminary Scientific Examination, are simply doing the belated work of this second stage. And there is, I doubt not, a similar vague complexity in America. But through the fog something very like the boundary line here placed about fourteen is again and again made out; not only the general requirements for efficient education, but the trend of present tendency seems to be towards a scheme of three stages in which a first stage of nine or ten years of increasingly serious Schooling (Primary Education), from a very light beginning about five up to about fourteen, is to be followed by a second stage of College education (Secondary Education), from fourteen or sixteen to an upward boundary determined by class and various facilities, and this is to be succeeded by a third stage, which we will now proceed to consider in detail.

Let us make it clear at once that this third stage is a much ampler thing than the graduation or post graduation work of a university. It may or it may not include that as an ingredient. But the intention is to express all those agencies (other than political, social, and economic forces, and the suggestions that arise from them), that go to increase and build up the mental structure of the man or woman. This includes the pulpit, so far as it is still a vehicle for the importation of ideas and emotions, the stage, books that do anything more than pass the time, newspapers, the Grove and the Agora. These all, in greater or lesser degrees, work powerfully together to make the citizen. They work most powerfully, of course, in those plastic unsettled years that last from adolescence to the middle twenties, but often in very slowly diminishing intensity right into the closing decades of middle age. However things may have been in the quieter past when newspapers did not exist, when creeds were rigid, plays mere spectacles to be seen only "in Town," and books rare, the fact remains that to-day everybody goes much further and learns far more than any of the professedly educational agencies can be held accountable for. There was a time, perhaps, when a man really did "settle down" intellectually, at the end of his days of learning, when the only way— outside the libraries and households of a few princely personages—to go on thinking and to participate in the secular development of ideas, was to go to a University and hear and dispute. But those days have gone for a hundred years at least. They have gone by, and the strange thing is that a very large proportion of those who write and talk about education have not discovered they have gone by, and still think and talk of Universities as though they were the only sources and repositories of wisdom. They conjure up a vision in my mind of an absent-minded water-seller, bearing his precious jars and crying his wares knee-deep, and going deeper into a rising stream. Or if that does not seem just to the University in the past, an image of a gardener, who long ago developed a novel variety of some great flower which has now scattered its wind-borne seed everywhere, but who still proffers you for sale in a confidential, condescending manner a very little, very dear packet of that universal commodity. Until the advent of Mr. Ewart (with his Public Libraries' Act), Mr. Passmore Edwards, and Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the stream of endowment for research and teaching flowed just as exclusively to the Universities as it did in Tudor times.

Let us deal, then, first with the finally less important and more formal portion of the third stage in the educational process; that is to say, with the University Course. One may conceive that so far as positive teaching and learning go, a considerable proportion of the population will never pass beyond the second stage at all. They will fail to keep up in the course of that stage, or they will branch off into the special development of some special aptitude. The failures will gravitate into positions a little better perhaps, but analogous to those taken up by the failures of the Schooling phase. The common clerks and common shop-hands, for example, would come out here. The others, who fall out without completing their College course, but who may not be College failures at all, will be all sorts of artists and specializing persons of that type. A great many girls, for economic and other reasons, will probably never get beyond the College stage. They will pass from the Biological and Historical courses into employment, or marry, or enter domestic life. But what may finally become a much larger proportion of New Republican citizens will either from the beginning, taking the College course in the evening, or after a year or so of full attendance at the College course, start also upon the third- grade work, the preparation for the upper ranks of some technical and commercial employment, for the systematic and liberal instruction that will replace the old rule-of-thumb apprenticeship. One can imagine a great variety of methods of combining the apprenticeship phase of serious occupation with the College course. Many waking up to the demands of life may do better for themselves with a desperately clutched College course of evening classes than others who will have progressed comfortably in day Colleges. There should be opportunity by means of scholarship openings for such cases of a late awakening to struggle back into the higher education. There may be every gradation from such students to those who will go completely and exhaustively through the College and who will then go on at one and twenty or two and twenty to equally complete and exhaustive work in the third grade. One imagines the third grade in its completeness as a most varied choice of thorough studies carried on for three or four years after eighteen or twenty-one, special schools of medicine, law, engineering, psychology, and educational science, economics and political science, economics and commercial science, philosophy and theology, and physical science. Quite apart from the obvious personal limitation, the discussion of the method of dealing specifically with each of these subjects would be too diversified and special a theme to occupy me now. The larger fact to which attention has to be given is this: that all these studies and all the technical study and such like preparation at lower levels of the third stage must be as it were floating in a common body of Thought, which is the unifying principle, the common initiative, the real common life of the truly civilized state, and that this body of Thought is no longer to be contained within the form of a University. It is the larger of the two things. And the last question, therefore, in these speculations is the general organization of that body of Thought, that is to say of contemporary literature, using the word in its widest sense to cover all that is good in journalism, all untechnical speculative, philosophical writing, all that is true and new in the drama, in poetry, fiction or any other distinctly literary form, and all scientific publication that is not purely a matter of recording or technical working out, all scientific publication that is, that deals with general ideas.

There was a time when the higher education was conceived of as entirely a matter of learning. To endow chairs and teachers, and to enable promising scholars to come and hear the latter was the complete organization of the higher education. It is within quite recent years that the conception of endowing research for its own sake, leaving the Research Professor free altogether from direct teaching or with only a few good pupils whose work consisted chiefly in assimilating his ideas and helping with his researches, has become at all widely acceptable. Indirectly, of course, the Research Professor is just as much a teacher as the Teaching Professor, because his results become accessible as he writes them. Our work now is to broaden both the conception of research and of teaching, to recognize that whatever imports fresh and valid ideas, fresh and valid aspects—not simply of chemical and physical matters, but of aesthetic, social, and political matters, partakes of the honour and claims of research—and that whatever conveys ideas and aspects vividly and clearly and invigoratingly, not simply by word of mouth but by book or picture or article, is teaching. The publication of books, the whole business of bringing the contemporary book most efficiently home to the general reader, the business of contemporary criticism, the encouragement and support of contemporary writers, is just as vitally important in the modern state as the organisation of Colleges and Schools, and just as little to be left to the enterprise of isolated individuals working primarily upon commercial lines for gain.

There are two aspects of this question. There is the simpler one of getting an abundance of good books, classical and contemporary, and of good publications distributed everywhere through the English-speaking world, and there is the more subtle and complex problem of getting, stimulating, and sustaining the original writers and the original critics and investigators upon whom the general development of contemporary thought, upon whom indeed the progress of the world finally depends. The latter problem may be reserved for the next paper, and here we will deal simply with the question of access and distribution.

For the present we must assume the quality of the books; all that sort of question must be deferred for our final discussion. We will simply speak of good books, serious books, on the one hand, and of light and merely amusing books on the other, in an intentionally vague way. The former sort of books is our present concern; pleasure as an end, pleasure except as necessary recuperation, is no affair for the state.

Books are either bought or borrowed for reading, and we have to consider what can be done to secure the utmost efficiency in the announcement, lending and selling of books. We have also to consider the best possible means of distributing periodicals. We have particularly to consider how books specifically "good," or "thorough," or "serious," and periodicals that are "sound" and "stimulating" are to be made as widely and invitingly accessible as possible. The machinery we have in hand are the booksellers and the newsvendors, the circulating libraries, the post-office, and the free public libraries that are now being energetically spread throughout the land [by men who, in this aspect, answer very closely to the conception of New Republicans as it is here unfolded], and to bring and keep all this machinery to the very highest level of efficiency is integral to the New Republican scheme of activity.

It may be objected that the organization of bookselling and publishing is the discussion of trivial details in the intellectual life of a people, but indeed that is not so. It is a constant trouble, a perpetual drain upon the time and energy of every man who participates in that life, to get the books that are necessary to the development of his thoughts. The high price of books, burthensome as it is, is the lesser evil, the great trouble is the trouble of access. There are a great number of people now who read nothing at all, or only promiscuous fiction, who would certainly become real readers were books of any other sort attractively available. These things are not trivial. The question of book distribution is as vitally important to the intellectual health of a modern people as are open windows in cases of phthisis. No nation can live under modern conditions unless its whole population is mentally aerated with books.

That allusion to the predominance of fiction brings one round to the question of the Public Library. One is constantly reading attacks on these new and most promising institutions, and always these attacks base themselves on the fact that the number of novels taken out was so many times, so many hundred times greater than the number of "serious books." Follows nonsense about "scrappy" reading, shallowness of the public mind, and so forth. In Great Britain public pomposities take up the strain and deliver large vague, foolish discourses on our intellectual decline. It occurs to none of these people—nothing, indeed, ever does seem to occur to this sort of people—to inquire if a man or woman can get serious reading from a public library. An inspection of a Public Library Catalogue reveals, no doubt, a certain proportion of "serious" books available, but, as a rule, that "serious side" is a quite higgledy-piggledy heap of fragments. Suppose, for example, an intelligent mechanic has a proclivity for economic questions, he will find no book whatever to guide him to what literature there may be upon those questions. He will plunge into the catalogue, and discover perhaps a few publications of the Cobden Club, Henry George's Progress and Poverty, J. S. Mill's Autobiography, Ruskin's Unto This Last, The Statesman's Year Book for 1895, and a text-book specially adapted to such and such an examination by the tutors of some Correspondence College. What can you expect from such a supply but a pitiful mental hash? What is the most intelligent of mechanics likely to secure for himself from this bran pie? Serious subjects are not to be read in this wild disorderly way. But fiction can be. A novel is fairly complete in itself, and in sticking to novels, the Public Library readers show, I submit, a better literary sense and a finer intellectual feeling than the muddle-headed, review-inspired, pretentious people who blame them.

But manifestly the Public Libraries ought to be equipped for serious reading. Too many of them are covers without meat, or, at least, with nothing to satisfy a respectable mind hunger. And the obvious direct method to equip them is to organize an Association, to work, if possible, with the Librarians, and get this "serious" side of the Libraries, this vitally important side, into better order. A few men with a little money to spend could do what is wanted for the whole English-speaking world. The first business of such an Association would be to get "Guides" to various fields of human interest written, guides that should be clear, explicit Bibliographies, putting all the various writers into their relationships one to another, advising what books should be first taken by the beginner in the field, indicating their trend, pointing out the less technical ones and those written obscurely. Differential type might stamp the more or less important works. These Guides ought to go to every Public Library, and I think also that all sorts of people would be eager to buy them if they were known to be comprehensive, intelligent, and inclusive. They might even "pay." Then I would suggest this Association should make up lists of books to present an outline course or a full course corresponding to each Guide. Where books were already published in a cheap edition, the Association would merely negotiate with the publisher for the special supply of a few thousand copies of each. Where books were modern and dear the Association would negotiate with publisher and author, for the printing of a special Public Library Edition. They would then distribute these sets of books either freely or at special rates, three or four sets or more to each Library. In many cases the Association would probably find it preferable to print its editions afresh, with specially written introductions, defining the relationship of each book to the general literature of the subject. [Footnote: In America Mr. George Iles is already organizing the general appraisement of books for the public library reader in a most promising manner. The Bibliography of the Literature of American History, with an appraisal of each book, which has appeared under his direction, is edited by Mr. Larned, and is a most efficient performance; it is to be kept up to date by Mr. P. P. Wells, librarian of the Yale Law School. It includes an appendix by Professor Channing, of Harvard, which is on the lines of the "Guides" I suggest, though scarcely so full as I should like them. This appendix is reprinted separately for five cents, and it is almost all English public librarians and libraries need so far as American history goes. The English Fabian Society, I may note, publishes a sixpenny bibliography of social and economic science, but it is a mere list for local librarians, and of little use to the uninitiated reader.]

Such an Association in the present state of publishing would become—in Great Britain, at any rate—quite inevitably a Publishing Association. A succession of vigorous, well-endowed Voluntary Publishing Associations is a quite vital necessity in the modern state. A succession is needed because each age has its unexpected new needs and new methods, and it would not be a bad idea to endow such associations with a winding-up clause that would plump them, stock, unspent capital, and everything except perhaps a pension fund for the older employes, into the funds of some great Public Library at the end of thirty or forty years. Several such Associations have played, or are still playing a useful part in British affairs, but most of them have lost the elasticity of youth. Lord Brougham's Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was one of the earliest, and we have today, for example, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the Catholic Truth Society, the Rationalist Press Association, and the Fabian Society. There is a real need to-day for one—indeed there is room for several—Publishing Associations that would set themselves to put bright modern lights into these too often empty lanterns, the Public Libraries. So lit, Great Britain and America would have in them an instrument of public education unparalleled in the world, infinitely better adapted to the individualistic idiosyncracy of our peoples than any imitation of German colleges can possibly be. Propaganda of all sorts could be diverted to this purpose. Persons of imperialistic tendencies might well consider the advisability of Guides to good geographical and historical reading and sets of travel books, and of geographical and historical works. Americanisers might consider the possibility of sets that would help the common British to a clearer idea of America, and Americans to a realization that the British Islands are something more than three obscure patches of land entirely covered by a haughty peerage and a slightly absurd but historically interesting Crown. . . . Indeed, whatever you want thought or believed, I would say, give books!

But the good New Republican would have a wider scope for his Publishing Association than to subdue it to this specific doctrine or that. It is not the opinion makes the man; it is not the conclusion makes the book. We live not in the truth, but in the promise of the truth. Sound thinking, clearly and honestly set forth, that is the sole and simple food of human greatness, the real substance and the real wealth of nations; the key that will at last unlock the door to all we can dream of or desire.



X.

THOUGHT IN THE MODERN STATE

These speculations upon the possibilities and means of raising the average human result have brought us at last to the problem of increasing the amount of original intellectual activity in the state, as a culminating necessity. That average child who threads our speculations has been bred and fed, we now suppose, educated in school and college, put under stimulating political and social conditions and brought within reach and under the influence of the available literature of the time, and he is now emerging into adult responsibility. His individual thought and purpose has to swim in and become part of the general thought and purpose of the community. If that general flow of thought is meagre, his individual life will partake of its limitations. As the general thought rises out of its pools and narrow channels towards a wide flood, so each individual becomes more capable of free movements and spacious co-operations towards the general end. We have bred our citizen and trained him only to waste all his energy at last; he is no better than the water in an isolated dry-season pool in the bed of a tropical river, unless he can mingle in the end with the general sea of thought and action.

Thought is the life, the spontaneous flexibility of a community. A community that thinks freely and fully throughout its population is capable of a thousand things that are impossible in an unthinking mass of people. The latter, collectively considered, is a large rigid thing, a lifeless thing, that will break rather than bend, that will die rather than develop. Its inevitable end is dust and extinction. Look at the thing from the baser level of political conceptions, and still that floating tide of thought is a necessity. With thought and gathered knowledge things that mean tumult, bloodshed, undying hatreds, schisms and final disaster to uncivilized races, are accomplished in peace; constitutional changes, economic reorganizations, boundary modifications and a hundred grave matters. Thought is the solvent that will make a road for men through Alpine difficulties that seem now unconquerable, that will dissolve those gigantic rocks of custom and tradition that loom so forbiddingly athwart all our further plans. For three thousand years and more the Book has been becoming more and more the evident salvation of man. If our present civilization collapse, it will collapse as all previous civilizations have collapsed, not from want of will but from the want of organization for its will, for the want of that knowledge, that conviction, and that general understanding that would have kept pace with the continually more complicated problems that arose about it. [Footnote: Dr. Beattie Crozier, in his most interesting and suggestive History of Intellectual Development, terms the literary apparatus that holds a people together to a common purpose, the "Bible" of that people, and suggests that the "Bible" of a modern people should be the History of Civilization. His work expresses by very different phrases and methods a line of thought closely akin to the thesis of this paper.]

One writes "our present civilization" and of previous civilizations, but indeed no civilizations have yet really come into existence. Tribes have aggregated into nations, nations have aggregated into empires, and then, after a struggle, has come a great confusion of thought, a failure to clarify a common purpose, and disintegration. Each successive birth has developed a more abundant body of thought, a more copious literature than the last, each has profited by the legacy of the previous failure, but none have yet developed enough. Mankind has been struggling to win this step of a permanent civilized state, and has never yet attained any sort of permanency—unless perhaps in China. And that sole imperfect permanency was based primarily upon a literature. A literature is the triumphant instrument of the invincible culture of the Jews. Through the whole volume of history the thoughtful reader cannot but exclaim, again and again, "But if they had only understood one another, all this bloodshed, all this crash, disaster, and waste of generations could have been avoided!" Our time has come, and we of the European races are making our struggle in our turn. Slavery still fights a guerilla war in factory and farm, cruelty and violence peep from every slum, barbaric habits, rude barbaric ways of thinking, grossness and stupidity are still all about us. And yet in many ways we seem to have got nearer to the hope of permanent beginnings than any of those previous essays in civilization. Collectively we know a great deal more, and more of us are in touch with the general body of knowledge than was ever the case at any earlier stage. Assuredly we know enough to hope that we have passed the last of the Dark Ages. But though we hope, we deal with no certainties, and it is upon the broadening and increase of the flow of ideas that our hope depends.

At present this stream of thought and common understanding is not nearly so wide and deep as it might conceivably become, as it must become if indeed this present civilization is to be more than another false start. Our society [Footnote: Anticipations, Chapter III. Developing Social Elements.] has ceased to be homogeneous, and it has become a heterogeneous confusion without any secure common grounds of action, under the stress of its own material achievements. For the lack of a sufficient literature we specialize into inco-ordinated classes. A number of new social types are developing, ignorant of each other, ignorant almost of themselves, full of mutual suspicions and mutual misunderstandings, narrow, limited, and dangerously incapable of intelligent collective action in the face of crises. The medical man sees nothing beyond his profession; he misunderstands the artist, the divine, and the engineer. The engineer hates and despises the politician, the lawyer misses the aims of the medical man, the artist lives angrily in a stuffy little corner of pure technique; none of them read any general literature at all except perhaps a newspaper. Each thinks parochially in his own limits, and, except for his specialty, is an illiterate man. It is absolutely necessary to the progress of our civilization that these isolations should be overcome, that the community should become aware of itself collectively and should think as a whole. And the only thing that can overcome these isolations and put the mass of intelligent men upon a common basis of understanding, is an abundant and almost universally influential contemporary literature.

We have already discussed the possibility of developing the innervation of the state, the distribution of books, the stimulation and direction of reading, and all the peripheral aspects of literature, and we come now to the difficult and intricate problem of whether we can do anything, and what it is we may do, to stimulate the central thought. Can we hope to improve the conditions of literary production, to make our literature more varied, quintessential and abundant, to enforce it with honour and help, to attract to its service every man and woman with gifts of value, and to make the most of these gifts?

Quite a number of people will assert that those things that constitute literature come and go beyond the control and will of man, they will speak of Shakespeare as being a sort of mystical consequence, of Roger Bacon or Newton as men independent of circumstances, inevitably great. And if they are by way of being comic writers—the word "humorist," as Schopenhauer long since pointed out, is a stolen lion's skin for these gentry—they will become extremely facetious about the proposed school for Bacons and Shakespeares. But a little reflection will convince the reader that none of the great figures of the past appeared without certain conditions being added to their inherent powers. In the first place, they had to be reasonably sure of a sympathetic and intelligent atmosphere, however limited in extent—there was no Plato in the heroic age, and no Newton during the Heptarchy—and in the second, the medium, language or what not, had to be ready for their use. In the third place they needed personally a certain minimum of training and preparation, and in the fourth they had to feel that for some reason—not necessarily a worldly one—the thing was "worth while." Given a "developer" of these ingredients, and they appeared. But without this developer they would not have appeared, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose, first, that a great number of men of a quality as rare as were those who constitute the unparalleled roll of English intellectual greatness, lived and died undeveloped before ever the developer was compounded at all, and that even in the last few hundred years the necessary combination has fallen upon so small an area of our racial life as to have missed far more than it has hit. The second of these papers is, indeed, an attempt to present quite convincingly what the comic man will probably regard as his effectual objection, that inherent tendency cannot be produced at will. But that the developer may conceivably be made in much greater quantities and spread much wider than it is at present is an altogether different thing. There are, one submits, enormous reserves of intellectual force unworked and scarcely touched, even to-day.

We have already discussed the means and possibilities of a net of education that should sweep through the whole social body, and of the creation of an atmosphere more alert and active than our present one. We have now to consider how the greatest proportion of those born with exceptional literary powers may be picked out and induced to exercise those powers to the utmost. Let us admit at once that this is a research of extraordinary subtlety and complexity, that there are ten thousand ways of going wrong, and perhaps mischievously wrong. That one may submit, is not a sufficient reason for abandonment and despair. To take an analogous case, it may be a complex and laborious thing to escape out of a bear-pit into which one has fallen, but few people will consider that a reason for inaction. Even if they had small hope of doing anything effectual they might find speculation and experiments in escape, a congenial way of passing the time. It is the sort of project one should only abandon at the final and conclusive proof of its impossibility. Exactly the same principle applies to human destinies and the saving of other lives than our own. As a matter of fact, the enterprise is not at all a hopeless one if it is undertaken honestly, warily, and boldly.

Let us consider the lines upon which men must go to ensure the greatest possible growth of original thought in the state, original thought of which what scientific men call Research is only one phase.

Before we can consider how we may endow him and equip him and help him, we have to consider how we may find the original thinker, and we have, if we can, to define him and to discover whatever we can of his methods and habits, his natural history as it were. We are attempting generalization about a class of remarkably peculiar and difficult persons. They are persons either of great intellectual power or simply of great imaginative power, whose bias and quality it is to apply these exceptional powers not directly and simply to their personal advancement and enrichment, but primarily through philosophical, scientific, or artistic channels, to the increase of knowledge or of wisdom or of both. And here is the peculiar point in this problem, they are men who put, or who wish to put the best of themselves and most of themselves into occupations and interests that do not lead to practical results, that often for the individual in open competition and the market fail more or less completely to "pay." Their activities, of course, pay tremendously at last for the race, but that is not their personal point of application. They take their lives and their splendid powers, they waste themselves in remote and inaccessible regions and bring back precious things that immediately any sharp commercial-minded man will turn into current coin for himself and the use of the world.

There are certain things follow naturally from this remote concentration, and we must persistently keep them in mind. These men of exceptional mental quality, if they are really to do what they are specially fitted to do, with all their power, will be unable to give their personal affairs, their personal advancement, sustained attention. In a democratic community whose principle is "hustle," in a leisurely monarchy where only opulence, a powerful top-note, and conspicuous social gifts succeed, they will have either to neglect or taint their special talent in order to survive. It does not follow that because a man's special qualities and inclinations are towards, let us say, illuminating inquiries into the constitution of matter, or profound and beautiful or simply beautiful renderings of his individual vision of life, that he is indifferent to or independent of honour, of all the freedoms to do and to rest from doing that come with wealth, or of the many lures and pleasures of life. Posthumous Fame is losing its attractiveness in an age which has discovered excellent reasons for doubting whether after all aere perennius was not rather too strong a figure. However powerful the impulse to think, to state and create, there comes a point—often a point a long way from starvation— at which a genius will stop working. Your man of scientific, literary, or artistic genius will not work below his conception of the endurable minimum, the minimum of hope and honour and attention as well as of material things, any more than a coal-heaver will—and we live in a period when the Standard of Life tends to rise. To secure these things which most men make the entire objective of their lives is, or should be, an irrelevancy to the man of exceptional gifts. This means an enormous handicap for him. Unless, therefore, we endow him and make life easy for him so long as he does his proper work, he will have either to pervert his powers more or less completely to these irrelevant ends, or if his powers do not admit of such perversion, he will have no use for them whatever. He will take some subordinate place in the world as a rather less than average man and, it may be, find the leisure to give just an amateurish ineffectual expression of the thing he might have been.

Now this is the case with a great deal of scientific and artistic work, and with nearly all literature at the present time, throughout the English-speaking community. There are a few sciences slightly endowed, there are a few arts patronized with some intelligence and generosity, and for the rest there is nothing for it, for the man who wants to do these most necessary and vital things, but to hammer some at least of his precious gold into the semblance of a brass trumpet and to devote a certain proportion of his time and energy to blowing that trumpet and with that air of conscious modesty the public is pleased to consider genuine, proclaiming the value of his wares. Some men seem able to do this sort of thing without any deterioration in quality and some with only a partial deterioration, but the way of self-advertisement is on a slippery slope, and it has brought many a man of indisputable gifts to absolute vulgarity and ineffectiveness of thought and work. At the best it is a shameful business, this noise and display, for all that Scott and Dickens were past masters in the art. And some men cannot do it at all. Moreover, what the good man may do with an effort, the energetic quack, whose only gift is simulation, can do infinitely better. It is only in the unprofitable branches of intellectual work that the best now holds the best positions unchallenged. In the really popular branches of artistic work every honourable success draws a parasitic swarm of imitators like fish round bread in a pool. In the world of thought, far more than in the world of politics, the polling method, the democratic method has broken down, the method that will only permit an author to write—unless his subject is one that allows him to hold a Professorial Chair—on condition that he can get a publisher to induce the public to buy a certain minimum number of copies of each of his works, a method that will give him no rest, once he is in the full swing of "production," until the end, no freedom to change his style or matter, lest he should lose that paying following by the transition or the pause.

Now before we can discuss how else we can deal with those who constitute the current thought of the community, we must consider how we are to distinguish what is worth sustaining from what is not.

This is the public aspect of Criticism. It is the mineralogy of literature and art. At present Criticism, as a public function, is discharged by private persons, usually anonymous and frequently mysterious, and it is discharged with an astonishing ineffectiveness. Nowhere in the whole English-speaking world is there anything one can compare to a voice and a judgment—much less any discussion between reputable voices. There are periodicals professing criticism, but most of them have the effect of an omnibus in which disconnected heterogeneous people are continually coming and going, while the conductor asks first one of his fluctuating load and then another haphazard for an opinion on this or that. The branch of literature that has first to be put on a sound footing is critical literature. The organization into efficiency of the criticism of contemporary work one is forced to believe an almost necessary preliminary to the hopeful treatment of the rest of the current of thought.

There is, of course, also the suggestion that an English Academy of Letters might be of great service in discounting vulgar "successes" and directing respect and attention to literary achievements. One may doubt whether such an Academy as a Royal Charter would give the world would be of any service at all in this connection. But Mr. Herbert Trench has suggested recently that it might be possible to organize a large Guild of literary men and women, which would include all capable writers, and from which a sort of Academy could be elected, either by a general poll or, I would suggest, by a Jury of Election or successive Juries confirming one another. The New Republican would like to see such a Guild not purely English, but Anglo-American, or in duplicate for the two countries. With a very carefully chosen nucleus and some little elaboration in the admission of new members—whose works might be submitted to the report of a critical jury—such a Guild might be made fairly representative of literary capacity. Election, one may suggest, should be involuntary. There would be a number of literary men, one fears—great men some of them—who would absolutely refuse to work with any such body, and from the first the Guild would have to determine to make such men unwilling members, members to whom all the honours and privileges of the Guild would be open whenever they chose to abandon their attitude of scorn or distrust. Such a Guild would furnish a useful constituency, a useful jury-list. It could be used to recommend writers for honours, to check the distribution of public pensions for literary services, perhaps even to send a member or so to the Upper Chamber. It is, at any rate, an experiment worth trying.

But such a Guild at best is only one of many possible expedients in this matter. Another is for a few people of means to subsidize a magazine for the exhaustive criticism of contemporary work for a few years. Quite a small number of people, serious in this matter, a couple of thousand or so, could float such a magazine by the simple expedient of guaranteeing subscriptions. [Footnote: It may be suggested that among other methods of putting the criticism of contemporary literature upon a better footing is one that might conceivably be made to pay its own expenses. There is so much room for endowments nowadays that where one can get at the purse of the general public one should certainly prefer it to that of the generous but overtaxed donor. The project would require a strong endowment, but that endowment might be of the nature of a guarantee fund, and might in the end return unimpaired to the lender. The suggestion is the establishment of a well-planned and reasonably cheap monthly or weekly critical magazine, written on a level at present unattainable—chiefly because of the low rate of payment for all literary criticism. There can be no doubt among those who read much among literary and quasi-literary periodicals in English that there is a very considerable amount of high critical ability available. Buried and obscured to an ineffectual degree among much that is formal, foolish, and venial, there is to be found to-day a really quite remarkable number of isolated reviews, criticisms and articles in which style is apparent, in which discrimination shines fitfully, in which there is the unmistakable note of honest enthusiasm for good work. For the most part, such criticism bears also the marks of haste— as, indeed, it must do when a review as long as the column of a daily paper, a day's work, that is, of steady writing, earns scarcely a pound. But the stuff is there. Scarcely a number of the Academy, or the Spectator, scarcely a week of the Morning Post, the Daily News, or the Daily Chronicle, but there is a review, or a piece of a review, that has the stigmata of literature. And this suggestion is that some of these writers shall be got together, shall be paid at least as well as popular short-story writers are paid, shall each have a definite department marked out under a trustworthy editor, and be pledged to limit their work to the pages of this new critical magazine. Their work would be signed, and there they would be, conspicuously urged to do the best that was in them, apropos of more or less contemporary books and writers. They would have leisure for deliberate judgments, for the development of that consistency of thought which the condition of journalism renders so impossible. This review would mean for them status, reputation, and opportunity. They would deal with contemporary fiction, with contemporary speculative literature, and with the style, logic, methods and vocabulary of scientific and philosophical writers. Their work would form the mass of the magazine, but there would also be (highly paid) occasional writers, towards whose opinions the regular staff would very carefully define their attitude. The project, of course, in foolish hands, might be very foolishly misinterpreted. It might be quite easy to drive a team of egregious asses in this way over contemporary work, leaving nothing but hoof-marks and injuries, but we are assuming the thing to be efficiently done. It is submitted that such a magazine, patiently and generously sustained for a few years, would at last probably come to pay its way. Unless the original selection of the staff was badly done, it would by sheer persistent high quality win its way to authority with the reading public, and so fill its covers with a swelling mass of advertisement pages. And once it paid, then forthwith a dozen rivals would be in the field, all of them, of course, also paying highly for critical matter and competing for critics of standing. Such an enterprise would be a lever for criticism through the whole of our literary world.]

Then it should also be possible to endow university lectureships and readerships in contemporary criticism, lectureships and readerships in which questions of style and method could be illustrated by quotation (not necessarily of a flattering sort) from contemporary work. Why should there not be an endowment which would enable a man of indisputable critical capacity to talk through an illuminating course, to sit before a little pile of marked books and reading sometimes here and sometimes there and talking between, to distinguish the evil from the good? What a wholesome thing to have Mr. Henley, for example, at that in the place of some of the several specialists who will lecture you so admirably on the Troubadours! How good to hear Mr. Frederic Harrison (with some one to follow) adjusting all our living efforts to the scale of the divine Comte, and Mr. Walkley and Mr. Herbert Paul making it perfectly clear that a dead dog is better than a living lion, by demonstrations on the lion. Criticism to-day is all too much in the case of that doctor whose practice was deadly, indeed, but his post- mortems admirable! No doubt such lectures would consist at times of highly contentious matter, but what of that? There could be several chairs. It would not be an impossible thing to set a few Extension Lecturers afloat upon the same channel. We have now numerous courses of lectures on the Elizabethan Dramatists and the evolution of the Miracle Play, and the people who listen to this sort of thing will depart straight away to recreate their souls in the latest triumph of vehement bookselling. Why not base the literary education of people upon the literature they read instead of upon literature that they are scarcely more in touch with than with Chinese metaphysics? A few carefully chosen pages of contemporary rubbish, read with a running comment, a few carefully chosen pages of what is, comparatively, not rubbish, a little lucid discussion of effects and probabilities, would do more to quicken the literary sense of the average person than all the sham enthusiasm about Marlowe and Spenser that was ever concocted. There are not a few authors who would be greatly the better and might even be subsequently grateful for a lecture upon themselves in this style. Let no one say from this that the classics of our tongue are depreciated here. But the point is, that for people who know little of history, little of our language, whose only habitual reading is the newspaper, the popular novel, and the sixpenny magazine, to plunge into the study of works written in the language of a different period, crowded with obsolete allusions, and saturated with obsolete ideas and extinct ways of thinking, is pretentious and unprofitable, and that most of such Extension Lecturing is fruitless and absurd. And I appeal to these two facts in confirmation, to the thousands of people who every year listen to such lectures and to the hundreds of thousands of copies of our national classics sold by the booksellers, on the one hand, and on the other to the absolute incapacity of our public to judge any new literary thing or to protect itself in any way from violently and vulgarly boomed rubbish of the tawdriest description. Without a real and popular criticism of contemporary work as a preliminary and basis, the criticism and circulation of the classics is quite manifestly vain.

By such expedients very much might be done for the literary atmosphere. By endowing a critical review or so, by endowing a few chairs and readerships in contemporary criticism, by organizing a Guild of Literature and a system of exemplary honours for literature, by stimulating the general discussion of contemporary work through lectures and articles, criticism could, I believe, be made "worth while" to an extent that is now scarcely imaginable, and there might be created an atmosphere of attention, appreciation, and judgment that would be in itself extraordinarily stimulating to all forms of literary effort. Of course all this sort of thing may be done cheaply, stupidly, dishonestly, and vulgarly, and one imagines the shy and exquisite type of mind recoiling from the rude sanity of these suggestions. But, indeed, they need not be done any other way than finely and well. People whose conception of what is good in art and literature is inseparable from rarity ought, I submit, to collect stamps. At an earlier phase in this series of discussions there was broached a project for an English Language Society, which would set itself to do or get done a number of services necessary to the teaching and extension of the language of our universal peoples. With such a Society those who undertook this project for the habilitation of criticism would necessarily co-operate and interlock.

It is upon this basis of an organized criticism and of a well-taught and cherished language that the English literature of the Twentieth Century, the literature of analysis and research, and the literature of creative imagination, has to stand. Upon such a basis it becomes possible to consider the practicability of the endowment of general literature. For to that at last we come. I submit that it is only by the payment of authors, and if necessary their endowment in a spacious manner, and in particular by the entire separation of the rewards of writing from the accidents of the book market, that the function of literature can be adequately discharged in the modern state. The laws of supply and demand break down altogether in this case. We have to devise some means of sustaining those who discharge this necessary public function in the progressive state.

There are several general propositions in this matter that it may be worth while to state at this point. The first is that both scientific generalization and literature proper have been and are and must continue to be the product of a quite exceptionally heterogeneous aggregation of persons. They are persons of the most various temperaments, of the most varied lop-sidedness, of the most various special gifts, and the most various social origins, having only this in common, the ability to add to the current of the world's thought. They are not to be dealt with as though they were a class of persons all of exceptional general intelligence, of exceptional strength of character, or of exceptional sanity. To do that, would be to hand over literature from the man of genius to the man of talent. A single method of selection, help, honour, and payment, measurement by one general standard cannot, therefore, be accepted as a solution. There must not be any one single central body, any authoritative single control, for such a body or authority would inevitably develop a "character" in its activity and greet with especial favour (or with especial disfavour) certain types. In this case, at any rate, organization is not centralization, and it is also not uniformity. The proposition may indeed be thrown out that the principle of Many Channels (a principle involving the repudiation both of the monarchical and the democratic idea) is an essential one to go upon in all questions of honour and promotion in the modern state. And not only Many Channels, but Many Methods. Whatever the value of that as a universally valuable proposition, it certainly applies here.

And next we may suggest that we must take great care that we pay for the thing we need and not for some subsidiary qualification of less value. The reward must be directly related to the work, and independent of all secondary considerations. It must have no taint of charity. The recipient must not have to show that he is in want. Because a writer or investigator is a sober, careful body and quite solvent in a modest way, that is no reason why we should not pay him stimulatingly for his valuable contributions to the general mind, or because he is a shiftless seeker of misfortunes, why we should pay him in excess. But pay him anyhow. Almost scandalous private immorality, I submit, should not bar the literary worker from his pay any more than it justifies our stealing his boots. We must deal with immorality as immorality, and with work as work. Above all, at the present time, we must keep clearly in view that popularity has no relation to literary, philosophic or scientific value, it neither justifies nor condemns. At present, except in the case of certain forms of research and in relation to the altogether too charitable-looking British Civil List, we make popularity the sole standard by which a writer may be paid. The novelist, for example, gets an income extraordinarily made up of sums of from sixpence to two shillings per person sufficiently interested to buy his or her books. The result is entirely independent of real literary merit. The sixpences and shillings are, of course, greatly coveted, and success in getting them on anything like a magnificent scale makes a writer, good or bad, vehemently hated and abused, but the hatred and abuse—unaccompanied as they are by any proposals for amelioration—are hardly less silly than the system. And for our present purpose it really does not matter if the fortunate persons who interest the great public are or are not overpaid. Our concern is with the underpaid, and with all this affair of mammoth editions and booming only as it affects that aspect. We are concerned with the exceptional man's necessities and not with his luxuries. The fly of envy in the True Artist's ointment may, I think, very well stop there until magnanimity becomes something more of a cult in the literary and artistic worlds than it is at the present time.

This, perhaps, is something of a digression from our second general proposition, that we must pay directly for the work itself. But it leads to a third proposition. The whole history of literature and science abundantly shows that no critical judgment is more than an approximation to the truth. Criticism should be equal to the exposure of the imitator and the pure sham, of course, it should be able to analyze and expose these types, but above that level is the disputed case. At the present time in England only a very few writers or investigators hold high positions by anything approaching the unanimous verdict of the intelligent public—of that section of the public that counts. In the department of fiction, for example, there is a very audible little minority against Mr. Kipling, and about Mr. George Moore or Mr. Zangwill or Mr. Barrie one may hear the most diverse opinions. By the test of blackballing, only the unknown would survive. The valuation is as erratic in many branches of science. The development of criticism will diminish, but it certainly will not end, this sort of thing, and since our concern is to stimulate rather than punish, we must do just exactly what we should not do if we were electing men for a club, we must include rather than exclude. I am told that Americans remark in relation to University endowments, "we speculate in research," and that will serve for only a slight exaggeration of this third proposition. So long as we get most of the men of exceptional mental gifts in the community under the best conditions for their work, it scarcely matters if, for each one of them, we get four or five shams or mere respectabilities upon our hands. Respectabilities and shams have a fatal facility for living on the community anyhow, and there is no more reason in not doing these things on their account than there would be in burning a house down to get rid of cockroaches and rats. The rat poison of sound criticism—to follow that analogy—is the remedy here. And if the respectability lives, his work at any rate dies.

But if the reward must be directly for the work, it must not have any quantitative relation to the output of work. It is quality we want, not quantity; we want absolutely to invert the abominable conditions of the present time by which every exercise of restraint costs an author a fine. It is my personal conviction that almost every well-known living writer is or has been writing too much. "No book, no income" is practically what the world says to an author, and the needy authors make a pace the independent follow; there is no respect for fine silences, if you cease you are forgotten. The literature of the past hundred years is unparalleled in the world's history in this feature that the greater portion of it is or has been written under pressure. It was the case with Scott, the case with Dickens, Tennyson, even with Browning, and a host of other great contributors to the edifice. No one who loves Dickens and knows anything of the art he practised but deplores that evil incessant demand that never permitted him to revise his plans, to alter, rearrange and concentrate, that never released him from the obligation to touch dull hearts and penetrate thick skins with obtrusive pathos and violent caricature.

Once embarked upon his course, he never had a moment for reconstruction. He had no time to read, no time to think. A writer nowadays has to think in books and articles; to read a book he must criticize or edit it; if he dare attempt an experiment, a new departure, comes his agent in a panic. Every departure from the lines of his previous success involves chaffering, unless he chance to be a man of independent means. When one reflects on these things it is only amazing that the average book is not more copious and crude and hasty than it is, and how much in the way of comprehensive and unifying work is even now in progress. There are all too many books to read. It would be better for the public, better for our literature, altogether better, if this obligation to write perpetually were lifted. Few writers but must have felt at times the desire to stop and think, to work out some neglected corner of their minds, to admit a year's work as futile and thrust it behind the fire, or simply to lie fallow, to camp and rest the horses. Let us, therefore, pay our authors as much not to write as though they wrote; instead of that twenty or thirty volumes, which is, I suppose, the average product, let us require a book or so, worth having. Which means, in fact, that we must find some way of giving an author, once he has proved his quality, a fixed income quite irrespective of what he does. We might, perhaps, require evidence that he was doing some work now and then, we might prohibit alien occupations, but for my own part I do not think even that is necessary. Most authors so sustained will write, and all will have written. We are presupposing, be it remembered, the stimulus of honours and criticism and of further honours and further emoluments.