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vinced that one of the best guarantees for the stability and progress of society is the influence of an educated middle class." The Times is indeed here speaking of Ireland, but this influence is just what in England, no less than in Ireland, is so sadly wanting; and the Irish, if they are to be ruled by our middle class, have at least a right to supplicate us, in Mr. Lowe's words, to "educate their masters." And the real obstacle to the establishment of public schools for the middle class is, that both the upper and the middle class have a lurking sense that by such schools the middle class would be transformed; and the upper class do not care to be disturbed in their preponderance, or the middle class in their vulgarity. convince the one resistance of its selfishness, and the other of its folly, should be the aim of all true Liberals. Finally, Liberals should remember that the country districts throughout England have their municipal organisation still to get; that they have at present only the feudal and ecclesiastical organisation of the Middle Ages. Nothing struck me more than this, on my return to England after seeing the Continental schools for the people, and the communal basis on which everything there rested. Our agricultural labourer will doubtless have the franchise, and that is well; but how much more constant and sure a training for him than that of the franchise is the public life in common of a true municipal system universally diffused! To this, rather than to the institution in our country churchyards of readings from Eliza Cook, Liberals might with much advantage turn their thoughts. Still the great work to be done in this country, and at this hour, is not with the lower class, but with the middle; a work of raising its whole level of civilisation, and, in order to do this, of transforming the British Puritan.

Hume relates that the well-known Praise God Barebones had a brother less famous than himself, but with a yet more singular name. He was called : "If Christ had not died for thee thou wert damned Barebones." But to go through all this was a terribly long business, and so the poor man came to be called simply: Damned Barebones. And the misfortune of this poor owner of an edifying name comes to one's mind when one thinks of what is happening now to the Puritan middle class. After all its sermons, all its victories, all its virtues, all its care for conduct, all its zeal for righteousness, to be told that it must transform itself, that the body of which it is the nerve and sinew is at a low level of civilisation! But so great and wide a thing is human progress; tentatives, approximations, hold good only for a certain time, and bring us only a certain way on our road; then they have to be changed. Happy the workers whose way and work have to be changed only, not abolished! The Puritan middle class, with all its faults, is still the best stuff in this nation. Some have hated and persecuted it, many have flattered and derided it,— flattered it that while they deride it they may use it; I have believed in it. It is the best stuff in this nation, and in its success is our best hope for the future. But to succeed it must be transformed.

IV.

PORRO UNUM EST NECESSARIUM.

AN acute French critic says that a wise man's best happiness is to be found, perhaps, in his having the sense de ne pas être dupe, of not being taken in. At any rate, we may allow that such happiness is better than none at all, and sometimes it is the only happiness within our reach. Certainly it is the only happiness to which the would-be reformer of secondary instruction in England can at present pretend.

There has just appeared in the French Journal Officiel a report by M. Bardoux, the Minister of Public Instruction, on the present state of the secondary schools in France, and on their movement since 1865, the date of a like decennial report on them by M. Duruy. With an interest not unmixed with the sense of defeat and weakness, I have studied this picture of the schools of that immense class of society, which in France has even more greatness and extent than with us, the middle class. Yes, the schools for this class are indeed, as the French themselves say, the keystone of a country's whole system of public instruction: they are what fixes and maintains the intellectual level of a people. And in our country they have been left to come forth as they could and to form themselves at haphazard, and are now, as a

whole, in the most serious degree inadequate and unsatisfactory. For some twenty years I have been full of this thought, and have striven to make the British public share it with me; but quite vainly. At this hour, in Mr. Gladstone's programme of the twenty-two engagements of the Liberal party, there is not a word of middle-class education. Twenty-two Liberal engagements, and the reform of middle-class education not one of them! What a blow for the declining age of a sincere but ineffectual Liberal, who so long ago as 1859 wrote with faith and ardour the words following,-buried in a blue-book, and now disinterred to show the vanity of human wishes:

"Let me be permitted to call the attention of Englishmen to the advantage which France possesses in its vast system of public secondary instruction; in its 63 lyceums and 244 communal colleges, inspected by the State, aided by the State; drawing from this connection with the State both efficiency and dignity; and to which, in concert with the State, the departments and the communes and private benevolence all co-operate to provide free admission for poor and deserving scholars. M. de Talleyrand said that the education of the great English public schools was the best in the world. He added, to be sure, that even this was detestable. But allowing it all its merits how small a portion of the population does it embrace ! It embraces the aristocratic class, it embraces the higher professional class, it embraces a certain number from the richer families of the commercial class; from the great body of the commercial class and of the immense middle-class of this country, it embraces hardly one. They are left to an education which, though among its professors are many excellent and honourable men, is deplorable. Our middle-classes are among the worst educated in the world. But it is not this only; although, when I consider this, all the French commonplaces about the duty of the State to protect children from the charlatanism and cupidity of individual speculation seem to me to be justified. It is far more that a great opportunity is missed of fusing all

the upper and middle classes into one powerful whole, elevating and refining the middle-classes by the contact and stimulating the upper. In France this is what the system of public secondary education effects; it effaces between the middle and upper classes the sense of social alienation; it gives to the boy of the middle-class the studies, the superior teaching, the sense of belonging to a great school, which the Eton or Harrow boy has with us; it tends to give to the middle-classes precisely what they most want, and their want of which makes the great gulf between them and the upper,—it tends to give them personal dignity. The power of such an education is seen in what it has done for the professional classes in England. The clergy, and barristers, and officers of both services, who have commonly passed through the great public schools, are nearly identified in thought, feeling, and manners with the aristocratic class. They have not been unmixed gainers by this identification; it has too much isolated them from a class to which by income and social position they, after all, naturally belong; while towards the highest class it has made them, not vulgarly servile, certainly, but intellectually too deferential, too little apt to maintain entire mental independence on questions where the prepossessions of that class are concerned. Nevertheless they have, as a class, acquired the unspeakable benefit of that elevation of the mind and feelings which it is the best office of superior education to confer. But they have bought this elevation at an immense money-price,—at a price which they can no better than the commercial classes afford to pay; which they who have paid it long, and who know what it has bought for them, will continue to pay while they must, but which the mass of the middle-classes will never even begin to pay. Either the education of this mass must remain what it is, vulgar and unsound; or the State must create by its legislation, its aid, its inspection, institutions honourable because of their public character, and cheap because nationally frequented, in which they may receive a better. The French middle-classes may well be taxed for the education of the poor, since public provision has already been made for their own education. But already there are complaints among the lower middle-classes of this country that the Committee of Council is providing the poor with better schools than those to which they themselves