Steady, lads! lie low! See, the foe appears. To three British cheers; Then the victor's brow Or a nation's tears. The influence of Tennyson, as was only natural, may be traced in much of the poetry of South Africa at this period. He had a great vogue there. A friend of the writer of this chapter, who knew South Africa well and who lost his life in the South African war, told of an old Boer farmer who, when his last days came, wandered down to a stream on his farm, and was heard repeating the well-known verses of The Rivulet: No more by thee my steps shall be, For ever and for ever. When Cecil Rhodes himself lay dying he quoted, as many will remember, the words of In Memoriam: So little done, so much to do. But perhaps still more striking testimony was that rendered by a divine of the Dutch church, H. S. Bosman, who shortly after the war, preached a remarkable sermon at Johannesburg, in July, 1902, advocating the keeping alive of the Dutch ideals, and who, when called in question, justified himself by quoting a passage from Tennyson's Cup, beginning: Sir, if a State submit At once, she may be blotted out at once, The glory and grief of battle won and lost To the influence of Tennyson succeeded naturally that of another poet, who has spent much time in the country, knows it, and is known by it, well. But of Rudyard Kipling and his influence on many, if not most, of the living poets of this part of the empire it is not permissible to take this occasion of speaking. Suffice it, therefore, to say that in letters as in action, in poetry as in politics and war, South Africa shows to-day the promise and the potency of achievement worthy of its own growing greatness and of the still vaster empire, and the noble aspirations, for which it has given, and is giving, at this hour, its best blood, and the travail alike of its sword and its soul. CHAPTER XIV Education HE latter half of the eighteenth century was marked by an TH hitherto unprecedented development of science. Mathe matics, physics and astronomy made notable advances, the foundations of modern chemistry were laid, the idea of biological evolution was being carefully studied a century before the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859); the speculations of the early French economists were focused in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776). But the most striking results of scientific research and experiment were to be found in the applied sciences and in mechanical inventions. From the later years of George II onwards, there was an extraordinary growth in the number of labour-saving machines, more especially of those employed in the cotton and woollen industries, inventions which multiplied almost incalculably the resources of the manufacturing districts of the north and middle of England. On the heels of these inventions came the work of great engineers, Watt, Boulton, Rennie, Stephenson. The enormous economy of labour, the much greater mechanical precision of the output and the increased facility of transport, all combined to bring about an industrial expansion, which, assisted by the commercial activity of the earlier part of the century, was deep enough and broad enough to merit the name "revolution." Amidst such circumstances, it was inevitable that the critics of contemporary education should condemn its almost absolute disregard of useful knowledge and of modern studies. A new people and a new order of civilised society appeared. Population increased, great urban communities arose in the midlands and in northern England, there was a general move ment away from the rural districts; a hitherto unwonted aggregation of capital altered the scale of industrial operations. While wealth increased, so, also, did poverty; it would be difficult to parallel in the previous history of England the wretched state of the labouring poor during the last years of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century. The educational provision for the mass of English children in charity, parish and Sunday schools was very insufficient, and commonly unsuitable in character. The desperate plight of parents and the unsparing employment of children in mills and factories would, in many cases, have made the offer of a complete provision little more than a mockery. Yet, these very conditions of ignorance and of moral degradation stirred the hearts of reformers to attempt their alleviation by means of schools. The evils and their remedy are both described by Wordsworth in the last two books of The Excursion (1795-1814). The activity directed to educational affairs, which has been a prominent feature of English life during recent years, dates from the time of the French revolution; but, at the moment of that outbreak, France and Germany could look back upon a whole generation engaged in revolutionising national education. By the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rousseau had protested against the prevailing rationalism, and, in the following year, he produced Émile, a book whose destructive and constructive proposals combined to make it the most considerable work of the eighteenth century dealing with its subject. La Chalotais and Basedow had enunciated the administrative principles of the lay school and undenominational religious teaching, while the attacks upon the Society of Jesus and its eventual suppression by papal bull in 1773 had suspended the labours of the greatest educational corporation of the time, and had inflicted a fatal blow upon the type of instruction which, for some two and a half centuries, had been general throughout Europe. Prussia, under the guidance of K. A. von Zedlitz, Frederick the Great's minister of education, had initiated reforms, which made her, in this respect, the model for the German people. So early as 1763, Frederick had decreed compulsory instruction and the provision of primary schools; ten years later, F. E. von Rochow had shown how rural schools of that order could be usefully conducted. In 1781, the modern German classical school, pursuing a course of study not confined to Latin and Greek, came into being with the curriculum which Gedike introduced in Berlin. Within the same decade, Prussian schools other than primary passed from ecclesiastical control to that of a specially constituted board of education, and, by the institution (1789) of the "leaving examination," the first advance was made in the evolution of the modern German university. Austria and other regions of catholic Germany had entered upon a path of reform with purposes similar to those of Prussia; but these steps were rapidly retraced during the reaction which followed the events of 1789 in France. Outside Germany, but amidst a Germanspeaking population, Pestalozzi had completed the inconclusive experiment in rural education which he had been conducting upon his farm, Neuhof (1774-80). The philosophy, psychology and, in a less degree, the educational doctrines which Europe had learned from John Locke lay behind the greater part of this strenuous activity; yet the external history of English education during the period 1760-90 exhibits a complete contrast with that of her continental neighbours. Oxford, Cambridge and the public schools, as a whole, were educating a smaller number of men and boys than had resorted to them in the days of Anne. At Oxford, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the number of boys admitted often exceeded 300; it never reached that number between 1726 and 1810, while it often fell below 200 in the mid-century. A similar decline occurred at Cambridge, and at both universities there was a fall in the number of those who graduated, which is not fully accounted for by the diminished tale of freshmen. An agitation for the relaxation of all formal professions of religious belief had been carried on since the middle of the century by a numerically small but active group of clergymen. At the universities, the movement led to repeated attempts between 1771 and 1787 to free bachelors of arts from subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles or from a statement of adherence to the church of England. These attempts failed, and, as a consequence, Oxford and Cambridge degrees remained closed Brodrick, G. C., Memorials of Merton College. |