LOOKING FORWARD. 2

LECTURE BY PROFESSOR TUCKER.

One favourable introduction of a lecture is an attractive title. At the same time a title should not be misleading. It is not for everyone to imitate the serene boldness of Mr. Ruskin, who labels a volume Sesame and Lilies, divides it into two chapters, "Kings' Treasuries" and "Queens' Gardens," and leaves you to discover that he is about to speak of books in the one and women in the other. It is quite pardonable that some readers should carry home Mr. Ruskin's The Two Paths under the impression that it is a novel, the centre of whose plot is some choice of love and life. But we may not all act thus arbitrarily by our public. And now that this lecture has been announced as "Looking Forward," I begin to fear that some of you may have come here with anticipations doomed to disappointment. You may fancy that I propose to sketch a Utopia (or, being in this part of the world, rather an Oceana) of the year 2,000 or thereabouts. Many of you, perhaps, have read a book called  Looking Backward. It may have entertained you, and you may he expecting me either to entertain you similarly, or else to devote my self to demonstrating the errors of that work. Nothing would please me better than to picture the life which in my conception would be ideal. But I do not think that before an audience of this character it would be of any profit for me to ring up the curtain of my imagination and show you the sort of ideal world which plays upon its stage.  Rightly enough you do not care to contemplate ideals, however alluring, unless you can also see some path of hope to their attainment. It is true we must ourselves be content with the position of Moses on Pisgah. We may see dimly in the distance the Promised Land of our race, but we may not hope ourselves to set foot upon it. We must rest satisfied with the faith that our posterity will at length reach it and enjoy all its streams of milk and honey. None the less we want to know, and to point out, in what direction the millennial Canaan lies. You would therefore demand that, if I had in mind an ideal future like that of Looking Backward, I should say how it was to be approached. I must also gather from the signs of the times that there was some likelihood of its being approached. And, if I had any systematised conception of the future at all, you would rightly require that I should show you reasons for the faith that was in me. Now, I have no such definite conception, and, if I had, this would be no place to publish a novel embodying it. 

By "looking forward," then, we shall not mean to depict the various departments of a life imagined in the more or less remote future; but we shall mean to inquire of the time-spirit what he is striving to produce. A distinguished writer speaks of the "stream of tendency." If I remember rightly that was his god. Without agreeing in his theology, we may adopt his phrase. There is a strong stream of tendency sweeping through this age—a stream which draws into itself religion, literature, manners art, and the whole of life. The question is, whither does it carry us? Now, the book called Looking Backward is not a novel. It is a half disguised treatise on collectivist Socialism. And it has its use. Delicate but uninformed minds still shudder at the name of Socialism. It suggests to them dynamite and spoliation, a vulgarised life and the destruction of individuality. Looking Backward may at least show that this notion is the very contrary of the authentic socialist conception. As a treatise, however, the book is no more satisfactory than as a novel. It does not show how our present complex social organisation is to pass so swiftly and yet so peacefully into the new order of things. It skims lightly over the periods of dissolution and reconstruction. It does not even prove that the desire of modern civilisation is towards a higher life of intellectual and aesthetic refinement, of sweetness and simplicity of social intercourse. And is it in human nature for one person to voluntarily declare himself that only for manual labour, and for another to declare himself fit for mental labour, and for both to feel their positions equally estimable? But I am not here to criticise this book in detail. Let us welcome any effort towards making men see that life ought to be so much better than it is, that it is full of injustices and uglinesses and futilities. But let us direct our attention to-night to the question towards what condition actual society is apparently tending, and by what means it would be most feasible to correct it, if in any obvious respect it is going wrong.   

In regard to all opinions and qualities it is usual to make a rough dissection of mankind into two opposite classes—the religious and the irreligious—the good tempered and the bad tempered—the tall and the short. The real truth may be that the great bulk of mankind is neither one nor the other So it is usual to set down every man as either an optimist or a pessimist, whereas in fact most men are something between the two. Some men are optimists after dinner, and pessimists before it. Some are just the contrary. Wendell Holmes tells how the Autocrat once, out of pity for the lone widow who kept the boardinghouse, ate some of her "too too solid" pie, and how afterwards he wrote some exceedingly morbid verse. The next morning he put it away, labelled "Pie crust." It is only the few who consistently and for assignable reasons take the rosy or the funereal view of life and the destiny of the race.

The ancients had a tradition of a gradual decadence of the world. Their poets speak of "these degenerate days."  This may have been only a fashion. We are not in a position to determine how far they believed what they said. It is likely that they did partly believe it, inasmuch as then mythology peopled the early world with demigods, heroes, and a just and righteous humanity. Similarly, at this day Mr Ruskin and his school declare that we are, like the Gadarean swine, running violently down a steep place into the sea. And there is the other class. I do not speak of the Master Panglosses, who find this the best of all possible worlds. I mean those who maintain that man is ever mounting to wards a state of perfection, that as civilised man has evolved himself from the savage, so a vastly superior man will be evolved from us. Let us listen for a few minutes to the view of the future which each of these men will be likely to form from some of the indications of social movement around him. And let us try to see if either is at all justified in his view. The pessimist will seize upon the worse indications, and will construe some of the better to the worse meaning. The optimist will most naturally look for the favourable signs and will be hopeful for those which are less so. We will take the gloomy view first. Assuming our pessimist to be a person of culture and sensibility, he will probably argue thus :— 

"You ask me, he says "what the world is coming to? Well, look at the tendency of all recent political movements, and at their effect Democracy is triumphing all along the line. And what is democracy? The rule of the people, you say. Yes, but for people substitute rabble, proletariat. The whole effect of recent legislation every where is to place power more and more in the hands of the lowest classes, the most ignorant and unreasonable classes. Manhood suffrage may seem a most equitable thing in theory, but in practice it means that the least cultured are deciding how the more cultured shall live and be governed. What are our Parliaments like? Do they consist of the ablest intellects and the noblest spirits? In former times when the classes and not the masses were the electors, then was some guarantee that the representative would be a man of at least some education and some manners. There is none now.
Moreover the representatives are mere tools —they have no independence. If they manage to learn sometime about the prudent hesitations of politics and economics, they are not allowed to use their superior knowledge, nor to act otherwise than as the passions of their constituencies direct. And this state of things is likely to become worse and not better. The masses are learning to organise themselves and to wield their numerical superiority so as to control all legislation. What will be the consequence? Nothing less than a perpetual sacrifice of all other interests to those of the proletariat. We shall soon get downright spoliation. The workman has legislated himself eight hours work a day. He is agitating for less. Is this kind of thing likely to stop, when he feels himself master of tho situation and able to do as he pleases?   There can be no end but social chaos. Admit that the old feudal tyranny was cruel, yet what we are coming to now is a proletariat tyranny, not only cruel but vulgar. Who will care to live under a system in which organised mutual jealousy will make life one dead colourless level of monotonous betise and vulgarity? Modern legislation spells Socialism. Socialism gains every day in Germany in Russia in America—everywhere. You may say that there are cultured Socialists who see in their systems higher and nobler life for all humanity. Mere Utopian dreams! Men are not intellectually, socially, morally, or physically equal, and yet the cry for equality is the clearest utterance of the age. Your perfected social state is an idle vision of the land of Cocaigne. What it really means is that all individual merit and aspiration and effort will be cramped on the procrustean bed of the average member of the mob. And one shudders to foresee how the social revolution will effect itself. Your Knights of Labour, your Nihilists, and other Irreconciliables threaten to precipitate a deluge of blood worse than that of the French Revolution. I say life in such a society will be unliveable by any man of the higher type. It will be harsh, egoistic insupportable, devoid of taste, reverence, religion, 0r play of the emotions. Observe the social effects of democratic advance so far. There is no reverence no respect for social rank, intellectual merit, or even age. The rising generation has taken nil admirari in its worst sense for a motto. Every man deems him self as good as every other man, probably better. He is therefore self-assertive, rude , undisciplined. Delicacy of manners is gone past redemption. Where do we find the old deference of gentleman to gentleman of man to woman, of boy to man, of servant to employer? This regardlessness of others feelings will be progressive. Not being compelled to outward observance of reverence, men will lose the inward capacity for it, and thereby one of the best lubricators of human intercourse will wholly disappear."

Let us have patience with our pessimist a little longer, for he is in earnest, and represents no small class.

"Religion," he will continue, "is vanishing along with all the other softening elements of life. Soon there will be no such thing. Your ordinary Socialist is anti-Christian in fact, anti-religious. Democracy, while pretending to favour no one religion at the expense of the rest, in reality destroys all alike by making them matters of indifference. Look at the hideous materialism and boundless immoralities of imperial Rome. They were due to the absence of religion and to the chaos of principle. Moral philosophers there were then as there are now. But moral philosophers have no influence on the mass of men; only religion can touch them. We have our 'Intuitive' and Utilitarian schools, they had their Stoics and Epicureans. But what does all the argumentation of this class do towards keeping alive the conscience and the moral tenderness of the populace? In fact it does harm for it leads men to believe that there is no real basis to morality at all. Consequently, they are the more likely to choose the broad path of sensuality and dishonesty rather than the narrow and difficult way of what we have been taught to consider virtue. Of what vitality is a poor 'provisional adherence' to the Ten Commandments? Abolish religion as you are doing, and you will remove the restraining banks from a frightful moral cataclysm without a parallel."

Foreseeing here a likely answer he will add, "You may say that the saving, grace for society lies in universal education and enlightenment. I do not deny that full and genuine education is the nearest approach to a social panacea. But we actually have an almost universal education, and with what result? Is it in any way counteracting our irreverent materialism? Is is not rather intensifying it? Our working men have learned enough to read the newspaper, or, maybe, Henry George, or perhaps even Colonel Ingersoll. They have learnt enough to misquote and to be arrogant, impatient and dangerous. Our middle class go a little further. They learn something to help them on to what they call a position. Under the domination of the modern vaunted 'scientific' spirit, they are turning out shallow egotists to a man. We boast of the height and depth of out modern education. But do we get from it anything equal to a Bacon or a Shakspeare? Do we get better philosophers or poets or politicians, or generals? Granted that the ordinary man nowadays comprehends the elementary facts of nature, and does not think the moon a green cheese. Is he a finer spirit, a more interesting man to live with, to deal with ? The fact is that education is losing its way. It is setting before itself entirely wrong aims. It turns out men as machines and not as men, as economic instruments and not as social elements. People will soon be led to believe that they are not expected to have any emotions. We take them when they are of tender years and tell them that they are to know this and to do that. But we give them no notion that they are to be anything in particular. We stuff our youths with facts and leave their finer sensibilities to perish of atrophy. Science! science! science! we keep crying and the consequence is, as Miss Cobbe puts it, 'that of the two sides of human life a man's scientific training will compel him to think always in the first place of the lower. The material (or, as our fathers would have called it the carnal) fact will be uppermost in his mind, and the spiritual meaning thereof out of sight. He will view his mother's tears, not as the expression of her sorrow, but as solutions of muriates and carbonates of soda and of phosphates of lime, and he will reflect that they were caused not by his heartlessness, but by cerebral pressure on the lachrymal glands.' This may be putting the case over strongly, nevertheless it contains only too much truth. At present maybe our emotions do get some play out of school. But generation after generation trained in this ungenerous way will grow less and less susceptible till the finer emotions are 'evolved' out of existence.

"Through the activity of scientific effort we are mustering the powers of nature but we do not advance the general happiness on that account. The increase of this knowledge, as Solomon says, 'only increaseth sorrow.' We learn to look upon Nature as a great machine. What grace 0r charm does that add to life ? We learn to enslave her to material production and our lands are becoming filled with the blackness and the darkness of the abomination of desolation. Soon there will be no corner of the earth left to which we can retire to commune with unvitiated nature. What has steam or electricity or nitro-glycerine or the torpedo done to make yon 0r me lead more happy and effective and beautiful lives? Are not men rather becoming more passive to a mere existence of work and worry; more tasteless and unfeeling and blind to beauty; more reckless and devilish with their schemes of degradation? And the momentum of this degradation continually increases. The philosophic idiots of Laputa were bad enough. But even these would be preferable to the machine-made man of the scientific socialistic atheistic future. The ideals, I say, will be hard and mean of the earth earthy. Literature and art will cease to be beautiful, being regulated by a sort of scientific analysis. Why, the sighs of this state of things are manifest already ! The growing tendency is towards sheer ugly anatomical realism. M. Zola is a typical child of the time-spirit. Nowhere is the coming moral chaos more apparent than in the modern novel. Really, to read modern fiction one would wonder whether there were such things left as right and wrong. Contrast, too, a Shakspere with an Ibsen. Not that I imply any possible comparison of dramatic genius; but contrast the simple direct, ethical conviction of Shakspere's plays with the bewildered gropings of the Scandinavian. Moreover the weakening of the domestic and social ties which Ibsen betrays is coming out of literature into practice. The male and the female, who were created to be one, are being legislated into a most distinct two by indulgent divorce bills and similar devices. The family affections are going the way of all the rest. Charity and loving kindness-are delegated to public institutions and are ceasing to be private virtues. The hospitals, excellent institutions as they are for the helpless, are becoming receptacles for those invalids of whom their cold blooded relatives long to be rid. The society of the future will be not only a monotonous level but a limitless level also."

And now, ladies and gentlemen not to weary you, and in order to allow time for my discussion to complete itself, we will leave our pessimistic friend and hear what the other side may have to say. He, too, is very much in earnest, and is the representative of a class perhaps still larger than the other. As in the former case, so in this, we shall hear some exaggerations, and I would ask you not to fancy in either instance that I am setting forth what are necessarily my own views.     

"The whole bearing of modern effort," he will say, "is in the direction of sweetness and light. Human civilisation like every organism has its evolution, an evolution towards social perfection. History is a record of steady advance. The future will be as much better than the present as the present is better than the past. And in order to see what that means, observe how society has improved in humanity and justice, knowledge and reason, as well as in maternal comforts and resources. Take the last half century of legislation, for instance. It has everywhere set towards liberty and equality, that is to say, towards justice and common sense.  It gives our people education, protects them from abuse in factories and mines, secures them a voice in determining their own lot.  To every man freedom, and knowledge to help him in using his freedom aright—these are the watchwords of the democratic movement. All the legislation concerning labour and taxation ; all the public organisation of charity and the like ; all the dreaded Radical programme, which soon becomes the Liberal programme, and then the Conservative programme, while Radicals, and after them the Liberals, advance to something still more trenchant—all this programme, which we adopt willy-nilly is in the direction of liberty, equality, fraternity. You may call it socialistic. What matters the name? Socialism, if this be Socialism, is really the most amiable and noble of conceptions. The prevailing tendency towards Socialism represents the aspirations of the lower classes after a higher and more complete life. Socialism is not the horrible bugbear it is imagined to be. It does not mean a regime under which there shall be no private life, no individual excellence, no art, and no beauty. On the contrary, it means a state of society in which all men and all women shall develop their best selves, be encouraged to do the thing which best suits their capacity; a state in which no person shall have cause to complain that he is oppressed or unfairly recompensed or deprived of opportunity; a state, moreover, in which each worker will have ample leisure to cultivate and nourish his higher faculties, and to enjoy the things of the mind, and shall have abundant education to enable him to use these facilities to the best effect. There will be no tyranny of a vicious and unenlightened proletariat. There will no longer be such a thing as that proletariat. At present our dullards, our drunkards, our criminals are generally such because of the conditions under which they or then fathers have laboured. In the new state of society, when all men work at something, but work shorter hours at that something, then will be no brutalising of either mind 0r body. And the growing enlightenment will prevent any bloody or violent revolution. The changes will develop themselves by steps as quiet and natural as our present progressive legislation. Why should such a life be unlovely? There are in every soul germs of æsthetic longing, instincts for beautiful and noble things to contemplate. Those who are now tasteless vulgarians will then have these germs and instincts developed into full activity; and there will be such a demand for art and beauty in surroundings and for elegance in life as no generation has yet conceived."

" This is no dream," he will continue, "but a coming reality. What cannot education do? It was education which brought about the Renaissance; the Renaissance brought about the Reformation, an era of discovery, a new birth of art and much else. Education brought religious tolerance; it brought scientific knowledge, control of the powers of nature, and an immense advance in all things material. By subjecting nature to man's use, it has rid him of his cruellest and most debasing work. It makes production so easy that men will be able to provide abundance of all desirable things, and yet enjoy all the ample leisure to which the new movement aspires. Universal education is an institution of one generation. Its effect has already been the self discipline of the masses. It is emancipating men from their passions or their agitators, and enabling them to consider social problems intelligently for themselves. To discuss them reasonably with one another instead or running after their leader like a pack of sheep, or rather wolves. We may expect this effect of education to be cumulative. At present we do not realise it. It is only a generation old, and the effect of heredity has yet to be seen. Depend upon it, the average man of the future will possess an enlightenment, an intellectual quickness and receptivity, at least equal to that of the cultured man of to-day. Such a man will be no unpleasant person to live with. He will substitute intellectual pleasures for his present sensual gratifications. He will insist on beautiful surroundings, on cleanliness and order. Art will be a necessity, and not merely a luxury to him. He will refuse to work in ugly and filthy factories. The smoke, the bare and grimy walls the foul smells, will be things of the past. We know these are not unavoidable even now. It is common to make out that they are so. An application of the general intelligence, backed by the power to enforce its will, might remove all these blemishes in less than a dozen years. Be assured that those who weep at the aridness and unloveliness of the coming regime may spare their tears."

" And morals, too, will be less and not more artificial. In the coming equality of opportunity and rank there will be no temptation to half the present crimes. The domestic ties will be more holy, since women will no longer be tempted to choose unloved husbands for their wealth or their position, nor men unloved wives for the same reason. So with manners. At present society is in a state of mutual hostility. The lower classes, though still brutalised, are intelligent enough to feel the reality of then power. The consequence is an ostentatious self-assertion.   But let society be harmonised into equality,let the masses enjoy their due share of healthful and pleasurable intercourse ; then there will result the truest of all courtesy, the courtesy of free men and equals. Toadyism will be impossible; resentful independence will never be provoked." 

In this way our optimist might proceed, and I believe, with no small portion of truth in his gratifying picture. His text might he expressed in the language of Shakspeare's Miranda—

"Oh, wonder !
How many goodly creatures are there here ! 
How beauteous mankind is ! Oh, brave new world 
That hath such people in't !" 

And his sermon might be summarised in Browning's words —   

"Progress is 
The law of life. Man is not man as yet;   
Nor shall I deem his general object served, 
While only here and there a towering mind     
O'erlooks his prostrate fellows. When the host
Is out at once to the despair of night ;
When all mankind alike is perfected, 
Equal in full-grown powers,then, not till then
I say, begins man's general infancy."   

I hope you will not think that I have wasted your time with these superficial outlines of social credos. It is well for us to habituate ourselves to hear both sides with equal patience; and these sketches, however inadequate, were necessary to my purpose. Where two intelligent men can hold such divergent views—and intelligent men do hold them—it is to be supposed that the truth is divided between the two, or that each has seen but one facet of the truth. It is so, I think in this case. There is sufficient cause to make us uneasy about the future, and sufficient argument to make us sanguine. One or other, however, must preponderate. Let us for the remainder of our time look as straight as we can at certain phenomena which seem to be of chief importance. 

And, if you please, since education figures so prominently in all this question, let us first ask what effect our present educational idea is likely to have upon the minds of men. For assuredly according to that effect will the life of the future be determined. I believe that if there is any sure instrument to human perfection, it lies in education. The mind is our human part; it has been solely the efforts and the development of this superior element in us which have raised men above brutes, and above their former brutish selves. Of this there is no doubt. And, if man as a social being, is to rise superior to his present self, it must be by further development and further effort of the same part. He may indeed become a better man bodily also, but it is the intellect and spirit which mould his social life, his civilisation. The other day a critic vehemently objected to a certain expression used by me some time ago. It was this. "And I am going to hold that our own ancestors were once as savage as any existing savages, in morals, in religious views, in intellectual and material resources, and I take leave further to think that we, too, are savages to what men will be in the hereafter." My critic seems to have thought that I was not in earnest. He objected to the inclusive "we." Well, ladies and gentlemen, I remain obstinate. It is undeniable that we have been for countless centuries advancing from barbarism, and I do not see why, because the year 1890 is that in which my critic happens to live, therefore the year 1890 should see the end of man's development. Rather, with Emerson, if there is anything true in the doctrine of evolution, if there is anything true in the teachings of history, I must believe that whereas we think civilisation near its meridian, "we are, in reality only at the cock-crowing, and the morning star." This is a more eloquent and striking way of putting my remark about the savage, but when you weigh its meaning it amounts to something equally positive. Well, I was in earnest then as now; and I thought of education, of culture, us the means to continue us in out progress from our comparative savagery. If men advanced so far even while training of the reason and scientific knowledge were so sparsely scattered, if civilisation has progressed so far through the learning, and wisdom and efforts of a comparative few, what may we expect when every social unit has some share in the enlightenment and in the processes of reason? Buckle and Lecky show how powerful a utilising agent the spread of knowledge has been in leading men to shake off prejudices and intolerance, and to grapple with facts and things as they are. Are then not more intolerances and prejudices to shake off, more complex facts to grapple with? Do not let us delude ourselves. It is apt to seem to us that there can be nothing absolutely new, now that we have electricity. Yet I hold that it is extremely likely that we have only begun to master electricity, and that, when we have done with electricity, there are still wonderful agencies and operations to be discovered of which our men of science have no conception. I cannot know that this is so. I cannot but think it. Before the days of electrical discovery was electricity conceivable? What common-place arrangement of steam and gas and electricity could have seemed less than a miracle in,say, Shakespeare's day? Now looking back over the past, and noting that these new discoveries and new inventions have crowded thicker and thicker upon us in proportion as knowledge and mental training have become more and more universal, it is sufficiently evident that of material resources the first promoter is education. And on the social side it is beyond all doubt that measures in the direction of individual liberty and equality of action and thought have pressed more and more rapidly upon each other with the increasing diffusion of education. The caste system is everywhere breaking down. The tyranny of theology is almost gone. Every institution and custom of society is being inquired into with perfect frankness as so much fact, with almost no regard to tradition and authority, or to any consideration extraneous to the fact. These are palpable truths. The consequence has been in particular an increase of tolerance and emancipation and justice. I ask you to observe that two advances have gone hand in hand and constitute that amount of progress which can be called certain. There is an ever accelerated increase in material resources and in mental and bodily freedom; and this progress is due to the spread of knowledge and intellectual training. Such facts form no mean  panegyric of education. I wish at this moment particularly to urge the absurdity of supposing that in either of these regions we have reached the goal. We have no more arrived at the fundamental social verities than we have arrived at the ne plus ultra of machinery.   

So far l am with the optimist. I believe that sound education is and will be the mightiest and surest power for civilisation. But all depends upon soundness, and soundness all depends upon completeness. Most of you, perhaps, are tired of hearing education discussed. My own remarks shall be brief. I will try to make them clear. Education, as a civilising agent, must do more than communicate items of knowledge. It must cultivate the thinking powers. I am not disposed to carp at our present method in this respect, but in other respects there are distinct reasons for mistrusting it. It matters not whether we take the state school, or the middle class school, or the university, education is tending to become less and less complete. The state looks upon the pupil as a spring-chicken for the market or as a tool for merely industrial success. It encourages in him this as an ideal—that he is to he part of a great producing machine. Formerly men learnt their trades after school and dedicated schools to things of the mind. Now they are for turning the schools themselves into shops and factories.This is distinctly a new conception, belonging to what is called the "scientific" age. If education were as comprehensive, as regardful of all the constituent parts of man, of his moral and æsthetic feelings, as it used to be when it was less widely diffused, we might continue entirely cheerful about the future. But, whereas man is made up of various faculties, faculties of heart as well as intellect, faculties of conduct and feeling as well as knowledge, our present conception of education seems to ignore this plenitude of being. It tends only to cultivate a part—the intellect and the faculties of knowledge. Religion now forms no part of education. Many are satisfied that it should not. But religion is a broad term, and though dogmatic theology and formulated creeds may well be left alone, it is deplorable that some guiding conception of life, some elevating influence upon character, should not be brought to bear as early and as persistently as possible on the plastic minds of children. Dry moral tracts are futile, often they are repulsive.

I have said elsewhere that the culture civilisation requires is one that shall combine the clearest judgment with the warmest sympathies, the most serious recognition of facts with the noblest ideal, the most solid skill of work with the highest spiritual refinement and delicacy of taste. Do our schools or universities set before them any such ideal as this? I believe not. The consequence is an increasing hardness and imperfection of development in our youths. Can a youth write well, read well, and calculate well? Can he point out places on a map ? Then he is fit to enter his trade or his office, and become a citizen and the founder of a family, with all such a person's duties and influence. We do not properly consider what it is that he will write, or read, or calculate. We do not trouble what are his acquirements in the matter of conscience, or manners, or feelings. Now when some of us, who are for more liberality in education, complain in this way, there are persons who burn to rise and tell us that all this sort of talk is very well, but a man must make a living, and, after all, the utilities are the things we must look to first. To which we reply, by all means. We know and say this as emphatically as you ; but what we claim is something besides the utilities, something to go along with the utilities, something to qualify and temper the utilities. For the purpose of living in, of eating and sleeping in, a perfectly cubical rectilinear box of a house, with no architectural adornment or pleasure of view, is as useful as the most picturesque Rhenish castle or Swiss chalet. But that does not make you any the more content with such a house for a home. So with education. If utility in its narrow sense is our ugly idol, if education is to bear only on our hours of professional work, and not upon our hours of social work and leisure, then we may pass all our youths through the factory which we call a school, and turn them, out as mechanically and as expeditiously as if we were manufacturing pins. What I would urge is that, if education is to be the saving grace of the future, if the social revolution which is impending is to leave life lovely, if art and manners and the cheerful serenity which is born of them are to flourish, if sympathetic fraternity is to accompany the coming equality and liberty, our education must retrace its steps somewhat. It must correct its narrowness.   Facts and processes must indeed still be pursued as science directs, but, with it all, we must no less zealously exercise and expand those other parts in us which deal with conduct, taste, and feeling.

For fear some of you may think me unjust towards sheer science, let me quote a well known passage from Darwin's life. Darwin, like a true scientist, looked at facts as they were and this is one of the facts he discovered with regard to himself :— " Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley,gave me great delight, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakspeare. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures and music." If this could happen to a Darwin, in whom the æsthetic instincts were spontaneous, what is likely to occur where such feelings have to be patiently stimulated? This danger of a dry, coarse literalness in looking at things, the danger therefore of a hard matter of fact social intercourse, in which half the springs of our humanity are dried up, is no mere phantom. If then we look forward to a society in which this mutilated system of education is carried to its extreme length, we shall not find art and beauty and poetry in surroundings ; we shall not find men sympathetic or amusing or expansive. We shall look upon a world which reminds us of Laputa, and upon a life which is little better than one eternal yawn. 

What then do I propose? To cease to teach these industrial and scientific utilities? By no means. But I propose that it should constantly be set before our students that all these things are but means to an end, necessities, but subservient necessities. Their moral and social powers should be cultivated harmoniously with their intellect. This can be largely done by an intelligent sympathetic use of well chosen literature and art in schools, by the enthusiasm and high ideals of teachers, who ought to be selected—as they are not selected—quite as much for what they are as for what they know. Good communicitions amend evil manners ; and the way to amend hard, unfeeling materialism is by communication with that literature and that art which, in the words of Bacon, "serveth and confereth to magnanimity, morality, and delectation." Such reading reacts on conduct. We want to encourage the "poetical" in our men and women. And we want to have this done not as a comparatively frivolous matter, but as an entirely vital matter. At present we examine and examine in facts ; we cannot examine in sentiments ; and therefore out teachers teach the facts and neglect the sentiments. Examination is growing to be the blight of culture. Moreover, a mass of people possessing knowledge without flexibility of feeling and delicacy of taste will be brutal in the conduct of that social revolution which is supposed to be on its way. Let us therefore introduce into our schools and colleges abundance of that educational element which emollit mores nec sinit esse feros. Fine sensibilities issue in fine action, and we want fine action as well as strenuous action.

I feel assured such is my faith in the ultimate triumph of reason and truth, that the education of the future will be this harmonious expansion of all the human powers. And, if this is so, there is nothing to fear, and everything to hope on the score of elevation and charm of life. Meanwhile, in new of the fact that these immense social changes are being pushed on ever more rapidly by persons who are not themselves thus completely and harmoniously cultivated, and who  may be narrow and unamiable and dangerous, it behoves us to be alive to the necessity of broadening at once our conception of teaching. It has been objected to discourses like this that they are only suggestive. Well, they are only meant to be suggestive. It is not for me to come here and be dogmatic about some debatable scheme of educational procedure. I am willing to follow humbly in the steps of Emerson or Carlyle and be merely suggestive. The main thing is that we should come to recognise the fact that a custom is not as it should be, or to consider profoundly whether it is as it should be. Let us create a widespread sentiment in favour of a certain ideal, and it will then be time enough to propose some definite programme of action.

Our educational one-sidedness reacts upon art. What are the immediate prospects of art—the art of literature and the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and music? Macaulay maintained that as knowledge advances poetry must decay. I have elsewhere tried to show that it need not. I am not one of those who complain that there is no such thing as art nowadays. One can hardly assert this when one remembers the present immense production of good pictures and the undisputed excellence of modern music. But I am with those who complain that there is no genuine understanding and love of art in the popular mind. Artists, and good artists, we have in no small numbers. But judges of art who are not artists—persons who instinctively admire the right thing to admire, who recognise beauty and ugliness immediately they are set before them—these are exceeding rare. According to Cardinal Antonelli when the Italian populace say of an object, e brutto, e bello, they are usually very near the mark. It must have been the same with the Greeks. The reason does not, I believe, lie so much in any constitutional artistic superiority of these races as in their familiar, leisured, open-spirited contemplation of beautiful things. Our ancient cathedrals are the admiration and despair of modern times. They are "frozen music," or "poetry in stone," 0r whatever fanciful term we like to apply to them. But the reason of their surpassing beauty lies, I believe, in the leisured, single-hearted enthusiasm which men devoted to such designs, in the relative importance and even sanctity attached to them by their builders, and in the patience with which they would wait for their execution. Nowadays we are too possessed with our businesses and our social tumults. We are becoming too impatient of protracted and laborious work. We are too apt to think such artistic matters either frivolous parerga, or else the concerns of professionals. 

We are now all for science, and therefore for realism. Imagination in art is incompatible with the merely scientific spirit. Therefore in pictures and in statuary, as well as in the novel and the drama we are growing impatient of it. It seems beyond all question that in proportion as our illumination is solely the lumen siccum of the present time-spirit, in such proportion tho range of art criticism is limited to the question whether a thing is sufficiently matter-of-fact.  Whitmanism, Ibsenism, Zolaism are different manifestations of the same feeling in literature. But restore to us all the finer culture which is passing away from us, or assure to us that portion of it which still remains, and, in such degree as you do so, will you preserve to us the blessing of creative imagination. It is in human nature to delight in variety and fancy. It is in human nature that the emotional and imaginative instincts will ever and anon break through the tyranny of the matter-of-fact. But I maintain that it is for the good of the human being and for the good of human society that these delights and emotions should have perpetual stimulation; that they should not be regarded as weaker and less worthy parts of our nature, but as essential elements of a perfect life. Ask me what I think will actually be the case, and I say that I am confident, as soon as this absorbing industrial crisis is past, as soon as this absorbing economic question is settled, as soon as men have time to breathe again and to live for life's sake, with some idea of what they are living for, and with some leisure to carry out that idea, so soon will they instinctively acknowledge the necessity of training the whole man instead of part of him. And therewith will come an unprecedented and boundless revival of art in every kind. The truth is that we are living in an absolutely unique period of transition Almost every new discovery or operation which has revolutionised production and society has been made in this one century. We have not yet adapted ourselves to tho new conditions. We have no time to take breath; perhaps we shall not for a generation or two, or even more. But a breathing time will come when mankind will have forded the great current; and when it finds itself safely landed on the shore of some new Atlantis it will set to work to fashion for itself some higher and broader life.

There is still the great social question to be considered, and on this point I feel more certainty than on any other. The democratic movement has for some time been setting in strongly over all civilised countries. Democracy is the form of rule which best fits with a natural sense of justice. History, as I have elsewhere contended, does not indeed teach that democracy has necessarily been stable when established. But on the other hand, it does not teach anything against the possibility of democracy being established once for all. Now the advance of democracy is in what the mathematicians call geometrical progression ; and anyone who takes a comprehensive survey of the democratic movement on both sides of the Atlantic will see that it is distinctly tending more and more towards the verge of Socialism, and the most striking indication about the whole matter is that many of those who shudder most at the name of this unknown "ism" are in reality most deeply imbued with the better elements of its spirit. Understand, if you please, that I am only dealing with facts. I am not a socialist; and if I were, my own political sentiments are more or less padlocked or allowed out only on parole. From Plato's Republic to Fourier's Phalanstère Socialism was a mere dream. But in 1885 Socialists in Germany polled votes to the number of more than three-quarters of a million or about 11 per cent of the whole constituency of the country. Such a fact is of immense significance. Anyone who studies Socialism knows, of course, that its main principle is purely economic, and that there is nothing more anti-religious or leading to dynamite in Socialism than in any other social doctrine. There is, it is true, an ignorant, blatant, riff-raff joining in yells quite foreign to the main principle; but this Jacquerie is not so numerous as it is loud. This, at least, must be said in justice to the movement, however much we may dissent from any existing school who call themselves by the name of Collectivists, or Anarchists or any other. Personally, I think what is the matter with the extreme but honest Socialist is that he is "too good to live." Socialism, among its temperate adherents, aims at equality of work and culture and opportunity, not at equality of men. Its ways and means may be, and probably are, faulty; its agitators may often be worthless; but, after all the essence of the movement is only the outcome of the struggles of the masses for a more worthy human life. History shows us the slave giving place to the serf, and the serf to the free labourer. Socialists hold that their movement is an inevitable continuation of this historic process. And we cannot shut our eyes to the present necessity of meeting this movement in its subtler tentative forms. Look at the whole direction of recent state action and legislation. Universal suffrage and universal education are rapidly precipitating a question which formerly hung in the clouds of speculation. John Stuart Mill saw it years ago. Mr. Sydney Webb sums up the leading socialistic symptoms, in the constantly increasing restriction upon the private ownership of land and capital, by Factory Acts and the like; in the gradual supersession of private industrial ventures by public administration, such as national railways and telegraphs, municipal tramways, state schools; in progressive absorption by taxation of unearned increment; in the supplementing of private charity by public organisation which aims at raising the condition of the residuum by public education, improved dwellings, and similar measures. In England county councils have been established.  Among ourselves we have begun to fix hours for the closing of shops. It is not, indeed, at all likely that any system which can ultimately establish itself will closely resemble any of those theoretically suggested. It must be some system which evolves itself in a manner more suited to the possibilities of economics and of human nature. For those who fear a tyranny of ignorance and dreariness it may be noted that one of the most emphasised demands of the movement is for better opportunities of self culture.

On one other matter I feel it necessary to make a brief comment. It is the growing power of women. Women are now on the way to that complete emancipation which they ought to have enjoyed long ago. They are receiving an education corresponding to that of men. I may not indeed be one of those who hold that the sexes are mentally constituted alike. They may be so; but my experience as a teacher of both sexes does not lead me to think it. It has taught me nevertheless to respect highly the capacity of the female intellect. In all our looking forward we must not overlook this great new force. Woman are socially the superiors of men. Well equipped by education, free and capable in the expression of their sentiments, they will make their social influence still further preponderate. We may expect throughout society a more prevailing reasonableness; and, if I may descend from the general to the particular, one thing we may certainly expect will be reformation of our customary social intercourse. As I said the other day, we have no ideal, and the social gatherings which might be banquets of delight are reduced to dull monotonies, where indifference or weariness masquerades as enjoyment. The cure for this state of things lies with women; and it is from complete education and complete emancipation that woman will learn the cure.

I do not expect, ladies and gentlemen to have done more than two things this evening, I hope to have done those. I hope to have made some of you desirous of looking more closely and seriously into the great social movement which is the distinguishing mark of to-day; and also to have directed your thoughts to the inadequacies of the style of education which is becoming fashionable, and which forms such a poor preparation for the best life. I hope in some measure to gain your sympathies in an effort to secure educational bread for our children instead of an educational stone.

 The Argus 10 January 1891, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8465485