d
some of which require not only trained teachers but costly apparatus
and laboratories. Increasing international competition and enlarged
scientific knowledge have rendered necessary an amount of technical and
agricultural education never dreamed of by our ancestors; and the rise
of the great provincial towns and the greater intensity of provincial
life and provincial patriotism, as well as the changes that have passed
over the position both of the working and middle classes, have created a
genuine demand for educational establishments of a different type from
the older universities. The higher education of women is essentially a
nineteenth-century work, and it has been carried on without the
assistance of old endowments and with very little help from modern
Parliaments. In the distribution of public funds a class which is wholly
unrepresented in Parliament seldom gets its fair share; and higher
education, like most forms of science, like most of the higher forms of
literature, and like many valuable forms of research, never can be
self-supporting. There are great branches of knowledge which without
established endowments must remain uncultivated, or be cultivated only
by men of considerable private means. Some invaluable curative agencies,
such as convalescent homes in different countries and climates and for
different diseases, have grown up in our own generation, as well as some
of the most fruitful forms of medical research and some of the most
efficacious methods of giving healthy change and brightness to the lives
that are most monotonous and overstrained. Every great revolution in
industry, in population, and even in knowledge, brings with it new and
special wants, and there are cases in which assisted emigration is one
of the best forms of charity.

These are but a few illustrations of the directions in which the large
surplus funds which many of the very rich are prepared to expend on
philanthropic purposes may profitably go. There is a marked and
increasing tendency in our age to meet all the various exigencies of
Society, as they arise, by State aid resting on compulsory taxation. In
countries where the levels of fortune are such that few men have incomes
greatly in excess of their real or factitious wants, this method will
probably be necessary; but many of the wants I have described can be
better met by the old English method of intelligent private generosity,
and in a country in which the number of the ve