ing that there is any great danger, at least in
this day, of over-education; the danger is on the other side. I will
tell you, gentlemen, what has been the practical error of the last
twenty years,--not to load the memory of the student with a mass of
undigested knowledge, but to force upon him so much that he has rejected
all. It has been the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an
unmeaning profusion of subjects; of implying that a smattering in a
dozen branches of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but
enlargement, which it is not; of considering an acquaintance with the
learned names of things and persons and the possession of clever
duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent lecturers, and membership with
scientific institutions, and the sight of the experiments of a platform
and the specimens of a museum, that all this was not dissipation of
mind, but progress. All things now are to be learned at once, not first
one thing, then another, not one well, but many badly. Learning is to
be without exertion, without attention, without toil; without grounding,
without advance, without finishing. There is to be nothing individual in
it; and this, forsooth, is the wonder of the age. What the steam engine
does with matter, the printing press is to do with the mind; it is to
act mechanically, and the population is to be passively, almost
unconsciously enlightened, by the mere multiplication and dissemination
of volumes. Whether it be the school boy, or the school girl, or the
youth at college, or the mechanic in the town, or the politician in the
senate, all have been the victims in one way or other of this most
preposterous and pernicious of delusions. Wise men have lifted up their
voices in vain; and at length, lest their own institutions should be
outshone and should disappear in the folly of the hour, they have been
obliged, as far as they could with a good conscience, to humour a spirit
which they could not withstand, and make temporising concessions at
which they could not but inwardly smile.

It must not be supposed that, because I so speak, therefore I have some
sort of fear of the education of the people: on the contrary, the more
education they have, the better, so that it is really education. Nor am
I an enemy to the cheap publication of scientific and literary works,
which is now in vogue: on the contrary, I consider it a great advantage,
convenience, and gain; that is, to those to whom education