erly, only the means to
obtain the real end of education, which is social efficiency. The only
way, in fact, to make the discipline demanded by a severe curriculum and
the sacrifice of particular tastes required for unity seem worth the cost,
is to persuade men that the resulting form of education both meets a
present and serious need of society and promises to serve those
individuals who desire to obtain society's fairer honors. As for the
specific need of society at the present day, it is not my purpose to open
this matter now, for the good reason that the editor of THE UNPOPULAR
REVIEW has already permitted me to argue it at length in my article on
_Natural Aristocracy_. Mr. McCombs, speaking for the "practical" man,
declares that there is no place in politics for the intellectual
aristocrat. A good many of us believe that unless the very reverse of this
is true, unless the educated man can somehow, by virtue of his education,
make of himself a governor of the people in the larger sense, and even to
some extent in the narrow political sense, unless the college can produce
a hierarchy of character and intelligence which shall in due measure
perform the office of the discredited oligarchy of birth, we had better
make haste to divert our enormous collegiate endowments into more useful
channels.

And here I am glad to find confirmation of my belief in the stalwart old
_Boke Named the Governour_, published by Sir Thomas Elyot in 1531, the
first treatise on education in the English tongue, and still, after all
these years, one of the wisest. It is no waste of time to take account of
the theory held by the humanists when study at Oxford and Cambridge was
shaping itself for its long service in giving to the oligarchic government
of Great Britain whatever elements it possessed of true aristocracy.
Elyot's book is equally a treatise on the education of a gentleman, and on
the ordinance of government; for, as he says elsewhere, he wrote "to
instruct men in such virtues as shall be expedient for them which shall
have authority in a weal public." I quote from various parts of his work
with some abridgment, retaining the quaint spelling of the original, and I
beg the reader not to skip, however long the citation may appear:

Beholde also the ordre that god hath put generally in al his
creatures, begynning at the moste inferiour or base, and
assendynge upwarde; so that in euery thyng is ordre, and without
ordre may