university degrees, whilst other pursuits of intellectual men shall have
no encouragement whatever." I may mention by name your present autocrat
of Public Instruction, Jules Simon. He is a literary man of some
eminence; he has written several interesting books, and on the whole he
is probably more competent to deal with these questions than many of his
predecessors. But however capable a man may be, he is sure to be biassed
by the feeling common to all intellectual men which attributes a
peculiar importance to their own pursuits. I do not like to see any
Minister, or any Cabinet of Ministers, settling what all the young men
of a country are to learn under penalty of exclusion from all the
liberal professions.

What I should think more reasonable would be some such arrangement as
the following. There might be a board of thoroughly competent examiners
for each branch of study separately, authorized to confer certificates
of competence. When a man believed himself to have mastered a branch of
study, he would go and try to get a certificate for that. The various
studies would then be followed according to the public sense of their
importance, and would fall quite naturally into the rank which they
ought to occupy at any given period of the national history. These
separate examinations should be severe enough to ensure a serviceable
degree of proficiency. Nobody should be allowed to teach anything who
had not got a certificate for the particular thing he intended to
profess. In the confusion of your present system, not only do you fail
to insure the thoroughness of pupils, but the teachers themselves are
too frequently incompetent in some speciality which accidentally fails
to their share. I think that a Greek master ought to be a complete
Hellenist, but surely it is not necessary that he should be half a
mathematician.

To sum up. It seems to me that a Government has no business to favor
some intellectual pursuits more than others, but that it ought to
recognize competent attainment in every one of them by a sort of diploma
or certificate, leaving the relative rank of different pursuits to be
settled by public opinion. And as to the educators themselves, I think
that when a man has proved his competence in one thing, he ought to be
allowed to teach that one thing in the University without being required
to pass an examination in any other thing.

LETTER VII.

TO THE PRINCIPAL OF A FRENCH COLLEGE.

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