an who, though endowed with an
acute and vigorous intellect, can neither think imaginatively nor
reason tactfully, has grave intellectual defects; and the blinder he
is to the existence of these defects the more pronounced will they
become.

The pity of it is that when these unimaginative "intellectuals" go
out into the world, they will fill posts in which they will have
unrivalled opportunities for establishing and disseminating their
unwholesome influence. A section of them will go into the teaching
profession, the higher grades of which are almost entirely recruited
from Oxford and Cambridge. Another section will go into the legal
profession, and through it will enter Parliament in considerable
numbers, where, being trained advocates, they will exercise an
influence out of all proportion to their numerical strength. And a
third section will man the higher grades of the Home, Colonial, and
Indian Civil Services. Teachers, legislators, administrators,--if
there are any walks in life in which cynicism and a capacity for
merely destructive criticism are out of place, and in which
imagination and sympathy are imperatively demanded, they are these
three; and it is nothing short of a national calamity that these
great and commanding professions should be manned, in part at least,
by men whose mission in life is to paralyse rather than to vitalise,
to fetter rather than to set free.

The further pity of it is that the training of these "intellectuals"
might easily have taken an entirely different course. Much of the
specialising which goes on in our Great Public Schools and
Universities, and which is so destructive of mental and spiritual
vitality, is wholly unnecessary. The course of education which the
sons of the "upper classes" go through has this in common with
elementary education, that in neither case need "utilitarian"
considerations weigh with the teachers. The parents of a large
proportion of our Public School boys can afford to give their sons a
_liberal_ education (in the truest and fullest sense of the word) up
to the age of twenty-two or twenty-three; and in the case of these
boys, at any rate, the excessive specialisation which makes their
education so illiberal is done, not in response to the demands
of professions (such as the medical or the engineering) which
necessitate early specialising, but solely in response to the demands
of an examination system which we adopted before we had begun to ask
ourselv