have been sacrificed to obstinate formalism and
pedagogic tradition. The defence of classics as a basis of education
is generally misrepresented by opponents. The unique value of the
classics is not in any begetting of literary style. We are thinking of
readers not of writers. Much of the best literature is the work of
unlettered men, as they never tire of telling us, but it is for the
enjoyment and understanding of books and of the world that continuity
with the past should be maintained. John Bunyan wrote sterling prose,
knowing no language but his own. But how much could he read? What
judgments could he form? We want also to keep classics and especially
Greek as the bountiful source of material and of colour, decoration
for the jejune lives of common men. If classics cease to be generally
taught and become the appanage of a few scholars, the gulf between the
literary and the scientific will be made still wider. Milton will need
more explanatory notes than O. Henry. Who will trouble about us
scientific students then? We shall be marked off from the beginning,
and in the world of laboratories Hector, Antigone and Pericles will
soon share the fate of poor Ananias and Sapphira.

I come now to the gravest part of the whole question. We plead for the
preservation of literature, especially classical literature, as the
staple of education in the name of beauty and understanding: but no
less do we demand science in the name of truth and advancement. Given
that our demand succeeds, what consequences may we expect? Nothing
immediate, as I fear. In opening the discussion it was argued that
even if scientific knowledge be widely diffused, any great change in
the composition of the ruling classes is scarcely attainable under
present conditions of social organisation. Even if science stand equal
with classics in examinations for the services the general tenor of
the public mind will in all likelihood be undisturbed. Yet it is for
such a revolution that science really calls, and come it will in any
community dominated by natural knowledge. Science saves us from
blunders about glycerine, shows how to economise fuel and to make
artificial nitrates, but these, though they decide national destinies,
are merely the sheaf of the wave-offering: the harvest is behind. For
natural knowledge is destined to give man not only a direct control of
the material world but new interpretations of higher problems. Though
we in England make a stand upo