e to mention actual names; but take by way
of example such a district as Dickens's "Coketown," or Disraeli's
"Wodgate," or George Eliot's "Milby," or any of those towns which
Cobbett expressively called "Hell-Holes." Let the State establish
in each of those places a qualified and accredited teacher for
adult students. The teacher may, if necessary, be paid in part
by voluntary subscription; but it is, in my view, all-important
that he should have the sanction and authority of the State to give
him a definite place among local administrators, and to the State
he should be responsible for the due discharge of his functions.
In Coketown or Wodgate or Milby his lecture-room would be a real
Oasis--"a fertile spot in the midst of a desert." Even if it has
not been our lot to dwell in those deserts, we all have had, as
travellers, some taste of their quality. We know the hideousness
of all that meets the eye; the necessary absorption in the struggle
for subsistence; the resulting tendency to regard money as the
one subject worth serious consideration; the inadequate means of
intellectual recreation; the almost irresistible atmosphere of
materialism in which life and thought are involved. The "Oasis"
would provide a remedy for all this. It would offer to all who
cared to seek them "the fairy-tale of science," the pregnant lessons
of history, the infinitely various joys of literature, the moral
principles of personal and social action which have been thought
out "by larger minds in calmer ages."

That there may be practical difficulties in the way of such a scheme
I do not dispute. The object of this chapter is not to elaborate a
plan, but to exhibit an idea. That the amount of definite knowledge
acquired in this way might be small, and what Archbishop Benson
oddly called "unexaminable," is, I think, quite likely. A man cannot
learn in the leisure-hours left over by exhausting work as he would
learn if he had nothing to think of except his studies and his
examination. But Education has a larger function than the mere
communication of knowledge. It opens the windows of the mind; it
shows vistas which before were unsuspected; and so, as Wordsworth
said, "is efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier."

IV

_LIFE, LIBERTY, AND JUSTICE_

When an article in a newspaper produces a reply, the modest writer
is gratified; for he knows that he has had at any rate one reader.
If the reply comes to him privately, he is