The facts and opinions just cited should keep us from the dangerous mistake of supposing that we are simply suffering from the predominant position of classics in our public schools, and that we have only to expel them in favour of physical science and modern languages, to be cured of all our ills. This idea, which was fostered by the Science Manifesto last February, seems to be losing ground, and it is well that it should, for if we base our reforms on it, we shall be like doctors who mistake a minor symptom for the real disease. It is no doubt true that we need more physical science in industry and elsewhere; but that is only a symptom of a more serious weakness. What is really wrong with us is that as a nation we do not believe in knowledge.

The slowness of some of our manufacturers to use science in industry is one sign of this. But there are other and much more serious signs. If an account is ever published of the work done by a certain section of the Admiralty Intelligence Department since the war began, we shall have plenty of evidence of our indifference to knowledge in departments as important as industry. Under the pressure of the war a branch of that Department has been amassing ethnographical

and geographical information, which we now find essential, and which we have hitherto neglected to collect. It might have been supposed that a great empire would have had some kind of a Civil General Staff, which would collect such facts, and pigeonhole them for the time when they should be needed, instead of having to improvise hurriedly a practically new Department, and ransack French, Dutch and German periodicals and books for knowledge which bears directly on its deepest interests. But though we have great geographers and explorers, we have never used their services methodically, or thought it necessary to accumulate and store the facts in which they deal, as we accumulate and store munitions or anything else necessary to the conduct of war. That is a sufficiently serious symptom of our national indifference to knowledge. Obviously it does not spring from ignorance of physical science, nor is it to be cured by instituting a preliminary science examination in our universities.

We generally regard this comparative indifference to knowledge as a quality of our breed, as

1 The branch in question is a new and extraneous development of the Admiralty Intelligence Department, which, no doubt, in its own work has from the first been efficient and prepared.

natural as the blue eyes and light hair of a Northman, and, resigning ourselves to being less thorough than the Germans, hope to make up this deficiency by other qualities which they do not possess. But our weakness is surely nothing mysterious. It is neither an ineradicable strain in our blood, nor a consequence of too little physical science in our education. It is the natural result of insufficient education of any kind. “In Prussia," wrote Mr. Sadler in 1899, "the machinery for the organisation of secondary education has been at work for more than seventy years. In England it is still, both locally and centrally, incomplete." And again: "There is little doubt that, so far as wide range of all-round intellectual attainment goes, a higher average is reached in the average German secondary school than is the case with us. There secondary schools of high quality are more uniformly spread over the whole country than is the case in England. They are cheaper and more accessible to poorer families of the middle class." 1 In fact, a smaller public is educated in England than in Germany, and, as a whole, it is less well-educated. It is the same with university education. There are twenty-one universities in

1o.c. p. 94.

Germany, of which the latest was founded in 1826. There are eighteen in Great Britain, but of these seven have been founded since 1900 (the University of Wales was founded in 1893), and only six were in existence in 1830.1 Consequently in Germany a much larger proportion of the population has had a university education than in England, and, it is not surprising, if the Germans, having had more education, and knowing better its value, prize knowledge and use it more than we do.2

1 It is characteristic that Scotland, the most intelligent part of Great Britain, possessed four of these.

The significance of these figures can only be appreciated, if we remember that the full effect on a nation of any improvement in its educational system is not felt for at least 20 years after it has been introduced.

According to the Statesman's Year-Book the statistics of university education work out as follows:

These figures need further analysis; for Britain, they include in some cases evening students and undergraduates who have finished their studies, but have not taken a degree; for Germany, they include nearly 10,000 unmatriculated students, but take no account of over 16,000 students at technical high schools with power to grant degrees. And examination might reveal other discrepancies.

There are obviously many other imperfections in our education contributing to the same result, which are not mentioned here.

If this is the real cause of our weakness, matters are not so unsatisfactory. We have simply to improve our secondary and university education, and to extend them further among the population. This has been done of recent years since Mr. Sadler wrote, great changes for the better have been made in our secondary education, and seven new universities have been provided—and if we continue on these lines, knowledge, and with knowledge, the belief in it, will grow. The new generations will value it more, and apply it more in all departments of life, and we shall become a 'scientific' nation, not in the sense that our education is largely in physical science, but that, whatever we do, we shall realise that the first business is to collect the relevant facts, so that we can base our action on knowledge. And this is the kind of science we really need. The Germans possess it, not because they have more physical science and less classics in their schools, but because they have more education generally. They have used the fertilizer of education widely, and the resulting crops are better than those of nations that have used it less.

There is something, too, in the nature of the particular fertilizer, at any rate in the case of the