on January 16—a friendly hand sent me a letter of Baron Holstein, sixteen octavo pages in length, bearing the superscription : "Kaiserlich Deutsche Bothschaft in Frankreich," and entirely written and signed by the Baron's hand. It was addressed to one of the most intimate friends of Mr. John Delane, editor of the Times, and denounced me as quite under the thumb of the Duc Decazes, and as willingly ignoring and concealing from my readers an Orleanist plot which was preparing a coup d'état. In this letter the Times was urged to send to Paris some clever and impartial person, to keep the paper au courant of what was here going on underneath, as well as on the surface.

This letter, I repeat, reached me on January 16, a week after Baron Holstein's visit of gratitude, and it had been sent on the 12th! I need not say that I have carefully preserved this curious and instructive document now for almost eighteen years, and if I divulge it to-day, it is because it is so appropriate in these pages, showing, as it does, with what stoicism a diplomatist bent upon his duty rids himself of a weight of gratitude when he thinks that he ought to do so in the interests of a higher cause.

I publish this story to-day because, as I think, one owes truth to the living much more than to the dead; because Baron Holstein and I are both alive; and because the moment has come no longer to defer the publication of so striking an example of professional sacrifice performed by a diplomatist devoted to the task which devolved upon him. It will bring a smile to the face of Baron Holstein, to-day very powerful in Germany, and will prove to him that the memory of our friendly but already distant relations is not effaced from my memory.

BLOWITZ.

THE ACADEMIC SPIRIT IN EDUCATION.

THE

HE feelings entertained by the man of action towards the scholar have never been concealed. The English gentleman of the Middle Ages, the serious business of whose life was murder and rapine, felt towards the scholarly recluse, the man of books, a contempt even deeper than that which he displayed for the men who produced the wealth he stole and squandered. This contempt was, however, qualified, sometimes by superstitious fear, for the scholar might be a wizard and in league with powers of evil not to be contemned, sometimes by religious reverence, due to the patronage of learning by the Church.

These same feelings of contempt and distrust are alive in the present day. Take the most representative modern literature of England, its fiction. A scholar is seldom introduced into a novel excepting as a butt for the humour of the full-blooded hero and his friends. He is there to make himself ridiculous, and he does it ho is dupe to the first impostor who turns up; he talks a pompous jargon of his own; he makes love to the wrong person, lets out the secret, and generally mixes up the business of the plot.

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I am not speaking only of inferior fiction: Goldsmith, Scott, George Eliot, George Meredith make their Dr. Primrose, Dominie Sampson, Casaubon, Dr. Middleton pretty much after the same pattern.

This is a true reflection of the way in which the business man of to-day regards clergymen, college dons, schoolmasters. His first charge against them is that they are "unpractical." There is something humorous in the complacent way in which they receive this charge. So far from being annoyed, they take it as a compliment. They regard it as testimony to their real superiority; partly it is the stupidity of common uneducated persons unable to appreciate their more exact and ordered intelligence, partly it is jealousy of the possession of some exclusive culture which sets them above the vulgar herd.

The academic person does not admit he is "unpractical": how should he? He smiles at the charge with an air of conscious superiority. But it is from this epithet that we may best approach the investigation of the academic spirit and its place in education.

Many classes engaged in intellectual work have the spirit in various powers and degrees. Some qualities of it are strongly pronounced in the schoolmaster; the medical and legal professions are not void of special forms; clergymen combine it with a special bias due to the theological training; literary cliques in London and elsewhere show it; but the purest and finest brand of the academic spirit is in the college don.

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It is in some sense the business of the scholar to be unpractical, read and to think rather than to act. Many subjects of study, those which are described par excellence as academic, have no direct bearing on life, no "utility" in the ordinary sense of the word. The whole process of education, self-education or the education of others, is "unpractical" in so far as it seeks knowledge and development of mind as ends in themselves. This knowledge, this ability, is capital which subsequently yields interest in "practice," but the academic spirit is rightly unconcerned with this. A mathematician, a literary man, a student of the natural sciences, as distinct from their application to the arts, is "unpractical."

If the imputation of being "unpractical" meant no more than this it would be wholly without sting. So far as the academic spirit is engaged in acquiring knowledge, it is nothing to the point to call it "unpractical." But where it is required to descend from the task of acquiring knowledge to that of imparting it to others, in order to assist in forming other minds for life in the world, where the academic spirit is brought to bear upon the conduct of life, the charge of being unpractical has more force.

Take a number of intelligent beings, remove them from the stress and strain of close continual contact with the average life of working society, place them in a social ring-fence, where all are alike engaged in some kind of "theoretic " work-looking at the ordinary work-aday world either not at all or through the refracting mirror of books -you have a special environment which must operate upon these men and women not merely as individuals, but as a species. Thus, either in our universities or wherever men and women form themselves into a corporation, a clique, or a coterie for purely intellectual purposes, you get this special atmosphere, the book-view of humar

nature.

It is often said human nature is slow to change. Nothing, 1 think, is more untrue; human nature changes rapidly, and is able to assume all kinds of curious new specific forms.

I wish to offer some analysis of this "academic" species, and to

show the bearing of my analysis on present practical questions of

education.

When Chaucer offered his advice, "Flee from the press and dwell with soothfastness," his advice was very necessary. In the turmoil of the Middle Ages knowledge could only be cultivated, the intellectual life could only be led in the seclusion of a monastic retreat or a hermit's cell. Philosophy, literature, science, were for the most part the humble starved protégés of religion, and were glad to avail themselves of any shelter she might allow. The degradation of this servitude is still visible in a thousand superstitions which cling round our educational theories and institutions. But though the poison of religious patronage still taints the academic life of our universities and public schools, it is not one of the essential academic qualities on which I wish to dwell.

What I wish to make manifest is the effects of maintaining in nineteenth-century England that artificially protected and specialised form of the intellectual life which once was necessary, but is no longer so. The withdrawal of the medieval scholar from the free intercourse of the world was necessary; the seclusion of the modern scholar is not only needless, but highly injurious.

I have not defined my term academic." No good comes by forcing close definition; rather by bringing such a term into relation with other words, one at a time, can its real connotation be effectively disclosed.

Academic suggests "armchair " and the “study." Solitude," as De Quincey finely said, "is essential to man." But so is society. The proper balance here, as elsewhere, is what we want. Excess of solitude is one mark of the academic life. One who draws largely upon books or leads a life of contemplation must be much alone, with the result that what he gains in direct self-cultivation he loses in social experience.

It is an endeavour to live too much alone, and to substitute an artificial society of books for the society of live men and women. I believe the time will come when we shall have advanced far enough in clear notions of education to admit that, taking knowledge as a whole, more can be learned from the smallest person alive than from the greatest dead; that, save within a certain confined region of art, books do not possess a life which can, for real importance in education, compare with that of the men and women who live around us. The same vulgar protestantism which narrowed religion into the worship of one book, has narrowed education into the worship of many books. Academic authority, in colleges and schools alike, is often loud with its mouth in repudiation of this ritualistic view of knowledge and education: in its heart, and in practice, it clings tenaciously to the superstition. A saner, healthier

age than ours will value books more lightly, and, so doing, will get
more worth out of them than we do. They will not set growing
children to worship these paper gods for eight or ten hours a
day at a time when the craving for recreation and free animal life
is natural and wholesome. Dickens has not yet done his work. The
system of our schools-high, grammar, and primary-is still in the
main that of Mr. McChokum Child, whose pupils were "little empty
vessels,” always waiting for the knowledge to be "poured in." Espe-
cially is this superstition rife in those establishments for higher
education of women where the teachers most indignantly repudiate
the suggestion of "cram." I assert most emphatically that women's
education is not advancing, but is rather going back; that the
old era of idle accomplishments, drawing-room embroidery and
pianoforte, was less injurious than the congested curriculum of
to-day.

All this is part and parcel of a superstitious quantitative estimate of
knowledge stored in books, which belongs to the academic spirit.
The scholarly solitude and the substitution. of dead minds for living
act upon the student so as to lower his intellectual and emotional
vitality, and falsify his standard of value. What a true picture of
the academic mind George Eliot has given in M. Casaubon; how
powerfully she points the lesson that many books are not only a
weariness to the flesh, but a starvation to the soul.

If we turn to books themselves we find that the best and greatest have not come from those who have been great readers, but rather from those who have lived and loved and fought. Such works as those of Homer, Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott, Goethe, Hugo, were not written in the atmosphere of the stndy.

Not that the academic person is without interest in life-on the contrary, he has many interests; he is fond of hearing many sides of a question, finds them all so "suggestive"; he is a collector of facts and opinions in the world of literature and art; his mind is a museum of preserved specimens in politics, sociology, religion. But if you conclude that such a man has opinions of his own, that any of the movements of the day in politics or religion have a hold of his emotions, that he would lift a finger to help or hinder them, you will be mistaken. His interest in these matters is purely intellectual. I know several such men who are students of social subjects; they will diligently collect information upon the various aspects of the labour movement, upon co-operation, trades unions, figures of pauperism, schemes of relief. They will carefully pack away these facts in the pigeon-holes of their mind, labelled "Information bearing on the condition of the working classes." There the knowledge will remain; you must not ask them to disturb it. Do not expect them to stir themselves to act or even to vote in order to assist the cause of progress. Not at all. It