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 http://www.archive.org/details/frenchetonormiddOOarnorich 
 
. A FRENCH ETON; 
 
 OR, 
 
 MIDDLE CLASS EDUCATION AND THE STATE. 
 
Forgetting those things which are behind^ and reachi7ig 
 fo7'th 7into those things which are before. — St. Paui.. 
 
FRENCH ETON; 
 
 OR, 
 
 MIDDLE CLASS EDUCATION 
 
 AND THE STATE. 
 
 BY 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD, 
 
 ate ly Foreign Assistant Commissioner to tJie Cotnmissioners appointed to inquire 
 into the State of Popular Edttcation in England. 
 
 Library. 
 
 ^0nbon nnb Cambridge: 
 
 M A C M I L L A N AND CO. 
 
 1864. 
 
L(\G34 
 
 «7 
 
 LONDON : 
 CLAV, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, 
 BREAD STREET HILL. 
 
Library. 
 
 A FRENCH ETON; 
 
 OR, 
 
 MIDDLE-CLASS EDUCATION AND THE STATE. 
 
 A LIVELY and acute writer, whom English so- 
 ciety, indebted to his vigilance for the exposure 
 of a thousand delinquents, salutes with admira- 
 tion as its Grand Detective, some time ago called 
 public attention to the state of the " College of 
 the Blessed Mary" at Eton. In that famous seat 
 of learning, he said, a vast sum of money was 
 expended on education, and a beggarly account 
 of empty brains was the result. Rich endow- 
 ments were wasted; parents were giving large 
 sums to have their children taught, and were 
 getting a most inadequate return for their outlay. 
 Science, among those venerable towers in the 
 vale of the Thames, still adored her Henry's 
 holy shade ; but she did very little else. These 
 topics, handled with infinite skill and vivacity, 
 
6 A French Eton. 
 
 produced a strong effect. Public attention, for 
 a moment, fixed itself upon the state of second- 
 ary instruction in England. The great class, 
 which is interested in the improvement of this, 
 imagined that the moment was come for making 
 the first step towards that improvement. The 
 comparatively small class, whose children are 
 educated in the existing public schools, thought 
 that some inquiry into the state of these institu- 
 tions might do good. A Royal Commission 
 was appointed to report upon the endowments, 
 studies, and, management of the nine principal 
 public schools of this country — Eton, Winchester, 
 Westminster, Charterhouse, St. Paul's, Merchant 
 Taylors', Harrow, Rugby, and Shrewsbury. 
 
 Eton was really the accused, although eight co- 
 respondents were thus summoned to appear with 
 Eton ; and in Eton the investigation now com- 
 pleted will probably produce most reform. The 
 reform of an institution which trains so many of 
 the ruler^ of this country is, no doubt, a matter 
 of considerable importance. That importance 
 is certainly lessened if it is true, as the Times 
 tells us, that the real ruler of our country is 
 '* The People," although this potentate does not 
 absolutely transact his own business, but dele- 
 gates that function to the class which Eton 
 
A French Eton. 7 
 
 educates. But even those who beheve that 
 Mirabeau, when he said, He who administersy 
 governs, was a great deal nearer the truth than 
 the Times, and to whom, therefore, changes at 
 Eton seem indeed matter of great importance, 
 will hardly be disposed to make those changes 
 very sweeping. If Eton does not teach her 
 pupils profound wisdom, we have Oxenstiern's 
 word for it that the world is governed by very 
 little wisdom. Eton, at any rate, teaches her 
 aristocratic pupils virtues which are among the 
 best virtues of an aristocracy — freedom from 
 affectation, manliness, a high spirit, simplicity. 
 It is to be hoped that she teaches something 
 of these virtues to her other pupils also, who, 
 not of the aristocratic class themselves, enjoy 
 at Eton the benefit of contact with aristocracy. 
 For these other pupils, perhaps, a little more 
 learning as well, a somewhat stronger dose of 
 ideas, might be desirable. Above all, it might 
 be desirable to wean them from the easy habits 
 and profuse notions of expense which Eton 
 generates — habits and notions gracefal enough 
 in the lilies of the social field, but inconvenient 
 for its future toilers and spinners. To convey 
 to Eton the knowledge that the wine of Cham- 
 pagne does not water the whole earth, and that 
 
'8 A Fre7ich Eton. 
 
 there are incomes which fall below "^^.Q^yc^l. a 
 year, would be an act of kindness towards a 
 large class of British parents, full of proper 
 pride, but not opulent. Let us hope that the 
 courageous social reformer who has taken Eton 
 in hand may, at least, reap this reward from his 
 labours. Let us hope he may succeed in some- 
 what reducing the standard of expense at Eton, 
 and let us pronounce over his offspring the 
 prayer of Ajax : — " O boys, may you be cheaper- 
 " educated than your father, but in other re- 
 " spects like him ; may you have the same loving 
 " care for the improvement of the British officer, 
 " the same terrible eye upon bullies and jobbers, 
 " the same charming gaiety in your frolics with 
 *' the ' Old Dog Tray ; ' — but may all these gifts 
 " be developed at a lesser price ! " 
 , But I hope that large class which wants the 
 I improvement of secondary instruction in this 
 .country — secondary instruction, the great first 
 stage of a liberal education, coming between 
 elementary instruction, the instruction in the 
 mother tongue and in the simplest and indis- 
 pensable branches of knowledge on the one 
 hand, and superior instruction, the instruction 
 given by universities, the second and finishing 
 stage of a liberal education, on the other — will 
 
A French Eton, 9 
 
 not imagine that the appointment of a Royal 
 Commission to report on nine existing schools 
 can seriously help it to that which it wants. I 
 hope it will steadily say to the limited class whom 
 the reform of these nine schools (if they need 
 reform) truly concerns — Tua res agittir. These 
 nine schools are by their constitution such that 
 they profess to reach but select portions of the 
 multitudes that are claiming secondary instruc- 
 tion ; and, whatever they might profess, being 
 nine, they ca7i only reach select portions. The 
 exhibition which the Royal Commissioners have 
 given us of these schools is indeed very interest- 
 ing ; I hope it will prove very useful. But, for 
 the champions of the true cause of secondary 
 instruction, for those interested in the thorough 
 improvement of this most important concern, 
 the centre of interest is not there. Before the 
 English mind, always prone to throw itself upon 
 details, has by the interesting Report of the 
 Public School Commissioners been led com- 
 pletely to throw itself upon what, after all, in 
 this great concern of secondary instruction, is 
 only a detail, I wish to show, with all the 
 clearness and insistance I can, where the centre 
 of interest really lies. 
 
lo A French Eton. 
 
 I. 
 
 To see secondary instruction treated as a 
 matter of national concern, to see any serious 
 attempt to make it both commensurate with the 
 numbers needing it and of good quality, we 
 must cross the Channel. The Royal Commis- 
 sioners have thought themselves precluded, by 
 the limits of their instructions, from making a 
 thorough inquiry into the system of secondary 
 instruction on the Continent. I regret that they 
 did not trust to the vast importance of the 
 subject for procuring their pardon even if they 
 somewhat extended their scope, and made their 
 survey of foreign secondary instruction exact. 
 This they could have done only by investing 
 quaHfied persons with the commission to seek, 
 in their name, access to the foreign schools. 
 These institutions must be seen at work, and 
 seen by experienced eyes, for their operation to 
 be properly understood and described. But to 
 see them at work the aid of the public authorities 
 abroad is requisite ; and foreign governments, 
 most prompt in giving this aid to accredited 
 
A Frenc/i Eton, 1 1 
 
 emissaries, are by no means disposed to extend 
 it to the chance inquirer. 
 
 In 1859 I visited France, authorised by the 
 Royal Commissioners who were then inquiring 
 into the state of popular education in England, 
 to seek, in their name, information respecting the 
 French primary schools. I shall never cease to 
 be grateful for the cordial help afforded to me 
 by the functionaries of the French Government 
 for seeing thoroughly the objects which I came 
 to study. The higher functionaries charged 
 with the supervision of primary instruction have 
 the supervision of secondary instruction also ; 
 and their kindness enabled me occasionally to 
 see something of the secondary schools — institu- 
 tions which strongly attracted my interest, but 
 which the Royal Commissioners had not autho- 
 rised me to study, and which the French Minister 
 of Public Instruction had not directed his func- 
 tionaries to show me. I thus saw the Lyceum, or 
 public secondary school, of Toulouse — a good 
 specimen of its class. To make clear to the 
 English reader what this class of institutions is, 
 with a view of enabling him to see, afterwards, 
 what is the problem respecting secondary in- 
 struction which we in this country really have to 
 solve, I will describe the Toulouse Lyceum. 
 
12 A French Eton, 
 
 Toulouse, the cliief city of the great plain of 
 Languedoc, and a place of great antiquity, 
 dignity, and importance, has one of the principal 
 lyceums to be found out of Paris. . But the chief 
 town of every French department has its lyceum, 
 and the considerable towns of every department 
 have their communal colleges, as the chief town 
 has its lyceum. These establishments of secon- 
 dary instruction are attached to academies, local 
 centres of the Department of Public Instruction 
 at Paris, of which there are sixteen in France. 
 The head of an academy is called its " rector," 
 and his chidf ministers are called " academy- 
 inspectors." The superintendence of all public 
 instruction (under the general control of the 
 Minister of Public Instruction at Paris) was given 
 by M. Guizof s education-law to the academies ; 
 that of primary instruction has been, in great 
 measure, taken away from them and given to the 
 prefects ; that of secondary or superior instruc- 
 tion still remains to them. Toulouse is the seat 
 of an academy of the first class, with a jurisdic- 
 tion extending over eight departments ; its 
 rector, when I was there in 1859, was an ex-judge 
 of the Paris Court of Cassation, M. Rocher, a 
 man of about sixty, of great intelligence, courtesy, 
 and knowledge of the world. Ill-health had 
 
A Frenc/i Eton. 13 
 
 compelled him to resign his judgeship, and the 
 Minister of Public Instruction, his personal 
 friend, had given him the rectorate of Toulouse, 
 the second in France in point of rank, as a kind 
 of dignified retreat. The position of rector in 
 France much resembles that of one of our heads 
 of houses at Oxford or Cambridge. M. Rocher 
 placed me under the guidance of his academy- 
 inspector, M. Peyrot ; and M. Peyrot, after intro- 
 ducing me to the primary inspectors of Toulouse, 
 and enabling me to make arrangements with 
 them for visiting the primary schools of the city 
 and neighbourhood, kindly took me over the 
 lyceum, which is under his immediate super- 
 vision. 
 
 A French lyceum is an institution founded and 
 maintained by the State, with aid from the de- 
 partment and commune. The communal colleges 
 are founded and maintained by the commune, 
 with aid from the State. The Lyceum of Toulouse 
 is held in large and somewhat gloomy buildings, 
 in the midst of the city ; old ecclesiastical build- 
 ings have in a number of towns been converted 
 by the Government into public-school premises. 
 We were received by the proviseur, M. Seignette. 
 The provisor is the chief functionary — the head 
 master — of a French lyceum ; he does not, how- 
 
14 A French- Eton. 
 
 ever, himself teach, but manages the business 
 concerns of the school, administers its finances, 
 and is responsible for its general conduct and 
 discipline ; his place is one of the prizes of 
 French secondary instruction, and the provisor, 
 having himself served a long apprenticeship as a 
 teacher, has all the knowledge requisite for super- 
 intending his professors. He, like the professors, 
 has gone through the excellent normal school 
 out of which the functionaries of secondary in- 
 struction are taken, and has fulfilled stringent 
 conditions of training and examination. Three 
 chaplains — Roman Catholic priests — have the 
 charge of the religious instruction of the lyceum ; 
 a Protestant minister, however, is specially ap- 
 pointed to give this instruction to pupils whose 
 parents are of the reformed faith, and these 
 pupils attend, on Sundays, their own Protestant 
 places of worship. The lyceum has from three 
 to four hundred scholars ; it receives both 
 boarders and day-scholars. In every lyceum 
 which receives boarders there are a certain num- 
 ber of bourses, or public scholarships, which re- 
 lieve their holders from all cost for their educa- 
 tion. The school has three great divisions, each 
 with its separate schoolrooms and playground. 
 The playgrounds are large courts, planted with 
 
A French Eton. 15 
 
 trees. Attached to the institution, but in a 
 separate building, is a school for little boys from 
 six to twelve years of age, called the Petit Col- 
 lege ; here there is a garden as well as a play- 
 ground, and the whole school-life is easier and 
 softer than in the lyceum, and adapted to the 
 tender years of the scholars. In the Petit Col- 
 lege, too, there are both boarders and day- 
 scholars. 
 
 The schoolrooms of the lyceum were much 
 like our schoolrooms here ; large bare rooms, 
 looking as if they had seen much service, with 
 their desks browned and battered, and inscribed 
 with the various carvings of many generations of 
 schoolboys. The cleanliness, order, and neatness 
 of the passages, dormitories, and sick-rooms were 
 exemplary. The dormitories are vast rooms, 
 with a teacher^s bed at each end ; alight is kept 
 burning in them all the night through. In no 
 English school have I seen any arrangements for 
 the sick to compare with those of the Toulouse 
 Lyceum. The service of the infirmary, as it is 
 called, is performed by Sisters of Charity. The 
 aspect and manners of these nurses, the freshness 
 and airiness of the rooms, the whiteness and 
 fragrance of the great stores of linen which one 
 saw ranged in them, made one almost envy the 
 
1 6 .A French Eton. 
 
 invalids who were being tended in such a place 
 of repose. 
 
 In the playground the boys — dressed, all of 
 them, in the well-known uniform of the French 
 schoolboy — were running, shouting, and playing, 
 with the animation of their age ; but it is not by 
 its playgrounds and means of recreation that a 
 French lyceum, as compared with the half-dozen 
 great English public schools, shines. The boys 
 are taken out to walk, as the boys at Winchester 
 used to ,be taken out to hills ; but at the end of 
 the French schoolboy s walk there are no hills 
 on which he is turned loose. He learns and 
 practises gymnastics more than our schoolboys 
 do ; and the court in which he takes his recreation 
 is somewhat more spacious and agreeable than 
 we English are apt to imagine a co74rt to be ; but 
 it is a poor place indeed — poor in itself and poor 
 in its resources — compared with \h^ playing-fields 
 of Eton, or the meads of Winchester, or the close 
 of Rugby. 
 
 Of course I was very desirous to see the boys 
 in their schoolrooms, and to hear some of the 
 lessons ; but M. Peyrot and M. Seignette, with 
 all the good-will in the world, were not able to 
 grant to an unofficial visitor permission to do 
 this. It is something to know what the pro- 
 
A French Eton. 17 
 
 gramme of studies in a French lyceum is, though 
 it would be far more interesting to know how 
 that programme is practically carried out. But 
 the programme itself is worth examining : it is 
 the same for every lyceum in France. It is 
 fixed by the Council of Public Instruction in 
 ' Paris, a body in which the State, the Church, 
 the French Academy, and the scholastic pro- 
 fession, are all represented, and of which the 
 Minister of 'Public Instruction is president. The 
 programme thus fixed is promulgated by the 
 Minister's authority, and every lyceum is bound 
 to follow it. I have before me that promulgated 
 by M. Guizot in 1833 ; the variations from it, up 
 to the present day, are but slight. In the sixth, 
 or lowest class, the boys have to learn French, 
 Latin, and Greek Grammar, and their reading is 
 Cornelius Nepos and Phaedrus, and, along with 
 the fables of Phaedrus, those of La Fontaine. 
 For the next, or fifth class, the reading is Ovid 
 in Latin, Lucian's Dialogues and Isocrates in 
 Greek, and Tdlemaque in French. For the 
 fourth, besides the authors read in the classes 
 below, Virgil in Latin and Xenophon in Greek, 
 and, in French, Voltaire's Charles XII . For the 
 third, Sallust and Cicero are added in Latin, 
 ^ Homer and Plutarch's Moralia in Greek ; in 
 
 B 
 
1 8 A French Eton. 
 
 French, Voltaire's Sihle de Louis XIV., Mas- 
 silon's Petit Care7ne, Boileau, and extracts from 
 Buffon. For the second class (our fifth form), 
 Horace, Livy, and Tacitus, in Latin ; in Greek, 
 Sophocles and Euripides, Plato and Demos- 
 thenes ; in French, Bossuet's Histoire Univer- 
 selle, and Montesquieu's Grmideur et Dkadence 
 des Romains. The highest class (our sixth form) 
 is divided into two, a rhetoric and a philosophy 
 class ; this division — which is important, and 
 which is daily becoming, with the authorities of 
 French Public Instruction, an object of greater 
 importance — is meant to correspond to the 
 direction, literary or scientific, which the studies 
 of the now adult scholar are to take. In place 
 oi the Pindar, Thucydides, Lucan, and Moliere, 
 of the rhetoric class, the philosophy class has 
 chemistry, physics, and the higher mathematics. 
 Some instruction in natural science finds a place 
 in the school-course of every class ; in the lower 
 classes, instruction in the elements of human 
 physiology, zoology, botany, and geology ; in 
 the second class (fifth form), instruction in the 
 elements of chemistry. To this instruction in 
 natural science two or three hours a week are 
 allotted. About the same time is allotted to 
 arithmetic, to special instruction in history and 
 
A French Eton. 19 
 
 geography, and to modern languages ; these last, 
 however, are said to be in general as imperfectly 
 learnt in the French public schools as they are 
 in our own. Two hours a week are devoted to 
 the correction of composition. Finally, the New 
 Testament, in Latin or Greek, forms a part of 
 the daily reading of each class. 
 
 On this programme I will make two remarks, 
 suggested by comparing it with that of any of 
 our own public schools. It has the scientific 
 instruction and the study of the mother-tongue 
 which our school-course is without, and is often 
 blamed for being without. I believe that the 
 scientific instruction actually acquired by French 
 schoolboys in the lower classes is very little, but 
 still a boy with a taste for science finds in this 
 instruction an element which keeps his taste 
 alive; in the special class at the head of the 
 school it is more considerable, but not, it is 
 alleged, sufficient for the wants of this special 
 class, and plans for making it more thorough and 
 systematic are being canvassed. In the study 
 of the mother-tongue the French school-boy 
 has a more real advantage over ours ; he does 
 certainly learn something of the French language 
 and literature, and of the English our schoolboy 
 learns nothing. French grammar, however, is a 
 B 2 
 
2b A French Eton, 
 
 better instrument of instruction for boys than 
 English grammar, and the French literature pos- 
 sesses prose works, perhaps even poetical works, 
 more fitted to be used as classics for schoolboys 
 than any which English literature possesses. I 
 need not say that the fitness of works for this 
 purpose depends on other considerations than 
 those of the genius alone, and of the creative 
 force, which they exhibit. 
 
 The regular school-lessons of a lyceum occupy 
 about twenty-two hours in the week, but among 
 these regular school-lessons the lessons in modern 
 languages are not counted. The lessons in modern 
 languages are given out of school-hours ; out of 
 school-hours, too, all the boarders work with the 
 masters at preparing their lessons ; each boarder 
 has thus what we call a private tutor, but the 
 French schoolboy does not, like ours, pay extra 
 for his private tutor : the general charge for 
 board and instruction covers this special tuition. 
 
 Now I come to the important matter of 
 school-fees. These are all regulated by autho- 
 rity ; the scale of charges in every lyceum and 
 communal college must be seen and sanctioned 
 by the academy-inspector in order to have le- 
 gality. A day-scholar in the Toulouse Lyceum 
 pays, in the lowest of the three great divisions of 
 
A French Eton, 2i 
 
 the school, i lof. (4/. %s. 4d.) a year ; in the second 
 division he pays I35f. (5/. 8s. ^d) ; in the third 
 and highest division, i8of. (7/. 4$-. 2d.) If he 
 wishes to share in the special tuition of the 
 boarders, he pays from 2/. to 4/. a year extra. 
 Next, for the boarders. A boarder pays, for his 
 whole board and instruction, in the lowest divi- 
 sion, 8oof. (32/.) a year ; in the second division, 
 85of (34/.) ; in the highest division, goof (36/.) 
 In the scientific class the charge is 2/. extra. 
 The payments are made quarterly, and always 
 in advance. Every boarder brings with him an 
 outfit {trousseau) valued at Soof (20/.) : the sum 
 paid for his board and instruction covers, besides, 
 all expense for keeping good this outfit, and all 
 charges for washing, medical attendance, books, 
 and writing materials. The meals, though plain, 
 are good, and they are set out with a propriety 
 and a regard for appearances which, when I was 
 a boy, graced no school-dinners that I ever saw ; 
 just as, I must say, even in the normal schools 
 for elementary teachers, the dinner-table in 
 France contrasted strongly, by its clean cloth, 
 arranged napkins, glass, and general neatness of 
 service, with the stained cloth, napkinless knives 
 and forks, jacks and mugs, hacked joints of meat, 
 and stumps of loaves, which I have seen on 
 
22 A French Eton. 
 
 the dinner-table of normal schools in England. 
 With us it is always the individual that is filled, 
 and the public that is sent empty away. 
 
 Such may be the cheapness of public school 
 education, when that education is treated as a 
 matter of public economy, to be administered 
 upon a great scale, with rigid system and exact 
 superintendence, in the interest of the pupil and 
 not in the interest of the school-keeper.* But 
 many people, it will be said, have no relish for 
 such cast-iron schooling. Well, then, let us look 
 at a French school not of the State-pattern — a 
 school without the guarantees of State-manage- 
 ment, but, also, without the uniformity and con- 
 straint which this management introduces. 
 
 A day or two after I had seen the Toulouse 
 Lyceum, I started for Soreze. Sor^ze is a village 
 in the department of the Tarn, a department 
 bordering upon that in which Toulouse stands ; 
 it contains one of the most successful private 
 
 * V administration des lycees est completement etrang^re a toute 
 idee de speculation et de profit, says the Toulouse prospectus 
 which lies before me ; ' ' A lyceum is managed not in the least as 
 a matter of speculation or profit ; " and this is not a mere adver- 
 tising puff, for the public is the real proprietor of the lyceums, 
 which it has founded for the education of its youth, and for that 
 object only ; the directors of the lyceum are simple servants of 
 the public, employed by the public at fixed salaries. 
 
A French Eton, 23 
 
 schools in France, and of this school, in 1859, 
 the celebrated Father Lacordaire was director. 
 I left Toulouse by railway in the middle of the 
 day ; in two hours I was at Castelnaudary, an 
 old Visigoth place, on a hill rising out of the 
 great plain of Languedoc, with immense views 
 towards the Pyrenees on one side and the 
 Cevennes on the other. After rambling about 
 the town for an hour, I started for Soreze in a 
 vehicle exactly like an English coach ; I was 
 outside with the driver, and the other places, in- 
 side and outside, were occupied by old pupils of 
 the Soreze school, who were going there for the 
 annual /^/^, the SpeecheSy to take place the next 
 day. They were, most of them, young men 
 from the universities of Toulouse and Mont- 
 pellier ; two or three were settled in Paris, but, 
 happening to be just then at their homes, at 
 B^ziers or Narbonne, they had come over like 
 the rest: they seemed a good set, all of them, 
 and their attachment to their old school and 
 master was more according to one's notions of 
 English school-life than French. We had to 
 cross the Montague Noire^ an outlier of the 
 Cevennes ; the elevation was not great, but the 
 air, even on the i8th of May in Languedoc, was 
 sharp, the vast distance looked grey and chill. 
 
24 A Frenth Eton, 
 
 and the whole landscape was severe, lonely, and 
 desolate. Sor^ze is in the plain on the other 
 side of the Montague Noire^ at the foot of gorges 
 running up into the Cevennes; at the head of these 
 gorges are the basins from which the Canal du 
 Midi — the great canal uniting the Mediterranean 
 with the Atlantic — is fed. It was seven o'clock 
 when we drove up the street, shaded with large 
 trees, of Soreze ; my fellow-travellers showed me 
 the way to the school, as I was obliged to get 
 away early the next morning, and wanted, there- 
 fore, to make my visit that evening. The school 
 occupies the place of an old abbey, founded in 
 757 by Pepin the Little ; for several hundred 
 years the abbey had been in the possession of the 
 Dominicans, when, in Louis the Sixteenth's 
 reign, a school was attached to it. In this 
 school the king took great interest, and himself 
 designed the dress for the scholars. The esta- 
 blishment was saved at the Revolution by the 
 tact of the Dominican who was then at its head ; 
 he resumed the lay dress, and returned, in all 
 outward appearance, to the secular life, and his 
 school was allowed to subsist. Under the Re- 
 storation it was one of the most famous and most 
 aristocratic schools in France, but it had much 
 declined when Lacordaire, in 1854, took charge 
 
A French Eton. 2$ 
 
 of it. I waited in the monastic-looking court 
 (much of the old abbey remains as part of the 
 present building) while my card, with a letter 
 which the Papal Nuncio at Paris, to whom I had 
 been introduced through Sir George Bowyer's 
 kindness, had obtained for me from the Superior 
 of the Dominicans, was taken up to Lacordaire; 
 he sent down word directly that he would see 
 me ; I wa;s shown across the court, up an old 
 stone staircase, into a vast corridor ; a door in 
 this corridor was thrown open, and in a large 
 bare room, with no carpet or furniture of any 
 kind, except a small table, one or two chairs, a 
 small book-case, a crucifix, and some religious 
 pictures on the walls, Lacordaire, in the dress of 
 his order, white-robed, hooded, and sandalled, 
 sat before me. 
 
 The first public appearance of this remarkable 
 man was in the cause of education. CThe Charter 
 of 1830 had promised liberty of instruction ; 
 liberty, that is, for persons outside the official 
 hierarchy of public instruction to open schools, j 
 This promise M. Guizot's celebrated school law 
 of 1833 finally performed ; but, in the meantime, 
 the authorities of public instruction refused to 
 give effect to it. Lacordaire and M. de Monta- 
 lembert opened in Paris, on the 7th of May, 
 
26 A French Eton. 
 
 1 83 1, an independent free school, of which they 
 themselves were the teachers ; it was closed in a 
 day or two by the police, and its youthful con- 
 ductors were tried before the Court of Peers and 
 fined. This was Lacordaire's first public ap- 
 pearance ; twenty-two years later his last sermon 
 in Paris was preached in the same cause ; it was 
 a sermon on behalf of the schools of the Chris- 
 tian Brethren. During that space of twenty-two 
 years he had run a conspicuous career, but on 
 another field than that of education ; he had 
 become the most renowned preacher in Europe, 
 and he had re-established in France, by his 
 energy, conviction, and patience, the religious 
 orders banished thence since the Revolution. 
 Through this career I cannot now attempt to 
 follow him ; with the heart of friendship and the 
 eloquence of genius, M. de Montalembert has 
 recently written its history ; but I must point 
 out two characteristics which distinguished him 
 in it, and which created in him the force by 
 which, as an educator, he worked, the force by 
 which he most impressed and commanded the 
 young. One of these was his passion for firm 
 order, for solid government. He called our age 
 an age " which does not know how to obey — • 
 ^' qui ne sait guhe obHr!' It is easy to see that 
 
A French Eton. 2y 
 
 this is not so absolutely a matter of reproach as 
 Lacordaire made it ; in an epoch of transition 
 society may and must say to its governors, 
 " Govern me according to my spirit, if I am to 
 " obey you." One cannot doubt that Lacordaire 
 erred in making absolute devotion to the Church 
 (malheur a qui trouble FEglise /) the watch-word 
 of a gifted man in our century ; one cannot 
 doubt that he erred in affirming that "the 
 " greatest service to be rendered to Christianity 
 *^ in our day was to do something for the revival 
 ** of the mediaeval religious orders." Still, he 
 seized a great truth when he proclaimed the in- 
 trinsic weakness and danger of a state of anarchy ; 
 above all, when he applied this truth in the 
 moral sphere he was incontrovertible, fruitful for 
 his nation, especially fruitful for the young. He 
 dealt vigorously with himself, and he told others 
 that the first thing for them was to do the same ; 
 he placed character above everything else. '' One 
 " may have spirit, learning, even genius," he said, 
 " and not character; for want of character our 
 " age is the age of miscarriages. Let us form 
 " Christians in our schools, but, first of all, let us 
 " form Christians in our own hearts ; the one 
 " great thing is to have a life of ones own'.' 
 Allied to this characteristic was his other — his 
 
28 A French Eton, 
 
 passion, in an age which seems to think that 
 progress can be achieved only by our herding 
 together and making a noise, for the antique 
 discipline of retirement and silence. His plan of 
 life for himself, when he first took orders, was to 
 go arid be a village cure in a remote province in 
 France. M. de Quelen, the Archbishop of Paris, 
 kept him in the capital as chaplain to the Con^ 
 vent of the Visitation ; he had not then com- 
 menced the co7tferences which made his reputa- 
 tion \^ he lived perfectly isolated and obscure, 
 and he was never so happy. "It is with delight," 
 he wrote at this time, " that I find my solitude 
 ^'deepening round me; 'one can do nothing 
 " without solitude,' is my grand maxim. A 
 " man is formed from within, and not from with- 
 " out. To withdraw and be with oneself and 
 " with God, is the greatest strength there can be 
 " in the world." It is impossible not to feel the 
 serenity and sincerity of these words. Twice 
 he refused to edit the Univers ; he refused a 
 chair in the University of Louvain. In 1836, 
 when his fame filled France, he disappeared for 
 five years, and these years he passed in silence 
 and seclusion at Rome. He came back in 1841 
 a Dominican monk ; again, at Notre Dame, that 
 eloquence, that ineffable accent^ led his country- 
 
'A French Eton. 29 
 
 men and foreigners captive; he achieved his 
 cherished purpose of re-establishing in France 
 the rehgious orders. Then once more he disap- 
 peared, and after a short station at Toulouse 
 consigned himself, for the rest of his life, to the 
 labour and obscurity of Soreze. " One of the 
 " great consolations of my present life,'' he writes 
 from Soreze, " is, that I have now God and the 
 " young for my sole companions." The young, 
 with their fresh spirit, as they instinctively feel 
 the presence of a great character, so, too,^ irre- 
 sistibly receive an influence from souls which 
 live habitually with God. 
 
 Lacordaire received me with great kindness. 
 He was above the middle height, with an ex- 
 cellent countenance; great dignity in his look 
 and bearing, but nothing ascetic; his manners 
 animated, and every gesture and movement 
 showing the orator. He asked me to dine 
 with him the next day, and to see the school 
 festival, the fete des anciens dkves ; but I could 
 not stop. Then he ordered lights, for it was 
 growing dark, and insisted on showing me all 
 over the place that evening. While we were 
 waiting for lights he asked me much about 
 Oxford ; I had already heard from his old 
 pupils that Oxford was a favourite topic with 
 
30 A French Eton. v 
 
 him, and that he held it up to them as a model 
 of everything that was venerable. Lights came, 
 and we went over the establishment ; the school 
 then contained nearly three hundred pupils — a 
 great rise since Lacordaire first came in 1854, 
 but not so many as the school has had in old 
 days. It is said that Lacordaire at one time 
 resorted so frequently to expulsion as rather to 
 alarm people. 
 
 Soreze, under his management, chiefly created 
 interest by the sort of competition which it 
 maintained with the lyceums, or State schools. 
 A private school, in France, cannot be opened 
 without giving notice to the public authorities ; 
 the consent of these authorities is withheld if 
 the premises of the proposed school are im- 
 proper, or if its director fails to produce a 
 certificate of probation and a certificate of 
 competency — that is, if he has not served for 
 five years in a secondary school, and passed 
 the authorised public examination for secon- 
 dary teachers. Finally, the school is always 
 subject to State-inspection, to ascertain that 
 the pupils are properly lodged and fed, and 
 that the teaching contains nothing contrary to 
 public morality and to the laws ; and the school 
 may be closed by the public authorities on an 
 
A French Eton, 3 1 
 
 inspector's report, duly verified. Still, for an 
 establishment like the Soreze school, the actual 
 State - interference comes to very little ; the 
 Minister has the pov/er of dispensing with the 
 certificate of probation, and holy orders are 
 accepted in the place of the certificate of 
 competency (the examination in the seminary 
 being more difficult than the examination for 
 this latter). In France the State (Machiavel 
 as we English think it), in naming certain 
 matters as the objects of its supervision in 
 private schools, means what it says, and does 
 not go beyond these matters ; and, for these 
 matters, the name of a man like Lacordaire 
 serves as a guarantee, and is readily accepted 
 as such. 
 
 All the boys at Soreze are boarders, and a 
 boarder's expenses here exceed by about 8/. or 
 10/. a year his expenses at a lyceum. The pro- 
 gramme of studies differs little from that of the 
 lyceums, but the military system of these State 
 schools Lacordaire repudiated. Instead of the 
 vast common dormitories of the lyceums, every 
 boy had his little cell to himself; that was, after 
 ^ all, as it seemed to me, the great difference. But 
 immense stress was laid, too, upon physical edu- 
 cation, which the lyceums are said too much 
 
32 A French Eton, 
 
 to neglect. Lacordaire showed me with great 
 satisfaction the stable, with more than twenty- 
 horses, and assured me that all the boys were 
 taught to ride. There was the salle d'escrime, 
 where they fenced, the armoury full of guns 
 and swords, the shooting gallery, and so on. 
 All this is in our eyes a little fantastic, and 
 does not replace the want of cricket and foot- 
 ball in a good field, and of freedom to roam 
 over the country out of school-hours ; in France, 
 however, it is a good deal ; and then twice a 
 week all the boys used to turn out with Lacor- 
 daire upon the mountains, to their great enjoy- 
 ment as the Soreze people said, the Father him- 
 self being more vigorous than any of them. And 
 the old abbey school has a small park adjoining 
 'it, with the mountains rising close behind, and 
 it has beautiful trees in its courts, and by no 
 means the dismal barrack-look of a lyceum. 
 Lacordaire had a staff of more than fifty 
 teachers and helpers, about half of these being 
 members of his own religious order — Domini- 
 cans; all co-operated in some way or other in 
 conducting the school. Lacordaire used never 
 to give school-lessons himself, but scarcely a 
 Sunday passed without his preaching in the 
 chapel. The highest and most distinguished 
 
• A French Eton, ' "33 
 
 boys formed a body called the Institictey with 
 no governing powers like those of our sixth 
 form, but with a sort of common-room to 
 themselves, and with the privilege of having 
 their meals with Lacordaire and his staff. I 
 was shown, too, a Salle d'lllustreSy or Hall of 
 Worthies, into which the boys are introduced 
 on high days and- holidays ; we should think 
 this fanciful, but I found it impressive. The 
 hall is decorated with- busts of the chief of 
 the former scholars, some of them very distin- 
 guished. Among these busts was that of Henri 
 de Larochejacquelin (who was brought up here 
 at Soreze), with his noble, speaking countenance, 
 his Vendean hat, and the heart and cross on his 
 breast. There was, besides, a theatre for public . 
 recitations. We ended with the chapel, in which 
 we found all the school assembled ; a Dominican 
 was reading to them from the pulpit an edifying 
 life of a scapegrace converted to seriousness by 
 a bad accident, much better worth listening to 
 than most sermons. When it was over, Lacor- 
 daire whispered to me to ask if I would stay 
 for the prayers or go at once. I stayed ; they 
 were very short and simple ; and I saw the boys 
 disperse afterwards. The gaiety of the little 
 ones and their evident fondness for the Phe 
 C 
 
34 ^ French Eto7t. 
 
 was a pretty sight. As we went out of chapel, 
 one of them, a Httle fellow of ten or eleven, ran 
 from behind us, snatched, with a laughing face, 
 Lacordaire's hand, and kissed it; Lacordaire 
 smiled, and patted his head. When I read the 
 other day in M. de Montalembert's book how 
 Lacordaire had said, shortly before his death, 
 *' I have always tried to serve God, the Church, 
 "and our Lord Jesus Christ; besides these, I 
 " have loved — oh, dearly loved ! — children and 
 /' young people,'* I thought of this incident. 
 
 Lacordaire knew absolutely nothing of our 
 great English schools, their character, or recent 
 history ; but then no Frenchman, except a very 
 few at Paris who know more than anybody in 
 the world, knows anything about anything. How- 
 ever, I have seen few people more impressive ; 
 he was not a great modern thinker, but a great 
 Christian orator of the fourth century, born in 
 the nineteenth ; playing his part in the nine- 
 teenth century not so successfully as he would 
 have played it in the fourth, but still nobly. I 
 would have given much to stay longer with him, 
 as he kindly pressed me; I was tempted, too, 
 by hearing that it was likely he would make a 
 speech the next day. Never did any man so 
 give one the sense of his being a natural orator. 
 
A French Etojt. 35 
 
 perfect in ease and simplicity ; they told me that 
 on Sunday, when he preached, he hardly ever 
 went up into the pulpit, but spoke to them from 
 his place " sans faqon!' But I had an engage- 
 ment to keep at Carcassone at a certain hour, 
 and I was obliged to go. At nine I took leave 
 of Lacordaire and returned to the village inn, 
 clean, because it is frequented by the relations 
 of pupils. There I supped with my fellow-tra- 
 vellers, the old scholars ; charming companions 
 they proved themselves. Late we sat, much 
 vin de Cahors we drank, and great friends we 
 became. Before we parted, one of them, the 
 Beziers youth studying at Paris, with the ami- 
 ability of his race assured me (God forgive 
 him!) that he was well acquainted with my 
 poems. By five the next morning I had started 
 to return to Castelnaudary. Recrossing the 
 Montagne Noire in the early morning was very 
 cold work, but the view was inconceivably grand. 
 I caught the train at Castelnaudary, and was at 
 Carcassone by eleven ; there I saw a school, and 
 I saw the old city of Carcassone. I am not going 
 to describe either the one or the other, but I 
 cannot forbear saying. Let everybody see the 
 cit^ de Carcassone. It is, indeed, as the anti- 
 quarians call it, the Middle Age Herculaneum. 
 C 2 
 
36 A French Eton. 
 
 When you first get sight of the old city, which 
 is behind the modern town — when you have got 
 clear of the modern town, and come out upon 
 the bridge over the Aude, and see the walled 
 cite upon its hill before you — you rub your eyes 
 and think that you are looking at a vignette in 
 Ivankoe, 
 
 Thus I have enabled, as far as I could, the 
 English reader to see what a French lyceum is 
 like, and what a French private school, com- 
 peting with a lyceum, is like. I have given 
 him, as far as I could, the facts; now for the 
 application of these facts. What is the pro- 
 blem respecting secondary instruction which we 
 in this country have to solve } What light do 
 these facts throw upon that problem } 
 
A French Eton. 37 
 
 II. 
 
 For the serious thinker, for the real student 
 of the question of secondary instruction, the 
 problem respecting secondary instruction which 
 we in England have to solve is this : — Why can- 
 not we have throughout England — as the French 
 have throughout France, as the Germans have 
 throughout Germany, as the Swiss have through- 
 out Switzerland, as the Dutch have throughout 
 Holland — schools where the children of our 
 middle and professional classes may obtain, at 
 the rate of from 20/. to 50/. a year, if they are 
 boarders, at the rate of from 5/. to 15/. a year 
 if they are day-scholars, an education of as good 
 quality, with as good guarantees, social cha- 
 racter, and advantages for a future career in the 
 world, as the education which French children 
 of the corresponding class can obtain from in- 
 stitutions like that of Toulouse or Sor^ze ? 
 
 There is the really important question. It is 
 vain to meet it by propositions which may, very 
 likely, be true, but which are quite irrelevant. 
 " Your French Etons," I am told, " are no Etons 
 ** at all; there is nothing like an Eton in France." 
 
38 A French Eton, 
 
 I know that. Very likely France is to be pitied 
 for having no Etons, but I want to call attention 
 to the substitute, to the compensation. The 
 English public school produces the finest boys 
 in the world ; the Toulouse Lyceum boy, the 
 Soreze College boy, is not to be compared with 
 them. Well, let me grant all that too. But 
 then there are only some five or six schools in 
 England to produce this specimen-boy; and 
 they cannot produce him cheap. Rugby and 
 Winchester produce him at about 120/. a year; 
 Eton and Harrow (and the Eton school-boy is 
 perhaps justly taken as the most perfect type of 
 this highly-extolled class) cannot produce him 
 for much less than 200/. a year. Tantce molis 
 erat Ronianam condere gentem — such a business 
 is it to produce an article so superior. But for 
 the common wear and tear of middling life, and 
 at rates tolerable for middling people, what do 
 we produce 1 What do we produce at 30/. a 
 year.? What is the character of the schools 
 which undertake for us this humbler, but far 
 more widely-interesting production t Are they 
 as good as the Toulouse Lyceum and the Soreze 
 College ? That is the question. 
 
 Suppose that the recommendations of the 
 Public School Commissioners bring about in the 
 
A French Eton, 39 
 
 great public schools all the reforms which a 
 judicious reformer could desire ; — suppose that 
 they produce the best possible application of 
 endowments, the best possible mode of election 
 to masterships; that they lead to a wise revision 
 of the books and subjects of study, to a rein- 
 forcing of the mathematics and of the modern 
 languages, where these are found weak ; to a 
 perfecting, finally, of all boarding arrangements 
 and discipline : nothing will yet have been done 
 towards providing for the great want — the want 
 of a secondary instruction at once reasonably 
 cheap and reasonably good. Suppose that the 
 recommendations of the Commissioners accom- 
 plish something even in this direction — suppose 
 that the cost of educating a boy at Rugby is 
 reduced to about 100/. a year, and the cost of 
 educating a boy at Eton to about 150/. a year — 
 no one acquainted with the subject will think it 
 practicable, or even, under present circumstances, 
 desirable, to effect in the cost of education in 
 these two schools a greater reduction than this. 
 And what will this reduction amount to ? A 
 boon — in some cases a very considerable boon — 
 to those who now frequent these schools. But 
 what will it do for the great class now in want 
 of proper secondary instruction } Nothing : for 
 
40 A French Eton, 
 
 in the first place these schools are but two, 
 and are full, or at least sufficiently full, already ; 
 in the second place, if they were able to hold all 
 the boys in England, the class I speak of would 
 still be excluded from them — excluded by a cost 
 of lOo/. or 150/. just as much as by a cost of 
 120/. or 200/. A certain number of the profes- 
 sional class, with incomes quite inadequate to 
 such a charge, will, for the sake of the future 
 establishment of their children, make a brave 
 effort, and send them to Eton or Rugby at a cost 
 of 150/. or 100/. a year. But they send them 
 there already, even at the existing higher rate. 
 The great mass of middling people, with middling 
 incomes, not having for their children's future 
 establishment in life plans which make a public 
 school training indispensable, will not make this 
 effort, will not pay for their children's schooling 
 a price quite disproportionate to their means. 
 They demand a lower school charge — a school- 
 charge like that of Toulouse or Soreze. 
 . And they find it. They have only to open 
 the Times. There they read advertisement upon 
 advertisement, offering them, "conscientiously 
 '^ offering " them, in almost any part of England 
 which suits their convenience, " Education, 20/. 
 " per annum, no extras. Diet unlimited, and 
 
A Frenc/i Eton, 41 
 
 " of the best description. The 'education com- 
 " prises Greek, Latin, and German, French by a 
 *' resident native, mathematics, algebra, mapping, 
 " globes, and all the essentials of a first-rate 
 ** commercial education." Physical, moral, mental, 
 and spiritual — all the wants of their children 
 will be sedulously cared for. They are invited 
 to an " Educational Home," where " discipline is 
 ** based upon moral influence and emulation, and 
 ** every effort is made to combine home-comforts 
 *' with school-training. Terms inclusive and mo- 
 " derate." If they have a child with an awkward 
 temper, and needing special management, even 
 for this particular child the wonderful operation 
 of the laws of supply and demand, in this great 
 commercial country, will be found to have made 
 perfect provision. "Unmanageable boys or youths 
 " (up to twenty years) are made perfectly tract- 
 " able and gentlemanly in one year by a clergy- 
 '* man near town, whose peculiarly persuasive high 
 " moral and religious training at once elevates," 
 &c. And all this, as I have said, is provided 
 by the simple, natural operation of the laws of 
 supply and demand, without, as the Times beau- 
 tifully says, "the fetters of endowment and the 
 " interference of the executive." Happy country ! 
 happy middle classes ! Well may the Times 
 
42 A Fren'ck Eton, 
 
 congratulate them with such fervency ; well may 
 it produce dithyrambs, while the newspapers of 
 less-favoured countries produce only leading 
 articles ; well may it declare that the fabled 
 life of the Happy Islands is already beginning 
 amongst us. 
 
 But I have no heart for satire, though the 
 occasion invites it. No one, who knows any- 
 thing of the subject, will venture to affirm that 
 these " educational homes " give, or can give, 
 that which they *' conscientiously offer." No 
 one, who knows anything of the subject, will 
 seriously affirm that they give, or can give, an 
 education comparable to that given by the 
 Toulouse and Soreze schools. And why } 
 Because they want the securities which, to 
 make them produce even half of what they 
 offer, are indispensable — the securities of super- 
 vision and publicity. By this time we know 
 pretty well that to trust to the principle of 
 supply and demand to do for us all that we 
 want in providing education is to lean upon a 
 broken reed. We trusted to it to give us fit 
 elementary schools till its impotence became 
 conspicuous ; we have thrown it . aside, and 
 called upon State-aid, with the securities ac- 
 companying this, to give us elementary schools 
 
A Freuck Eton, 43 
 
 more like what they should be ; we have thus 
 founded in elementary education a system still, 
 indeed, far from perfect, but living and fruitful 
 — a system which will probably survive the most 
 strenuous efforts for its destruction. In secondary 
 education the impotence of this principle of 
 supply and demand is as signal as in elementary 
 education. The mass of mankind know good 
 butter from bad, and tainted meat from fresh, 
 and the principle of supply and demand may, 
 perhaps, be relied on to give us sound meat and 
 butter. But the mass of mankind do not so 
 well know what distinguishes good teaching and 
 training from bad ; they do not here know what 
 they ought to demand, and, therefore, the demand 
 cannot be relied on to give us the right supply. 
 Even if they knew what they ought to demand, 
 they have no sufficient means of testing whether 
 or no this is really supplied to them. Securities, 
 therefore, are needed. The great public schools 
 of England offer securities by their very publicity ; 
 by their wealth, importance, and connexions, 
 which attract general attention to them; by 
 their old reputation, which they cannot forfeit 
 without disgrace and danger. The appointment 
 of the Public School Commission is a proof, that 
 to these moral securities for the efficiency of the 
 
44 -^ French Eto7i. 
 
 great public schools may be added the material 
 security of occasional competent supervision. I 
 will grant that the great schools of the Continent 
 do not offer the same moral securities to the 
 public as Eton or Harrow. They offer them in 
 a certain measure, but certainly not in so large 
 measure : they have not by any means so much 
 importance, by any means so much reputation. 
 Therefore they offer, in far larger measure, the 
 other security — the security of competent super- 
 vision. With them this supervision is not oc- 
 casional and extraordinary, but periodic and 
 regular ; it is not explorative only ; it is also, to 
 a considerable extent, authoritative. 
 
 It will be said that between the " educational 
 home " and Eton there is a long series of schools, 
 with many gradations ; and that in this series are 
 to be found schools far less expensive than Eton, 
 yet offering moral securities as Eton offers them, 
 and as the " educational home " does not. Chel- 
 tenham, Bradfield, Marlborough, are instances 
 which will occur to every one. It is true that 
 these schools offer securities ; it is true that the 
 mere presence, at the head of a school, of a 
 distinguished master like Mr. Bradley is, perhaps, 
 the best moral security which can be offered. 
 But, in the first place, these schools are thinly 
 
A French Eton, 45 
 
 scattered over the country ; we have no provision 
 for planting such schools where they are most 
 wanted, or for insuring a due supply of them. 
 Cheltenham, Bradfield, and Marlborough are no 
 more a due provision for the Northumberland boy 
 than the Bordeaux Lyceum is a due provision for 
 the little Alsatian. In the second place, Are these 
 schools cheap ? Even if they were cheap once, 
 does not their very excellence, in a country where 
 schools at once good and cheap are rare, tend to 
 deprive them of their cheapness ? Marlborough 
 was, I believe — perhaps it still is — the cheapest 
 of them ; Marlborough is probably just now the 
 best-taught school in England ; and Marlborough, 
 therefore, has raised its school-charge. Marl- 
 borough was quite right in so doing, for Marl- 
 borough is an individual institution, bound to 
 guard its own interests and to profit by its own 
 successes, and not bound to provide for the 
 general educational wants of the country. (But 
 what makes the school-charge of the Toulouse 
 Lyceum remain moderate, however eminent may 
 be the merits of the Toulouse masters, or the 
 successes of the Toulouse pupils } It is that 
 the Toulouse Lyceum is a public institution, 
 administered in view of the general educational 
 wants of France, and not of its own individual 
 
46 A French Eton. 
 
 preponderance. And what makes (or made, 
 alas !) the school-charge of the Soreze College 
 remain moderate, even with a most distinguished 
 and attractive director, like Lacordaire, at its 
 head ? It was the organisation of a complete 
 system of secondary schools throughout France, 
 the abundant supply of institutions, with at once 
 respectable guarantees and reasonable charges, 
 fixing a general mean of school-cost which even 
 the most successful private school cannot venture 
 much to exceed. 
 
 After all, it is the "educational home," and 
 not Bradfield or Marlborough, which supplies us 
 with the nearest approach to that rate of charges 
 which secondary instruction, if it is ever to be 
 organised on a great scale, and to reach those 
 who are in need of it, must inevitably adopt. 
 People talk of the greater cheapness of foreign 
 countries, and of the dearness of this ; every- 
 thing costs more here, they say, than it does 
 abroad ; good education, like everything else. 
 I do not wish to dispute, I am willing to make 
 some allowance for this plea ; one must be 
 careful not to make too much, however, or we 
 shall find ourselves to the end of the chapter 
 with a secondary instruction failing just where 
 our present secondary instruction fails — a secon- 
 
A Fre7ich Eton, 47 
 
 dary instruction which, out of the multitude 
 needing it, a few, and only a few, make sacrifices 
 to get ; the many, who do not like sacrifices, go 
 without it. If we ^^ a school-charge varying 
 from 25/. to 50/. a year, I am sure we have fixed 
 the outside rate which the great body of those 
 needing secondary instruction will ever pay. 
 Sir John Coleridge analyses this body into "the 
 " clergy of moderate or contracted incomes " (and 
 that means the immense majority of the clergy), 
 " officers of the army and navy, medical men, 
 " solicitors, and gentry of large families and small 
 " means." Many more elements might be enu- 
 merated. Why are the manufacturers left out } 
 The very rich, among these, are to be counted 
 by ones, the middling sort by hundreds. And 
 when Sir John Coleridge separates *' tenant- 
 " farmers, small landholders, and retail trades- 
 '^ men," into a class by themselves, and proposes 
 to appropriate a separate class of schools for 
 them, he carries the process of distinction and 
 demarcation further than I can think quite 
 desirable. But taking the constituent parts of 
 the class requiring a liberal education as he 
 assigns them, it seems to me certain that a sum 
 ranging from 25/. to 50/. a year is as much as 
 those whom he enumerates can in general be 
 
48 A French Eton. 
 
 expected to pay for a son's education, and as 
 much as they need be called upon to pay for 
 a sound and valuable education, if secondary 
 instruction were organised as it might be. It 
 must be remembered, however, that a reduced 
 rate of charge for boarders, at a good boarding- 
 school, is not by any means the only benefit 
 to the class of parents in question — perhaps not 
 even the principal benefit — which the organisa- 
 tion of secondary instruction brings with it. It 
 brings with it, also, by establishing its schools in 
 proper numbers, and all over the country, facili- 
 ties for bringing up many boys as day-scholars 
 who are now brought up as boarders. At present 
 many people send their sons to a boarding-school 
 when they would much rather keep them at home, 
 because they have no suitable school within 
 reach. Opinions differ as to whether it is best 
 for a boy to live at home or to go away to 
 school, but there can be no doubt which of the 
 two modes of bringing him up is the cheapest 
 for his parents ; and those (and they are many) 
 who think that the continuation of home-life 
 along with his schooling is far best for the boy 
 himself, would enjoy a double benefit in having 
 suitable schools made accessible to them. 
 
 But I must not forget that an institution, or 
 
A French Eton, 49 
 
 rather a group of institutions, exists, offering to 
 the middle classes, at a charge scarcely higher 
 than that of the 20/. " educational home," an 
 education affording considerable guarantees for 
 its sound character. I mean the College of St. 
 Nicholas, Lancing, and its affiliated schools. This 
 institution certainly demands a word of notice 
 here, and no word of mine, regarding Mr. Woodard 
 and his labours, shall be wanting in unfeigned 
 interest and respect for them. Still, I must 
 confess that, as I read Mr. Woodard's programme, 
 and as I listened to an excellent sermon from 
 the Dean of Chichester in recommendation of it, 
 that programme and that sermon seemed to me 
 irresistibly to lead towards conclusions which 
 they did not reach, and the conclusions which 
 they did reach were far from satisfying. Mr. 
 Woodard says with great truth : " It may be 
 " asked. Why cannot the shopkeeper-class 
 " educate their own children without charity I 
 " It may be answered. Scarcely any class in the 
 " country does educate its own children without 
 " some aid. Witness the enormous endowments 
 " of our Universities and public schools, where 
 ** the sons of our well-to-do people resort. Witness 
 ** our national schools supported by State grants, 
 '* and by parochial and national subscriptions, 
 D 
 
so A French Eton, 
 
 " On the other hand, the lower middle class " 
 (Mr, Woodard might quite properly have said 
 the middle class in general), '^ politically a very 
 *' important one, is dependent to a great extent 
 " for its education on private desultory enterprise.. 
 ** This class, in this land of education, gets nothing 
 "out of the millions given annually for this 
 *' purpose to every class except themselves.'* In 
 his sermon Dr. Hook spoke, in his cordial, manly 
 way, much to the same effect. 
 
 This was the grievance ; what was the remedy ? 
 That this great class should be rescued from the 
 tender mercies of private desultory enterprise ? 
 That, in this land of (education, it should hence- 
 forth get something out of the millions given 
 annually for this purpose to every class except 
 itself ? That in an age when " enormous endow- 
 "ments," — the form which public aid took in 
 eariier ages, and taking which form public aid 
 founded in those ages the Universities and the 
 public schools for the benefit, along with the 
 upper class, of this very middle class which is 
 now, by the irresistible course of events, m great 
 measure excluded from them—that in an age, I 
 say, when these great endowments, this mediaeval 
 form of public aid, have ceased, public aid should 
 be brought to these classes in that simpler and 
 
A French Eton, 5 1 
 
 more manageable form which in modern societies 
 it assumes— the form of public grants, with the 
 guarantees of supervision and responsibility ? 
 The Universities receive public grants ; for — not 
 to speak of the payment of certain professors* 
 by the State — that the State regards the endow- 
 ments of the Universities as in reality public 
 grants, it proves by assuming to itself the right 
 of interfering in the disposal of them ; the ele- 
 mentary schools receive public grants. Why, 
 then, should not our secondary schools receive 
 public grants ? But this question Mr. Woodard 
 {I do not blame him for it, he had a special 
 function to perform) never touches. He falls 
 back on an Englishman's favourite panacea — a 
 subscription. He has built a school at Lancing, 
 and a school at Shoreham, and he proposes to 
 biiild a bigger school than either at Balcombe. 
 He asks for a certain number of subscribers to 
 give him contributions for a certain number of 
 years, at certain rates, which he has calculated. 
 I cannot see how, in this way, he will be deliver- 
 ing English secondary instruction from the hands 
 
 * These professors are now nominally paid by the University ; 
 but the University pays them in consideration of the remission to 
 her, by the State, of certain duties of greater amount than the 
 salaries M^hich the State used to pay to these professors. They 
 are still, therefore, in fact, paid by the State. 
 
 D 2 
 
5^2 A French Eton. 
 
 of " private desultory enterprise." What English 
 secondary instruction wants is these two things ; 
 sufficiency of provision of fit schools, sufficiency 
 of securities for their fitness. Mr. Woodard pro- 
 poses to establish one great school in Sussex, 
 where he has got two already. What sort of a 
 provision is this for that need which is, on his 
 own showing, so urgent.'^ He hopes, indeed, 
 that ** if the public will assist in raising this one 
 "school, it will lead to a general extension of 
 " middle class education all over England." But 
 in what number of years } How long are we to 
 wait first } And then we have to consider the 
 second great point — that of securities. Suppose 
 Mr. Woodard's hopes to be fulfilled — suppose 
 the establishment of the Balcombe school to 
 have led to the establishment of like schools 
 all over England — what securities shall we have 
 for the fitness of these schools t Sussex is not a 
 very large and populous county, but, even if we 
 limit ourselves to the ratio adopted for Sussex, 
 of three of these schools to a county, that gives 
 us 1 20 of them for England proper only, without 
 taking in Wales. I have said that the eminence 
 of the master may be in itself a sound security 
 for the worth of a school ; but, when I look at 
 the number of these schools wanted, when I look 
 
A French Eton. 5 5 
 
 at the probable position and emoluments of their 
 teachers, I cannot think it reasonable to expect 
 that all of them, or anything like all, will be 
 provided with masters of an eminence to make 
 all further guarantees unnecessary. But, perhaps, 
 they will all be affiliated to the present institution 
 at Lancing, and, in some degree, under its super- 
 vision ? Well, then, that gives us, as the main 
 regulative power of English secondary instruc- 
 tion, as our principal security for it, the Provost 
 and Fellows of St. Nicholas College, Lancing. 
 I have the greatest, the most sincere respect for 
 Mr. Woodard and his coadjutors' — I should be 
 quite ready to accept Mr. Woodard's name as 
 sufficient security for any school which he himself 
 conducts — but I should hesitate, I confess, before 
 accepting Mr. Woodard and his colleagues, or 
 any similar body of private persons, as my final 
 security for the right management of a great 
 national concern, as the last court of appeal to 
 which the interests of English secondary instruc- 
 tion were to be carried. Their constitution is 
 too close, their composition too little national. 
 Even if this or that individual were content to 
 take them as his security, the bulk of the public 
 would not. We saw this the other day, when 
 imputations were thrown out against Lancingj 
 
54 ^ French Eton, 
 
 and our proposed security had to find security 
 for itself. It had no difficulty in so doing ; Mr. 
 Woodard has, it cannot be repeated too often, 
 governed Lancing admirably ; all I mean is — 
 and Mr. Woodard himself would probably be the 
 first to agree with me — that, to command public 
 confidence for a great national system of schools, 
 one needs a security larger, ampler, more na- 
 tional, than any which, by the very nature of 
 things, Mr. Woodard and his friends can quite 
 supply. 
 
 But another and a vtty plausible security has 
 been provided for secondary instruction by the 
 zeal and energy of Mr. Acland and Dr. Temple ; 
 I mean, the Oxford and Cambridge Middle Class 
 Examinations. The good intentions and the 
 activity of the promoters of these examinations 
 cannot be acknowledged too gratefully ; good 
 has certainly been accomplished by them : yet 
 it is undeniable that this security also is, in its 
 present condition, quite insufficient. I write, not 
 for the professed and practised educationist, but 
 for the general reader ; above all, for the reader 
 of that class which is most concerned in the 
 question which I am raising, and which I am 
 most solicitous to carry with me — the middle 
 class. Therefore, I shall use the plainest and 
 
A French Eton. 55 
 
 most unprofessional language I can, in attempting 
 to show what the promoters of these University 
 examinations try to do, what they have accom- 
 plished, wherein they have failed. /They try to 
 make security do for us all that we want in the 
 improvement of our secondary education. They 
 accept the " educational homes *' at present 
 scattered all over the country ; they do not aim 
 at replacing them by other and better institu- 
 tions ; they do not visit or criticise them ; but 
 they invite them to send select pupils to certain 
 local centres, and when the pupils are there, they 
 examine them, class them, and give prizes to the 
 best of them. Undoubtedly this action of the 
 Universities has g\v^x\ a certain amount of 
 stimulus to these schools, and has done them 
 a certain amount of good. But any one can 
 see how far this action falls, and must fall, short 
 of what is required. Any one can see that the 
 examination of a few select scholars from a 
 school, not at the school itself, not preceded Of 
 followed by an inspection of the school itself, 
 affords no solid security for the good condition 
 of their school. Any one can see that it is for 
 the interest of an unscrupulous master to give 
 all his care to his few cleverest pupils, who will 
 serve him as an advertisement, while he neglects 
 
56 A French Eton, 
 
 the common bulk of his pupils, whose backward- 
 ness there will be nobody to expose. I will not, 
 however, insist too strongly on this last mischief, 
 because I really believe that, serious as is its 
 danger, it has not so much prevailed as to coun- 
 terbalance the benefit which the mere stimulus 
 of these examinations has given. All I say 
 is, that this stimulus is an insufficient security. 
 Plans are now broached for reinforcing University 
 examination by University inspection. There 
 we get a far more solid security. And I agree 
 with Sir John Coleridge, that a body fitter than 
 the Universities to exercise this inspection could 
 not be found. It is indispensable that it should 
 be exercised in the name, and on the responsi- 
 bility, of a great public body; therefore the 
 Society of Arts, which deserves thanks for its 
 readiness to help in improving secondary in- 
 struction, is hardly, perhaps, from its want of 
 weight, authority, and importance, qualified to 
 exercise it : but whether it is exercised by the 
 State, or by great and august corporations like 
 Oxford and Cambridge, the value of the security 
 is equally good ; and learned corporations, like 
 the Universities, have a certain natural fitness 
 for discharging what is, in many respects, a 
 learned function. It is only as to the power 
 
A French Eton, 57 
 
 of the Universities to organise, equip, and keep 
 working an efficient system of inspection for 
 secondary schools that I am in doubt ; organisa- 
 tion and regularity are as indispensable to this 
 guarantee as weight and authority. Can the 
 Universities organise and pay a body of inspec- 
 tors to travel all over England, to visit, at least 
 once in every year, the four or five hundred 
 endowed schools of this country, and its un- 
 numbered "educational homes; "can they sup- 
 ply a machinery for regulating the action of 
 these gentlemen, giving effect to the information 
 received from them, printing their reports, cir- 
 culating them through the country ? The French 
 University could ; but the French University was 
 a department of State. If the English Univer- 
 sities cannot, the security of their inspection will 
 be precarious ; if they can, there can be no 
 better. 
 
 No better security. But English secondary 
 jnstructjon wants, I said, two things : sufficient 
 groyision of good schools, sufficient security for 
 the^e-SGhoois contmuTng good. Granting that 
 the Universities may give us the second, I do 
 not see how they are to give us the first. It is 
 not enough merely to provide a staff of inspectors 
 and examiners, and still to leave the children of 
 
58 A French Eton. 
 
 our middle class scattered about through the 
 numberless obscure endowed schools and " edu- 
 " cational homes " of this country, some of them 
 good,* many of them middling, most of them 
 bad ; but none of them great institutions, none 
 of them invested with much consideration or 
 dignity. What is wanted for th^^^^ 
 class is respected schools, as well as inspected 
 ones. I will explain what I mean. 
 
 The education of each class in society has, 
 or ought to have, its ideal, determined by the 
 wants of that class, and by its destination. So- 
 ciety may be imagined so uniform that one 
 education shall be suitable for all its members ; 
 we have not a society of that kind, nor has any 
 European country. We have to regard the 
 condition of classes, in. dealing with education ; 
 
 * A friendly critic, in the Museum, complains that my Censure 
 of private schools is too sweeping, that I set them all down, all 
 v/ithout exception, as utterly bad ; — he will allow me to point to 
 these words as my answer. No doubt there are some masters ox 
 cheap private schools who are doing honest and excellent work j 
 but no one suffers more than such men themselves do from a 
 state of things in which, from the badness of the majority of these 
 schools, a discredit is cast over them all, bad and good alike; ftO 
 one would gain more by obtaining a public, trustworthy discri- 
 mination of bad from good, an authentic recognition of merit. 
 The teachers of these schools would then have, in their profes- 
 sion, a career ; at present they have none. 
 
A Frenc/t Eton, 59 
 
 but it is right to take into account not their 
 immediate condition only, but their wants, their 
 ^destination — above all, their evident pressing 
 wants, their evident proximate destination. 
 Looking at English society at this moment, 
 one may say that the ideal for the education 
 of each of its classes to follow, the aim which 
 the education of each should particularly en- 
 deavour to reach, is different. Mr. Hawtrey, 
 whose admirable and fruitful labours at St. 
 Mark's School entitle him to be heard with 
 great respect, lays it down as an absolute pro- 
 position that the family is the type of the schooL 
 I do not think that is true for the schools of 
 all classes alike. I feel sure my father, whose 
 authority Mr. Hawtrey claims for this maxim, 
 would not have laid it down in this absolute 
 way. For the wants of the highest class — of the 
 class which frequents Eton, for instance-— not 
 scJiool a family y but rather school a little world, is 
 the right ideal. I cannot concede to Mr. Hawtrey 
 that, for the young gentlemen who go to Eton, 
 our grand aim and aspiration should be, in hi& 
 own words, '*to make their boyhood a joyous 
 " one, by gentle usage and friendly confidence 
 " on the part of the master." Let him believe 
 me, the great want for the childr^ of luxury 
 
66 A French Eton, 
 
 is not this sedulous tenderness, this smoothing 
 of the rose-leaf for them ; I am sure that, in 
 fact, it is not by the predominance of the family 
 and parental relation in its school-life that Eton 
 is strongest : and it is well that this is so. It 
 seems to me that, for the class frequenting Eton, 
 the grand aim of education should be to.,^ive 
 them those good things which their birth and 
 rearing are least likely to give them : to give 
 them (besides mere book-learning) the notion of 
 a sort of republican fellowship, the practice of 
 a plain life in common, the habit of self-help. 
 To the middle class, the grand aim of education 
 should be to give largeness of soul and personal 
 dignity ; to the lower class, feeling, gentleness, 
 humanity. Here, at last, Mr. Hawtrey's ideal 
 of the fa7nily as the type for the school, comes 
 in its due place ; for the children of poverty it 
 is right, it is needful to set oneself first to 
 " make their boyhood a joyous one, by gentle 
 " usage and friendly confidence on the part of 
 " the master ; " for them the great danger is not 
 insolence from over-cherishing, but insensibility 
 '• from over-neglect. Mr. Hawtrey's labours at 
 St. Mark's have been excellent and fruitful, just 
 because he has here applied his maxim where 
 it was the right maxim to apply. Yet even in 
 
A French Eton, 6 1 
 
 this sphere Mr. Hawtrey's maxim must not be 
 used too absolutely or too long. Human dignity 
 needs almost as much care as human sensibility. 
 First, undoubtedly, you must make men feeling ; 
 but the moment you have done that, you must 
 lose no time in making them magnanimous. 
 Mr. Hawtrey will forgive me for saying that 
 perhaps his danger lies in pressing the spring of 
 gentleness, of confidence, of child-like docility, 
 of " kindly feeling of the dependent towards the 
 " patron who is furthering his well-being " a little 
 too hard. The energy and manliness, which he 
 values as much as any one, run perhaps some 
 little risk of etiolating. At least, I think I can 
 see some indications of this danger in the reports 
 — pleasing as in most respects they are — of his 
 boys' career in the world after they have left 
 school. He does so much for them at St. 
 Mark's, that he brings them to the point at 
 which the ideal of education changes, and the 
 prime want for their culture becomes identical 
 with the prime want for the culture of the 
 middle classes. Their fibre has been suppled 
 long enough ; now it wants fortifying. 
 
 To do Eton justice, she does not follow Mr. 
 Hawtrey's ideal; she does not supple the fibre 
 of her pupils too much ; and, to do the parents 
 
62 A French Eton, 
 
 of these pupils justice, they have in general a 
 wholesome sense of what their sons do really 
 most want, and are not by any means anxious 
 that school should over-foster them. But I am 
 afraid our middle classes have not quite to 
 the same degree this just perception of the true 
 wants of their offspring. They wish them to 
 be comfortable at school, to be sufficiently in- 
 structed there, and not to cost much. Hence 
 the eager promise of " home comforts " with 
 school teaching, all on "terms inclusive and 
 " moderate," from the conscientious proprietor of 
 the educational home. To be sure, they do not 
 get what they wish. So long as human nature 
 remains what it is, they never will get it, until 
 they take some better security for it than a pro- 
 spectus. But suppose they get the security of 
 inspection exercised by the Universities, or by 
 any other trustworthy authority. Some good 
 such an inspection would undoubtedly accom- 
 plish ; certain glaring specimens of charlatanism 
 it might probably expose, certain gross cases of 
 mishandling and neglect it might put a stop to. 
 It might do a good deal for the school teaching, 
 and something for the home comforts. It can 
 never make these last what the prospectuses 
 promise, what the parents who believe the pro- 
 
A French Eton, 63 
 
 spectuses hope for, what they might even really 
 have for their money ; for only secondary in- 
 struction organised on a great and regular scale 
 can give this at such cheap cost, and so to 
 organise secondary instruction the inspection we 
 are supposing has no power. But even if it had 
 the power, if secondary instruction were organised 
 on a great and regular scale, if it were a national 
 concern, it would not be by ensuring to the off- 
 spring of the middle classes a more solid teach^- 
 ing at school, and a larger share of home com- 
 forts than they at present enjoy there (though 
 certainly it would do this), that such a secondary 
 instruction would confer upon them the greatest 
 boon. Its greatest boon to the offspring of these 
 classes would be its giving them great, honour- 
 able, public institutions for their nurture— insti- 
 -tuttons conveying to the spirit, at the tim€ of 
 life when the spirit is most penetrable, the salu- 
 tary influences of greatness, honour, and nation- 
 alityr:-jnfluences which expand the soul, liberalise 
 the mind, dignify the character, 
 "^lich institutions are the great public schools 
 of England and the great Universities; with 
 these influences, and some others to which I 
 just now pointed, they have formed the upper 
 class of this country — z. class with many faults. 
 
64 ^ French Eton. 
 
 with many shortcomings, but imbued, on the 
 whole, and mainly through these influences, with 
 a high, magnanimous, goyerningjpirit, which 
 iia^ tong enabled them to rule, not ignobly, this 
 great country, and which will still enable them 
 to rule it until they are equalled or surpassed. 
 These institutions had their origin in endow- 
 ments ; and the age of endowments is gone. Beau- 
 tiful and venerable as are many of the aspects 
 under which it presents itself, this form of public 
 establishment of education, with its limitations, 
 its preferences, its ecclesiastical character, its in- 
 flexibility, its inevitable want of foresight, proved, 
 as time rolled on, to be subject to many incon- 
 veniences, to many abuses. On the Continent 
 of Europe a clean sweep has in general been 
 made of this old form of establishment, and new 
 institutions have arisen upon its ruins. In Eng- 
 land we have kept our great school and college 
 foundations, introducing into their system what 
 correctives and palliatives were absolutely neces- 
 sary. Long may we so keep them ! but no such 
 palliatives or correctives will ever make the 
 public establishment of education which sufficed 
 for earlier ages suffice for this, nor persuade the 
 stream of endowment, long since failing and 
 scanty, to flow again for our present needs as it 
 
A French Eton, 65 
 
 flowed in the middle ages. For public establish- 
 ments modern societies have to betake them- 
 selves to t he State ; that is, to themselves in \ 
 their collective and corporate character. On the 
 Continent, society has thus betaken itself to the 
 State for the establishment of education. The 
 result has been the formation of institutions like 
 the Lyceum of Toulouse ; institutions capable of 
 great improvement, by no means to be extolled 
 absolutely, by no means to be imitated just as 
 they are ; but institutions formed by modern 
 society, with modern modes of operation, to 
 meet modern wants ; and in some important 
 respects, at any rate, meeting those wants. 
 These institutions give to a whole new class — 
 to the middle class taken at its very widest — 
 not merely an education for whose teaching and 
 boarding there is valid security, but something — 
 not so much I admit, but something — of the 
 same enlarging, liberalising sense, the sense of 
 belonging to a great and honourable public in- 
 stitution, which Eton and our three or four great 
 public schools give to our upper class only, and 
 to a small fragment broken off from the top of 
 our middle class. That is where England is 
 weak, and France, Holland, and Germany are 
 strong. Education is and must be a matter of 
 E 
 
66 A French Eton. 
 
 public establishment. Other countries have re- 
 placed the defective public establishment made 
 by the middle ages for their education with a 
 new one, which provides for the actual condition 
 of things. We in England keep our old public 
 establishment for education. That is very well ; 
 but then we must not forget to supplement it 
 where it falls short. We must not neglect to 
 provide for the actual condition of things. 
 
 I have no pet scheme to press, no crotchet to 
 gratify, no fanatical zeal for giving this or that 
 particular shape to the public establishment of 
 our secondary instruction. All I say is, that it 
 is most urgent to give to the establishment of it 
 a wider, a truly public character, and that only 
 the State can give this. If the matter is but 
 once fairly taken in hand, and by competent 
 \ agency, I am satisfied. In this country we do 
 not move fast ; we do not organise great wholes 
 all in a day. But if the State only granted for 
 secondary instruction the sum which it originally 
 granted for primary — 20,000/. a year — and em- 
 ployed this sum in founding scholarships for 
 secondary schools, with the stipulation that all 
 the schools which sent pupils to compete for 
 these scholarships should admit inspection, a 
 beginning would have been made ; a beginning 
 
A French Eton, 67 
 
 which I truly believe would, at the end of ten 
 years' time, be found to have raised the cha- 
 racter of secondary instruction all through 
 England. If more than this can be attempted 
 at first. Sir John Coleridge, in his two excellent 
 letters on this subject to the Guardian, perfectly 
 indicates the right course to take : indeed, one 
 could wish nothing better than to commit the 
 settlement of this matter to men of such pru- 
 dence, moderation, intelligence, and public cha- 
 racter as Sir John Coleridge. The four or ^yq. 
 hundred endowed schook, whose collective opera- 
 tions now give so little result, should be turned 
 to better account ; amalgamation should be used, 
 the most useful of these institutions strengthened, 
 the most useless suppressed, the whole body of 
 them be treated as one whole, destined harmo- 
 niously to co-operate towards one end. What 
 should be had in view is to constitute, in every 
 county, at least one great centre of secondary 
 instruction, with low charges, with the security of 
 inspection, and with a public character. These 
 institutions should bear some such title as that 
 of Royal Schools, and should derive their sup- 
 port, mainly, of course, from school-fees, but 
 partly, also, from endowments — their own, or 
 those appropriated to them — and partly from 
 E 2 
 
6S A French Eton, 
 
 scholarships supplied by public grants. Wher- 
 ever it is possible, wherever, that is, their scale 
 of charges is not too high, or their situation not 
 too unsuitable, existing schools of good repute 
 should be adopted as the Royal Schools. Schools 
 such as Mr. Woodard's, such as King Edward's 
 School at Birmingham, such as the Collegiate 
 School at Liverpool, at once occur to one as 
 suitable for this adoption ; it would confer upon 
 them, besides its other advantages, a public 
 character which they are now without. Pro- 
 bably the very best medicine which could be 
 devised for the defects of Eton, Harrow, and 
 the other schools which the Royal Commis- 
 sioners have been scrutinising, would be the 
 juxtaposition, and, to a certain extent, the com- 
 petition, of establishments of this kind. No wise 
 man will desire to see root-and-branch work 
 made with schools like Eton or Harrow, or to 
 see them diverted from the function which they 
 at present discharge, and, on the whole, usefully. 
 Great subversive changes would here be out of 
 place ; it is an addition of new that our secon- 
 dary instruction wants, not a demolition of old, 
 or, at least, not of this old. But to this old I 
 cannot doubt that the apparition and operation 
 of this desirable new would give a very fruitful 
 
A French Eton. 69 
 
 stimulus ; as this new, on its part, would cer- 
 tainly be very much influenced and benefited 
 by the old. 
 
 The repartition of the charge of this new 
 secondary instruction, the mode of its assess- 
 ment, the constitution of the bodies for regu- 
 lating the new system, the proportion and cha- 
 racter of functions to be assigned to local and to 
 central authority respectively, these are matters 
 of detail and arrangement which it is foreign to 
 my business here to discuss, and, I hope, quite 
 foreign to my disposition to haggle and wrangle 
 about. They are to be settled upon a due con- 
 sideration of circumstances, after an attentive 
 scrutiny of our existing means of operation, and 
 a discriminating review of the practice of other 
 countries. In general, if it is agreed to give a 
 public and coherent organisation to secondary 
 instruction, few will dispute that its particular 
 direction, in different localities, is best committed 
 to local bodies, properly constituted, with a 
 power of supervision by an impartial central 
 authority, and of resort to this authority in the 
 last instance. Of local bodies, bad or good, 
 administering education, we have already plenty 
 of specimens in this country ; it would be diffi- 
 cult for the wit of man to devise a better 
 
70 A Frmch Eton. 
 
 governing body for its purpose than the trustees 
 of Rugby School, or a worse governing body 
 than the trustees of Bedford School. To reject 
 the bad in the examples offering themselves, 
 to use the good, and to use it with just regard 
 to the present purpose, is the thing needful. 
 Undoubtedly these are important matters ; but 
 undoubtedly, also, it is not difficult to settle 
 them properly; not difficult, I mean, for ordinary 
 good sense, and ordinary good temper. The 
 intelligence, fairness, and moderation which, in 
 practical matters, our countrymen know so well 
 how to exercise, make one feel quite easy in 
 leaving these common-sense arrangements to 
 them. 
 \ I am more anxious about the danger of having 
 f the whole question misconceived, of having false 
 \ issues raised upon it. One of these false issues 
 I ^ have already noticed. People say : " After 
 "all, your Toulouse Lyceum is not so good as 
 " Eton.'* (But the Toulouse Lyceum is f9r the 
 middle class, Eton for the upper class.' ^ will 
 allow that the upper class, amongst us, is very 
 well taken care of, in the way of schools, already. 
 But is the middle class ? / The Lyceum loses, 
 perhaps, if compared with Eton ; but does it not 
 gain if compared with the ** Classical and Com- 
 
A French Eton. 71 
 
 '* mercial Academy ? " And it is with this that 
 the comparison is instituted. Again, the French 
 Lyceum is reproached with its barrack hfe, its 
 want of country air and exercise, its dismalness, 
 its rigidity, its excessive supervision. But these 
 defects do not come to secondary instruction 
 from its connexion with the State ; they are not 
 necessary results of that connexion ; they come 
 to French secondary instruction from the com- 
 mon French and continental habitudes in the. 
 training of children and school-boys— habitudes 
 that do not enough regard physical well-being 
 and play. They may be remedied in France, 
 and men's attention is now strongly drawn to 
 them there ; there has even been a talk of 
 moving the Lyceums into the country, though 
 this would have its inconveniences. But, at any 
 rate, these defects need not attend the public 
 establishment of secondary instruction in Eng- , 
 land, and assuredly, with our notions of training-, 
 they would not attend them. Again, it is said ] 
 that France is a despotically-governed country, \ 
 and that its Lyceums are a part of its despotism. > 
 But Switzerland is not a despotically-governed 
 country, and it has its Lyceums just as much as 
 France. Again, it is said that in France the 
 Lyceums are the only schools allowed to exist. 
 
72 A French Eton, 
 
 that this is monopoly and tyranny, and that the 
 Lyceums themselves suffer by the want of com- 
 petition. There ••is some exaggeration in this 
 complaint, as thft existence of Soreze, and other 
 places like Sorefee, testifies ; still the restraints 
 put upon private'' enterprise in founding schools 
 in France, are, no doubt, mischievously strict ; 
 the refusal of :j:he requisite authorisation for 
 opening a private school is often vexatious ; the 
 Lyceums would really be benefited by the prox- 
 imity of other, and sometimes rival, schools. But 
 who supposes that any check would ever be put, 
 in England, upon private enterprise in founding 
 schools ? Who supposes that the authorisation 
 demanded in France for opening a private school 
 would ever be demanded in England, that it 
 would ever be possible to demand it, that it 
 would ever be desirable ? Who supposes that 
 all the benefits of a public establishment of in- 
 struction are not to be obtained without it ? It 
 is for what it does itself that this establishment 
 is so desirable, not for what it prevents others 
 from doing. Its letting others alone does not 
 prevent it from itself having a most useful work 
 to do, and a work which can be done by no one 
 else. The most zealous friends of free instruction 
 upon the Continent feel this. One of the ablest 
 
A French Eton. j^ 
 
 of them, M. Dollfus, lately published in the 
 Revue Germanique some most interesting remarks 
 on the defects of the French school system, as 
 at present regulated. He demands freedom for 
 private persons to open schools without any 
 authorisation at all. But does he contest the 
 right of the State to have its own schools, to 
 make a public establishment of instruction } So 
 far from it, he treats this as a right beyond all 
 contestation, as a clear duty. He treats as cer- 
 tain, too, the right of the State to inspect all 
 private schools once opened, though he denies 
 the right, and the good policy, of its putting the 
 present obstacles in the way of opening them. 
 
 But there is a catchword which, I know, will 
 be used against me. England is the country of 
 cries and catchwords ; a country where public 
 life is so much carried on by means of parties 
 must be. That English public life should be 
 carried on as it is, I believe to be an excellent 
 thing , but it is certain that all modes of life 
 have their special inconveniences, and every 
 sensible man, however much he may hold a 
 particular way of life to be the best, and may be 
 bent on adhering to it, will yet always be sedu- 
 lous to guard himself against its inconveniences. 
 One of these is, certainly, in English public life, 
 
74 ^ French Eton. 
 
 the prevalence of cries and catchwords, which 
 are very apt to receive an application, or to be 
 used with an absoluteness, which do not belong 
 to them ; and then they tend to narrow our 
 spirit and to hurt our practice. It is good to 
 make a catchword of this sort come down from 
 its stronghold of commonplace, to force it to 
 move about before us in the open country, and 
 to show us its real strength. Such a catchword 
 as this : Tlie State had better leave things alone. 
 One constantly hears that as an absolute maxim ; 
 now, as an absolute maxim, it has really no force 
 at all. The absolute maxims are those which 
 carry to man's spirit their own demonstration 
 with them ; such propositions as. Duty is the law 
 of human lifey Man is morally free^ and so on. 
 The proposition. The State had better leave things 
 aloney carries no such demonstration with it ; it 
 has, therefore, no absolute force ; it merely con- 
 veys a notion which certain people have gene- 
 ralised from certain facts which have come under 
 their observation, and which, by a natural vice 
 of the human mind, they are then prone to 
 apply absolutely. Some things the State had 
 better leave alone, others it had better not. Is 
 this particular thing one of these, or one of 
 those } — that, as to any particular thing, is the 
 
A French Eton. 75 
 
 right question. Now, I say, that education is 
 one of those things which the State ought not 
 to leave alone, which it ought to establish. It is 
 said that in education given, wholly or in part, 
 by the State, there is something eleemosynary, 
 pauperising, degrading ; that the self-respect and 
 manly energy of those receiving it are likely to 
 become impaired, as I have said that the manly 
 energy of those who are too much made to feel 
 their dependence upon a parental benefactor, is 
 apt to become impaired. Well, now, is this so t 
 Is a citizen's relation to the State that of a depen- 
 dent to a parental benefactor } By no means ; 
 it is that of a member in a partnership to the 
 whole firm. The citizens of a State, the mem- 
 bers of a society, are really a partnership ; " a 
 " partnership," as Burke nobly says, " in all 
 *' science, in all art, in every virtue, in all perfec- 
 " tion." Towards this great final design of their 
 connexion, they apply the aids which co-opera- 
 tive association can give them. This applied to 
 education will, undoubtedly, give the middling 
 person a better schooling than his own individual 
 unaided resources could give him ; but he is not 
 thereby humiliated, he is not degraded ; he is 
 wisely and usefully turning his associated condi- 
 tion to the best account. Considering his end 
 
^6 A French' Eton, 
 
 and destination, he is bound so to turn it ; cer- 
 tainly he has a right so to turn it. Certainly he 
 has a right — to quote Burke again — ''to a fair 
 " portion of all which society, with all its combi- 
 " nations of skill andforcey can do in his favour." 
 Men in civil society have the right — to quote 
 Burke yet once more (one cannot quote him too 
 often) — as ^' to the acquisitions of their parents 
 *^ and to the fruits of their own industry," so also 
 " to the improvement of their offsprings to instruc- 
 ** tion in life, and to consolation in death." 
 
 How vain, then, and how meaningless, to tell 
 a man who, for the instruction of his offspring, 
 receives aid from the State, that he is humiliated ! 
 Humiliated by receiving help for himself as an 
 individual from himself in his corporate and 
 associated capacity ! help to which his own 
 money, as a tax-payer, contributes, and for 
 which, as a result of the joint energy and intel- 
 ligence of the whole community in employing 
 its powers, he himself deserves some of the 
 praise ! He is no more humiliated than one is 
 humiliated by being on the foundation of the 
 Charterhouse or of Winchester, or by holding a 
 scholarship or fellowship at Oxford or Cambridge. 
 Nay (if there be any humiliation here), not so 
 much. For the amount of benefaction, the 
 
A French Eton. yy 
 
 amount of obligation, the amount, therefore, I 
 suppose, of humihation, diminishes as the pubHc 
 character of the aid becomes more undeniable. 
 He is no more humiliated than when he crosses 
 London Bridge, or walks down the King's Road, 
 or visits the British Museum. But it is one of • 
 the extraordinary inconsistencies of some Eng- 
 lish people in this matter, that they keep all 
 their cry of humihation and degradation for help 
 which the State offers, (k. man is not pauperised, 
 is not degraded, is not oppressively obliged, Jpy 
 taking aid for his son's schooling from Mr. 
 Woodard's subscribers, or from the next squire, 
 or from the next rector, or from the next iron-y^^, 
 monger, or from the next druggist; he is only* 
 pauperised when he takes it from the State, 
 ^when he helps to give it himself !y 
 
 This matter of State-intervention in the 
 establishment of public instruction is so beset 
 with misrepresentation and misconception, that 
 I must, before concluding, go into it a little more 
 fully. I want the middle classes (it is for them, 
 above all, I write), the middle classes so deeply 
 concerned in this matter, so numerous, so right- 
 intentioned, so powerful, to look at the thing 
 with impartial regard to its simple reason and 
 to its present policy. 
 
yS A Fre7ich Eton 
 
 III. 
 
 The State mars everything which it touches, 
 say some. It attempts to do things for private 
 people, and private people could do them a great 
 deal better for themselves. '^ The State," says 
 the Times, " can hardly aid education without 
 " cramping and warping its growth, and mis- 
 " chievously interfering with the laws of its 
 " natural development." '^ Why should persons 
 " in Downing Street," asks Dr. Temple, " be at 
 " all better qualified than the rest of the world 
 " for regulating these matters 1 " Happily, how- 
 ever, this agency, at once so mischievous and so 
 blundering, is in our country little used. "In 
 '' this country," says the Times again, *' people 
 " cannot complain of the State, because the 
 " State never promised them anything, but, on 
 *' the contrary, always told them it could do them 
 " no good. The result is, none are fed with false 
 *' hopes." So it is, and so it will be to the end. 
 " This is something more than a system with us ; 
 *' it is usage, it is a necessity. We shall go on 
 " for ages doing as we have done." 
 
 Whether this really is so or not, it seems as if 
 

 A French Eton. 79 
 
 it ought not to be so. "Government," says 
 urke (to go back to Burke again), '' is a contri> 
 " vance of human wisdom to provide for human 
 " wants. Men have a right that these wants 
 " should be provided for by this wisdom." We 
 are a free people, we have made our own Govern- 
 ment. Our own wisdom has planned our con- 
 trivance for providing for our own wants. And 
 what sort of a contrivance has our wisdom made } 
 According to the Times, a contrivance of which 
 the highest merit is, that it candidly avows its 
 own impotency. It does not provide for our 
 wants, but then it " always told us " it could not 
 provide for them. It does not fulfil its function, 
 but then it " never fed us with false hopes " that 
 it would. It is perfectly useless, but perfectly 
 candid. And it will always remain what it is 
 now ; it will always be a contrivance which con- 
 trives nothing : this with us " is usage, it is a 
 " necessity." Good heavens ! what a subject for 
 self-congratulation ! What bitterer satire on us 
 and our institutions could our . worst enemy 
 invent .'* 
 
 Dr. Temple may well ask, " Why should per- 
 " sons in Downing Street be at all better qualified 
 " than the rest of the world for regulating such 
 " matters as education } " Why should not a 
 
8o A French Eton. 
 
 sporting rector in Norfolk, or a fanatical cobbler 
 in Northamptonshire, be just as good a judge of 
 what is wise, equitable, and expedient in public 
 education, as an Education Minister ? Why, 
 indeed ? The Education Minister is a part of 
 our contrivance for providing for our wants, and 
 we have seen what that contrivance is worth. It 
 might have been expected, perhaps, that in con- 
 triving a provision for a special want, we should 
 have sought for some one with a special skill. 
 But we know that our contrivance will do no 
 good, so we may as well let Nimrod manage as 
 Numa. 
 
 From whence can have arisen, in this country, 
 such contemptuous disparagement of the effi- 
 ciency and utility of State-action } Whence 
 such studied depreciation of an agency which to 
 Burke, or, indeed, to any reflecting man, appears 
 an agency of the greatest possible power and 
 value 1 For several reasons. In the first place, 
 the government of this country is, and long has 
 been, in the hands of the aristocratic class. 
 Where the aristocracy is a small oligarchy, able 
 to find employment for all its members in the 
 administration of the State, it is not the enemy, 
 but the friend of State-action ; for State-action 
 is then but its own action under another name. 
 
A French Eton 8i 
 
 and it is itself directly aggrandised by all that 
 aggrandises the State. But where, as in this 
 country, the aristocracy is a very large class, by 
 no means conterminous with the executive, but 
 overlapping it and spreading far beyond it, it 
 is the natural enemy rather than the friend of 
 State-action ; for only a small part of its mem- 
 bers can, xdirectly administer the State, and it 
 is not for the interest of the remainder to give 
 to this small part an excessive preponderance. 
 fNay, this small part will not be apt to seek it ; 
 for its interest in its order is permanent, while ^^ 
 its interest in State-function is transitory, and 
 it obeys an instinct which attaches it by pre- 
 ference to its order, j The more an aristocracy 
 has of that profound political sense by which the 
 English aristocracy is so much distinguished, 
 the more its members obey this instinct ; and, 
 by doing so, they signally display their best 
 virtues, moderation, prudence, sagacity; they 
 prevent fruitful occasions of envy, dissension, and 
 strife ; they do much to insure the permanence 
 of their order, its harmonious action, and con- 
 tinued predominance. A tradition unfavourable 
 to much State-action in homfe concerns (foreign 
 are another thing) is thus insensibly established 
 in the Government itself. This tradition, this 
 
 r 
 
82 A Frefich Eton, 
 
 essentially aristocratic sentiment, gains even 
 those members of the Government who are not 
 of the aristocratic class. In the beginning they 
 are overpowered by it ; in the end they share it. 
 When the shepherd Daphnis first arrives in 
 heaven, he naturally bows to the august traditions 
 of his new sphere — candidiis insuetum miratur 
 limen Olympu By the time the novelty of his 
 situation has worn off, he has come to think just 
 as the immortals do ; he is now by conviction 
 the foe of State-interference ; the worthy Daphnis 
 is all for letting things alone — amat bonus otia 
 Daphnis, 
 
 Far from trying to encroach upon individual 
 liberty, far from seeking to get everything into 
 its own hands, such a Government has a natural 
 and instinctive tendency to lirhit its own func- 
 tions. It turns away from offers of increased 
 responsibility or activity; it deprecates them. 
 To propose increased responsibility and activity 
 to an aristocratic Government is the worst pos- 
 sible way of paying one's court to it. The 
 Times is its genuine mouthpiece, when it says 
 that the business of Government, in domestic 
 concerns, is negative — to prevent disorder, job- 
 bery, and extravagance ; that it need " have no 
 " notion of securing the future, not even of 
 
A French Eton, 3 3 
 
 ** regulating the present ; " that it may and 
 ought to " leave the course of events to regulate 
 ** itself, and trust the future to the security of 
 " the unknown laws of human nature and the 
 ** unseen influences of higher powers." This is 
 the true aristocratic theory of civil government ^-n 
 to have recourse as little as possible to State- / 
 action, to the collective action of the community ; ^-^ 
 to leave as much as possible to the individual, / 
 to local government. And why } Because the 
 members of an aristocratic class are preponde- 
 rating individuals, with the local government in 
 their hands. No wonder that they do not wi:?h 
 to see the State overshadowing them and or- 
 dering them about. Since the feudal epoch, the 
 palmy time of local government, the State has 
 overlaid individual action quite enough. Mr. 
 Adderley remembers with a sigh that *' Houses 
 " of Correction were once voluntary institutions." 
 Go a little further back, and the court of justice 
 was a voluntary institution ; the gallows was 
 a voluntary institution; voluntary, I mean, in 
 Mr. Adderley's sense of the word voluntary — not 
 depending on the State, but on the local govern- 
 ment, on the lord of the soil, on the preponderat- 
 ing individual. The State has overlaid the feudal 
 gallows, it has overlaid the feudal court of justice, 
 
 F 2 
 
84 A French Eton. 
 
 it has overlaid the feudal House of Correction, 
 and finally, says Mr. Adderley, " it has overlaid 
 " our school-system." What will it do next } 
 
 In the aristocratic class, whose members 
 mainly compose and whose sentiment power- 
 fully pervades the executive of this country, 
 jealousy of State-action is, I repeat, an intel- 
 ligible, a profoundly natural feeling. That, amid 
 the temptations of office, they have remained 
 true to it is a proof of their practical sense, 
 their sure tact, their moderation — the qualities 
 which go to make that governing spirit for 
 which the English aristocracy is so remarkable. 
 And perhaps this governing spirit of theirs is 
 destined still to stand them in good stead 
 through all the new and changing development 
 of modern society. Perhaps it will give them 
 the tact to discern the critical moment at which 
 it becomes of urgent national importance that 
 an agency, not in itself very agreeable to them,- 
 should be used more freely than heretofore. 
 They have had the virtue to prefer the general 
 interest of their order to personal temptations of 
 aggrandising themselves through this agency ; 
 perhaps they will be capable of the still higher 
 virtue of admitting, in the general interest of 
 their country, this agency, in spite of the natural 
 
A French Eton, 85 
 
 prejudices and the seeming immediate interest 
 o'f their own order. Already there are indica- 
 ti(^ns that this is not impossible. No thoughtful 
 observer can have read Lord Derby's remarks 
 lalt session on the regulation of our railway 
 s}^tem, can have followed the course of a man 
 like Sir John Pakington on the Education ques- 
 tion, can have watched the disposition of the 
 country gentlemen on a measure like Mr. Glad- 
 stone's Government Annuities Bill, without re- 
 cognising that political instinct, that governing 
 spirit, which often, in the aristocratic class of 
 this country, is wiser both than the unelastic 
 pedantry of theorising Liberalism, and than their 
 own prejudices. 
 
 The working classes have no antipathy to 
 State-action. Against this, or against anything 
 else, indeed, presented to them in close con- J 
 nexion with some proceeding which they dislike, 
 it is, no doubt, quite possible to get them to 
 raise a cry ; but to the thing itself they have 
 no objection. Quite the contrary. They often 
 greatly embarrass their Liberal friends and pa- 
 trons from other classes, one of whose favourite 
 catchwords is no State-interference, by their reso- 
 lute refusal to adopt this Shibboleth, to embrace 
 this article of their patrons' creed. They will 
 
86 A French Eton. 
 
 join with them in their LiberaHsm, not in their 
 crotchets. Left to themselves, they are led, as 
 by their plain interest, so, too, by their natural 
 disposition, to welcome the action of the State 
 in their behalf. 
 
 It is the middle class that has been this 
 action's great enemy. ;And originally it had 
 good reason to be its enemy. In the youth and 
 early manhood of the English middle class, the 
 action of the State was at the service of an 
 ecclesiastical parfy.A This party used the power 
 of the State to secure their own predominance, 
 and to enforce conformity to their own tenets. 
 The stronghold of Nonconformity then, as now, 
 was in the middle class ; in its struggle to repel 
 the conformity forced upon it, the middle class 
 underwent great suffering and injustice ; and it 
 has never forgotten them. It has never for- 
 gotten that the hand which smote it — the hand 
 which did the bidding of its High Church and 
 prelatical enemies — was the hand of the State. 
 It has confronted the State with hostile jealousy 
 ever since. The State tried to do it violence, so 
 it does not love the State ; the State failed to 
 subdue it, so it does not respect the State. It 
 regards it with something of aversion and some- 
 thing of contempt. It professes the desire to 
 
A French Eton, 87 
 
 limit its functions as much as possible, to restrict 
 its action to matters where it is indispensably- 
 necessary, to make of it a mere tax-collector 
 and policeman — the hewer of wood and drawer 
 of water to the community. 
 
 There is another cause also which indisposes 
 the English middle class to increased action on 
 the part of the State. M. Amedee Thierry, in 
 his "Historv. of the Gauls," observes, in con- 
 trasting the (Gaulish and Germanic races, that the 
 first is characterised by the instinct of intelli- 
 gence and mobility, and by the preponderant 
 action of individuals ; the second, by the instinct 
 of discipline and order, and by the preponderant 
 action of bodies of menA This general law of 
 M. Thierry's has to submit to many limitations, 
 but there is a solid basis of truth in it. Apply- 
 ing the law to a people mainly of German blood 
 like ourselves, we shall best perceive its truth by- 
 regarding the middle class of the nation. Mul- 
 titudes, all the world over, have a good deal in 
 common ; aristocracies, all the world over, have 
 a good deal in common. The peculiar national 
 form and habit exist in the masses at the bottom 
 of society in a loose, rudimentary, potential state ; 
 in the few at the top of society, in a state modi- 
 fied and reduced by various culture. The man 
 
rd 
 
 88 A French Eton, 
 
 of the multitude has not yet solidified into the 
 typical Englishman ; the man of the aristocracy 
 has been etherealised out of him. The typical 
 Englishman is to be looked for in the middle 
 class. And there we shall find him, with a com- 
 plexion not ill-suiting M. Thierry's law ; with a 
 spirit not very open to new ideas, and not easily 
 ravished by them ; not, therefore, a great enthu- 
 \i siast for universal progress, but with a strong 
 
 love of discipline and order, — that is, of keeping 
 things settled, and much as they are ; and with 
 a disposition, instead of lending himself to the 
 onward-looking statesman and legislator, to act 
 with bodies of men of his own kind, whose 
 aims and efforts reach no further than his own. 
 "Poverty and hope make man the friend of ideals, 
 therefore the multitude has a turn for ideals ; 
 culture and genius make man the friend of 
 ideals, therefore the gifted or highly-trained 
 few have a turn for ideals. The middle class 
 has the whet neither of poverty nor of culture ; 
 it is not ill-off in the things of the body, and it 
 is not highly trained in the things of the mind ; 
 erefore it has little turn for ideals : it is self- 
 Isatisfied. This is a chord in the nature of the 
 English middle class which seldom fails, when 
 struck, to give an answer, and which some 
 
A French Eton, 89 
 
 people are never weary of striking. AU the 
 variations which are played on the endless 
 theme of local self-government rely on this chord. 
 Hardly any local government is, in truth, in this 
 country, exercised by the middle class ; almost 
 the whole of it is exercised by the aristocratic 
 class. Every locality in France — that country 
 which our middle class is taught so much to 
 compassionate — has a genuine municipal govern- 
 ment, in which the middle class has its due 
 share ; and by this municipal government all 
 matters of local concern (schools among the 
 number) are regulated ; not a country parish in 
 England has any effective government of this 
 kind at all. But what is meant by the habit of 
 local self-government, on which our middle class 
 is so incessantly felicitated, is its habit of volun- 
 tary combination, in bodies of its own arranging, 
 for purposes of its own choosing — purposes to 
 be carried out within the limits fixed for a pri- 
 vate association by its own powers. When the 
 middle class is solemnly warned against State- 
 interference, lest it should destroy " the habit of 
 " self-reliance and love of local self-government," 
 it is this habit, and the love of it, that are meant. 
 When we are told that ** nothing can be more 
 " dangerous than these constant attempts on the 
 
QO A French Eton, 
 
 '' part of the Government to take from the people 
 ** the management of its own concerns," this is 
 the sort of management of our own concerns that 
 is meant ; not the management of them by a 
 regular local government, but the management 
 of them by chance private associations. It is our 
 habit of acting through these associations which, 
 says Mr. Roebuck, saves us from being " a set of 
 " helpless imbeciles, totally incapable of attending 
 *^ to our own interests." It is in the event of this 
 habit being at all altered that, according to the 
 same authority, " the greatness of this country is 
 " gone." * And the middle class, to whom that 
 habit is familiar and very dear, will never be 
 insensible to language of this sort - 
 
 Finally, the English middle class has a strong 
 practical sense and habit of affairs, and it sees 
 that things managed by the Government are 
 often managed ill. It sees them treated some- 
 
 * Mr. Roebuck, in his recent excellent speech at Sheffield, 
 has shown that in popular education, at any rate, he does not 
 mean these maxims to apply without restriction. But perhaps 
 it is a little incautious for a public man ever to throw out, 
 without guarding himself, maxims of this kind ; for, on the 
 one hand, in this country such maxims are sure never to be lost 
 sight of ; on the other, but too many people are sure always to 
 be prone to use them amiss, and to push their application much 
 fnrther than it ought to go. 
 
A FreiicJi Eto7t. 91 
 
 times remissly, sometimes vexatiously ; now with 
 a paralysing want of fruitful energy, now with 
 an over-busy fussiness, with rigidity, with for- 
 mality, without due consideration of special 
 circumstances. Here, too, it finds a motive dis- 
 inclining it to trust State-action, and leading it to 
 give a willing ear to those who declaim against it. 
 Now, every one of these motives of distrust is 
 respectable. Every one of them has, or once 
 had, a solid ground. Every one of them points 
 to some virtue in those actuated by it, which is 
 not to be suppressed, but to find true conditions 
 for its exercise. The English middle class was 
 quite right in repelling State-action, when the 
 State suffered itself to be made an engine of the 
 High Church party to persecute Nonconformists. 
 It gave an excellent lesson to the State in so 
 doing. It rendered a valuable service to liberty 
 of thought and to all human freedom. If State- 
 action now threatened to lend itself to one re- 
 ligious party against another, the middle class 
 would be quite right in again thwarting and con- 
 fining it. But can it be said that the State now 
 shows the slightest disposition to take such a 
 course ^ Is such a course the course towards which 
 the modern spirit carries the State } Does not 
 the State show, more and more, the resolution to 
 
92 A French Eton. 
 
 hold the balance perfectly fair between religious 
 parties ? The middle class has it in its own 
 power, more than any other class, to confirm the 
 State in this resolution. This class has the power 
 to make it thoroughly sure — in organising, for 
 instance, any new system of public instruction — 
 that the State shall treat all religious persuasions 
 with exactly equal fairness. If, instead of hold- 
 ing aloof, it will now but give its aid to make 
 State-action equitable, it can make it so. 
 
 Again, as to the " habits of self-reliance and 
 " the love of local self-government." People talk 
 of Government interference, Government co7itroly 
 
 (as if State-action were necessarily something 
 imposed upon them from ^ithout ; something 
 despotic and self-originated j something which 
 took no account of their will, and left no freedom 
 to their activity. Can any one really suppose 
 that, in a country like this, State-action — in edu- 
 cation, for instance-^can ever be that, |inless we 
 choose to make it so }\ We can give it what form 
 we will. We can make it our agent, not our 
 
 ' master. In modern societies the agency of the 
 State, in certain matters, is so indispensable, that 
 it will manage, with or without our common 
 consent, to come into operation somehow ; but 
 when it has introduced itself without the common 
 
A French Eton. 93 
 
 consent — when a great body, like the middle 
 class, will have nothing to say to it — then its 
 course is indeed likely enough to be not straight- 
 forward, its operation not satisfactory. But, by 
 all of us consenting to it, we remove any danger 
 of this kind. By really agreeing to deal in our 
 collective and corporate character with education, 
 we can form ourselves into the best and most 
 efficient of voluntary societies for managing it. 
 We can make State-action upon it a genuine 
 local government of it, the faithful but potent 
 expression of our own activity. We can make 
 the central Government that mere court of dis- 
 interested review and correction, which every 
 sensible man would always be glad to have for 
 his own activity. We shall have all our self- 
 reJiance and individual action still (in this country 
 we shall always have plenty of them, and the 
 parts will always be more likely to tyrannise over 
 the whole than the whole over the parts), but we 
 shall have had the good sense to turn them to 
 account by a powerful, but still voluntary, organi- 
 sation. Our beneficence will be " beneficence 
 " acting by ride " (that is Burke's definition of 
 law, as instituted by a free society), and all the 
 more effective for that reason. Must this make 
 us " a set of helpless imbeciles, totally incapable 
 
94 A French Eton, 
 
 *' of attending to our own interests ? " Is this 
 '^ a grievous blow aimed at the independence 
 " of the Enghsh character ? " Is " EngHsh self- 
 " reliance and independence " to be perfectly- 
 satisfied with what it produces already without 
 this organisation ? In middle class education it 
 produces, without it, the educational home and 
 the classical and commercial academy. Are we 
 to be proud of that ? Are we to be satisfied with 
 that ? Is " the greatness of this country " to be 
 seen in that ? But it will be said that, awaken- 
 ing to a sense of the badness of our middle class 
 education, we are beginning to improve it. Un- 
 doubtedly we are ; and the most certain sign 
 of that awakening, of those beginnings of im- 
 provement, is the disposition to resort to a public 
 agency, to "beneficence working by ridel' to help 
 us on faster with it. When we really begin to 
 care about a matter of this kind, we cannot help 
 turning to the most efficient agency at our 
 disposal. Clap-trap and commonplace lose their 
 power over us ; we begin to see that, if State 
 action has often its inconveniences, our self- 
 . reliance and independence are best shown in so 
 I arranging our State-action as to guard against 
 ) those inconveniences, not in foregoing State- 
 ^ action for fear of them. So it was in elementary 
 
A French Eton, 9$- 
 
 education. Mr. Balnes says that this was already 
 beginning to improve, when Government inter- 
 fered with it. Why, it was because we were all 
 beginning to take a real interest in it, beginning 
 to improve it, that we turned to Government — 
 to ourselves in our corporate character — to get it 
 improved faster. So long as we did not care 
 much about it, we let it go its own way, and 
 kept singing Mr. Roebuck's fine old English 
 stave about " self-rehance." We kept crying just 
 as he cries now : " nobody has the same interest 
 " to do well for a man as he himself has." That 
 was all very pleasant so long as we cared not 
 a rush whether the people were educated or no. 
 The moment we began to concern ourselves 
 about this, we asked ourselves what our song 
 was worth. We a§ked ourselves how the bringing 
 up of our labourers and artisans — they "doing 
 " for themselves," and " nobody having the same 
 " interest to do well for a man as he himself has " 
 — was being done. We found it was being done 
 detestably. Then we asked ourselves whether 
 casual, precarious, voluntary beneficence, or 
 " beneficence acting by rule," was the better 
 agency for doing it better. We asked ourselves 
 if we could not employ our public resources on 
 this concern, if we could not make our beneficence 
 
96 A French Eton. 
 
 act upon it by rule, without losing our " habits of 
 " self-reliance," without " aiming a grievous blow 
 " at the independence of the English character." 
 We found that we could ; we began to do it ; and 
 we left Mr. Baines to sing in the wilderness. 
 
 Finally, as to the objection that our State- 
 action — our '^ beneficence working by rule " — 
 often bungles and does its work badly. No 
 wonder it does. The imperious necessities of 
 modern society force it, more or less, even in 
 this country, into play ; but it is exercised by a 
 class to whose cherished instincts it is opposed — - 
 the aristocratic class ; and it is watched by a 
 class to whose cherished prejudices it is opposed 
 ■ — the middle class. It is hesitatingly exercised 
 and jealously watched. It therefore works with- 
 out courage, cordiality, or belief in itself. Under 
 its present conditions it must work so, and, 
 working so, it must often bungle. But it need 
 not work so ; and the moment the middle class 
 abandons its attitude of jealous aversion, the 
 moment they frankly put their hand to it, the 
 moment they adopt it as an instrument to do 
 them service, it will work so no longer. Then 
 it will not bungle ; then, if it is applied, say, 
 to education, it will not be fussy, baffling, and 
 barren ; it will bring to bear on this concern the 
 
A French Eton. 97 
 
 energy and strong practical sense of the middle 
 class itself. 
 
 But the middle class must make it do this. 
 They must not expect others to do the business 
 for them. It is they whose interest is concerned 
 in its being done, and they must do it for them- 
 selves. Why should the upper class — the aris- 
 tocratic class — do it for them } What motive — 
 except the distant and not very peremptory one 
 of their general political sense, their instinct for 
 taking the course which^-for the whole country's 
 sake, ought to be taken — have the aristocratic 
 class to impel them to go counter to all their 
 natural maxims, nay, and to all their seeming 
 interest t They do not want new schools for 
 their children. The great public schools of the 
 country are theirs already. Their numbers are 
 not such as to overflow these few really public 
 schools ; their fortunes are such as to make the 
 expensiveness of these schools a matter of in- 
 difference to them. The Royal Commissioners, 
 whose report has just appeared, do not, indeed, 
 give a very brilliant picture of the book-learning 
 of these schools. But it is not the book-learning 
 (easy to be improved if there is a will to improve 
 it) that this class make their first care ; they 
 make their first care the tone, temper, and habits 
 G 
 
 ( 
 
98 A French Eton. 
 
 generated in these schools. So long as they 
 generate a public spirit, a free spirit, a high spirit, 
 a governing spirit, they are not ill-satisfied. 
 Their children are fitted to succeed them in the 
 government of the country. Why should they 
 concern themselves to change this state of things } 
 Why should they create competitors for their 
 own children .J* Why sho.uld they labour to endow 
 another class with those great instruments of 
 power — a public spirit, a free spirit, a high spirit, 
 a governing spirit.'* Why should they do violence 
 to that distaste for State-action, which, in an 
 aristocratic class, is natural and instinctive, for 
 the benefit of the middle class } 
 
 No ; the middle class must do this work for 
 themselves. \^rom them must come the demand 
 for the satisfaction of a want that is theirs. jThey 
 must leave off being frightened at shadows. They 
 may keep (I hope they always will keep) the 
 maxim that self-reliance and independence are 
 the most invaluable of blessings, that the great 
 end of society is the perfecting of the individual, 
 the fullest, freest, and worthiest development of 
 the individual's activity. But that the individual 
 may be perfected, that his activity may be 
 worthy, he must often learn to quit old habits 
 to adopt new, to go out of himself, to transform 
 
A French Eton. 99 
 
 himself. It was said, and truly said, of one of 
 the most unwearied and successful strivers after 
 human perfection that have ever lived — Wilhelm 
 von Humboldt — that it was a joy to him to feel 
 himself modified by the operation of a foreign 
 influence. And this may well be a joy to a 
 man whose centre of character and whose moral 
 force are once securely established. Through 
 this he makes growth in perfection. Through 
 this he enlarges his being and fills up gaps in it; 
 he unlearns old prejudices and learns new ex- 
 cellences ; he makes advance towards inward 
 light and freedom. Societies may use this means 
 of perfection as well as individuals, and it is a 
 characteristic (perhaps the best characteristic) of 
 our age, that they are using it more and more. 
 Let us look at our neighbour, France. What 
 strikes a thoughtful observer most in modern 
 France, is the great, wide breach which is being 
 made in the old French mind ; the strong flow 
 with which a foreign thought is pouring in and 
 mixing with it. There is an extraordinary in- 
 crease in the number of German and English 
 books read there, books the most unlike possible 
 to the native literary growth of France. There is 
 a growing disposition there to pull to pieces old 
 stock French commonplaces, and to put a bridle 
 G 2 
 
ICX) A French Eton, 
 
 upon old stock French habitudes. France will 
 not, and should not, like some English liberals, 
 run a-muck against State-action altogether ; but 
 she shows a tendency to control her excessive 
 State-action, to reduce it within just limits where 
 it has overpassed them, to make a larger part 
 for free local activity and for individuals. She 
 will not, and should not, like Sir Archibald 
 Alison, cry down her great Revolution as the 
 work of Satan ; but she shows more and more 
 the power to discern the real faults of that 
 Revolution, the real part of delusion, impotence, 
 and transitoriness in the work of '89 or of '91, 
 and to profit by that discernment. 
 
 Our middle class has secured for itself that 
 centre of character and that moral force which 
 I are, I have said, the indispensable basis upon 
 which perfection is to be founded. To securing 
 them, its vigour in resisting the State, when the 
 State tried to tyrannise over it, has contributed 
 not a little. In this sense, it may be said to 
 have made way towards perfection by repelling 
 the State's hand. Now it has to enlarge and to 
 adorn its spirit. I cannot seriously argue with 
 those who deny that the independence and 
 free action of the middle class is now, in this 
 country, immutably secure ; I cannot treat the 
 
A French Eton. loi 
 
 notion of the State now overriding it and doing 
 violence to it, as anything but a vain chimera. 
 Well, then, if the State can (as it can) be of 
 service to the middle class in the work of en- 
 larging its mind and adorning its spirit, it will 
 now make way towards perfection by taking 
 the State's hand. State-action is not in itself 
 unfavourable to the individual's perfection, to his 
 attaining his fullest development. So far from 
 it, it is in ancient Greece, where State-action was 
 omnipresent, that we see the individual at his 
 very highest pitch of free and fair activity. This 
 is because, in Greece, the individual was strong 
 enough to fashion the State into an instrument 
 of his own perfection, to make it serve, with a 
 thousand times his own power, towards his own 
 ends. He was not enslaved by it, he did not 
 annihilate it, but he used it. (^JWhere, in modern 
 nations, the State has maimed and crushed indi- 
 vidual activity, it has been by operating as an 
 alien, exterior power in the community, a power 
 not originated by the community to serve the 
 common weal, but entrenched among them as a 
 conqueror with a weal of its own to serve^j Just 
 because the vigour and sturdiness of the people 
 of this country have prevented, and will always 
 prevent, the State from being anything of this 
 
102 A French Eton. 
 
 kind, I believe we, more than any modern people, 
 have the power of renewing, in our national life, 
 the example of Greece. I believe that we, and 
 our American kinsmen, are specially fit to apply 
 State-action with advantage, because we are 
 specially sure to apply it voluntarily. 
 
 Two things must, I think, strike any one who 
 attentively regards the English middle class at 
 this moment. One is the intellectual ferment 
 which is taking place, or rather, which is begin- 
 ning to take place, amongst them. It is only 
 in its commencement as yet ; but it shows itself 
 at a number of points, and bids fair to become 
 a great pow^jP; ""T'he importance of a change, 
 placing in the great middle class the centre of 
 the intellectual life of this country, can hardly 
 _be over-estimated. I have been reproved for 
 saying that the culture and intellectual life of 
 our highest class seem to me to have somewhat 
 flagged since the last century. That is my 
 opinion, indeed, and all that I see and hear 
 strengthens rather than shakes it. JThfi^culture 
 of^ this class is^jnot^what it used to be. Their 
 value for High culture, their belief in its import- 
 ance, is not what it used to be. One may see 
 it in the public schools, one may see it in the 
 universities. Whence come the deadness, the 
 
A French Eton. 103 
 
 want of intellectual life, the poverty of acquire- 
 ment after years of schooling, which the Com- 
 missioners, in their remarkable and interesting 
 report, show us so prevalent in our most dis- 
 tinguished public schools ? What gives to play 
 and amusement, both there and at the univer- 
 sities, their present overweening importance, so 
 that home critics cry out : '(The real studies of 
 " Oxford are its games," and^ foreign critics cry 
 out : " At Oxford the student is still the mere 
 *' school-boy " ? jThe most experienced and acute 
 of Oxford heads of houses told me himself, that 
 when he spoke to an undergraduate the other 
 day about trying for some distinguished scholar- 
 ship, the answer he got was : '' Oh, the men 
 " from the great schools don't care for those 
 " things now ; the men who care about them are 
 " the men from Marlborough, Cheltenham, and 
 " the second-rate schools." Whence, I say, does 
 this slackness, this sleep of the mind, come, 
 except from a torpor of intellectual life, a dearth 
 of ideas, an indifference to fine culture or disbelief 
 in its necessity, spreading through the bulk of 
 our highest class, and influencing its rising 
 generation ? People talk as if the culture of 
 this class had only changed ; the Greek and 
 Roman classics, they say, are no longer in 
 
104 -^ French Eton, 
 
 vogue as they were in Lord Chesterfield's time. 
 Well, if this class had only gone from one 
 source of high culture to another ; if only, 
 instead of reading Homer and Cicero, it now 
 read Goethe and Montesquieu ; — but it does 
 not ; it reads the Times and the Agricultural 
 Journal. And it devotes itself to practical life. 
 And it amuses itself It is not its rising gene- 
 ration only which loves play; v^iever in all its 
 *c history has our whole highest class shown such 
 zeal for enjoying life, for amusing itself y It 
 would be absurd to make this a matter of 
 reproach against it. The triumphs of material 
 progress multiply the means of material enjoy- 
 ment ; they attract all classes, more and more, 
 to taste of this enjoyment ; on the highest class, 
 which possesses in the amplest measure these 
 means, they must needs exercise this attraction 
 very powerfully. But every thoughtful observer 
 can perceive that the ardour for amusement and 
 enjoyment, often educative and quickening to 
 a toil-numbed working class or a strait-laced 
 middle class, whose great want is expansion, 
 tends to become enervative and weakening to 
 an aristocratic class — a class which must rule 
 by superiority of all kinds, superiority not to be 
 won without contention of spirit and a certain 
 
A Fre7ich Eton. 105 
 
 severity. I think, therefore, both that the culture 
 of our highest class has declined, and that this 
 declension, though natural and venial, impairs 
 its power. 
 
 Yet in this vigorous country everything has a 
 wonderful ability for self-restoration, and he 
 would be a bold prophet who should deny that 
 the culture of our highest class may recover 
 itself. But however this may be, there is no 
 doubt that a liberal culture, a fulness of intel- 
 lectual life, in the middle class, is a far more 
 important matter, a far more efficacious stimulant 
 to national progress, than the same powers in an 
 aristocratic class. Whatever may be its culture, 
 an aristocratic class will always have at bottom, 
 like the young man in Scripture with great 
 possessions, an inaptitude for ideas ; but, besides 
 this, high culture or ardent intelligence, pervading 
 /a large body of the community, acquire a breadth 
 \of basis, a sum of force, an energy of central heat 
 f for radiating further, which they can never pos- 
 ^e sG wh en they pervade a small upper class only. 
 Pi is when such a broad basis is obtained, that 
 /individual genius gets its proper nutriment, and 
 ( is animated to put forth its best powers ; this is 
 the secret of rich and beautiful epochs in national 
 life ; the epoch of Pericles in Greece, the epoch 
 
io6 A F^^ench Eton, 
 
 of Michael Angelo in Italy, the epoch of Shak- 
 speare in England. Our actual middle class has 
 not yet, certainly, the fine culture, or the living 
 intelligence, which quickened great bodies of 
 men at these epochs ; but it has the forerunner, 
 the preparer, the indispensable initiator; it is 
 traversed by a strong intellectual ferment. It 
 is the middle class which has real mental ardour, 
 real curiosity; it is the middle class which is 
 the great reader ; that immense literature of the 
 day which we see surging up all round us, — 
 literature the absolute value of which it is almost 
 impossible to rate too humbly, literature hardly 
 a word of which will reach, or deserves to reach, 
 the future, — it is the middle class which calls it 
 forth, and its evocation is at least a sign of a 
 vvidespread mental movement in that class. Will 
 this movement go on and become fruitful : will 
 it conduct the middle class to a high and com- 
 manding pitch of culture and intelligence } That 
 depends on the sensibility which the middle 
 class has for perfectio7i ; that depends on its 
 power to transform itself. 
 
 And it is not yet manifest how far it possesses 
 this power. For — and here I pass to the second 
 of those two things which particularly, I have 
 said, strike any one who observes the English 
 
A French Eton, 107 
 
 middle class just now — in its public action this 
 class has hitherto shown only the power and 
 disposition to affirm itself^ not at all the power 
 and disposition to transform itself. That, indeed, 
 is one of the deep-seated instincts of human 
 nature, but of vulgar human nature — of human 
 nature not high-souled and aspiring after per- 
 fection — to esteem itself for what it is, to try to 
 establish itself just as it is, to try even to impose 
 itself with its stock of habitudes, pettinesses, 
 narrownesses, shortcomings of every kind, on 
 the rest of the world as a conquering power. 
 But nothing has really a right to be satisfied 
 with itself, to be and remain itself, except that 
 which has reached perfection; and nothing has 
 the right to impose itself on the rest of the 
 world as a conquering force, except that which 
 is of higher perfection than the rest of the world. 
 And such is the fundamental constitution of 
 human affairs, that the measure of right proves 
 also, in the end, the measure of power. Before 
 the English middle class can have the right or 
 the power to assert itself absolutely, it must have 
 greatly perfected itself It has been jokingly ^ 
 said of this class, that all which the best of it 
 cared for was summed up in this alliterative 
 phrase — Business and Bethels : and that all which 
 
io8 A French Eton, 
 
 the rest of it cared for was the Business without 
 the Bethels. No such jocose and slighting words 
 can convey any true sense of what the reHgion 
 of the English middle class has really been to 
 it ; what a source of vitality, energy, and per- 
 sistent vigour. '' They who wait on the Lord," 
 says Isaiah, in words not less true than they are 
 noble, '' shall renew their strength ; " and the 
 English middle class owes to its religion not 
 only comfort in the past, but also a vast latent 
 force of unworn life and strength for future pro- 
 gress. But the Puritanism of the English middle 
 class, which has been so great an element of 
 strength to them, has by no means brought 
 them to perfection ; nay, by the rigid mould in 
 which it has cast their spirit, it has kept them 
 back from perfection. The most that can be 
 said of it is, that it has supplied a stable basis 
 on which to build perfection ; it has given them 
 character, though it has not given them culture, 
 I But it is in making endless additions to itself, 
 \ in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless 
 ^1 growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of 
 I the human race finds its ideal; to reach this 
 I ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that 
 is the true value of culture. The life of aristo- 
 cracies, with its large and free use of the world, 
 
A Freuc/t Eton, 109 
 
 its conversance with great affairs, its exemption 
 from sordid cares, its liberation from the hum- 
 drum provincial round, its external splendour 
 and refinement! is a kind of outward shadow 
 of this ideal, a prophecy of it ; and there lies 
 the secret of the charm of aristocracies^ and of 
 their power over men's minds. In a^ountry 
 like England, the middle class, with its industry 
 and its Puritanism, and nothing more, will never 
 be able to make way beyond a certain point, 
 will never be able to divide power with the 
 aristocratic class, much less to win for itself a 
 preponderance of power. While it only tries 
 to affirm its actual self, to impose its actual 
 self, it has no charm for men's minds, and can 
 achieve no great triumphs. And this is all it 
 attempts at present. The Conservative reaction, 
 of which we hear so much just now, is in great 
 part merely a general indisposition to let the 
 middle-class spirit, working by its old methods, 
 and having only its old self to give us,, establish 
 itself at all points and become master of the 
 situation. Particularly on Church questions is 
 this true. In this sphere of religion, where 
 feeling and beauty are so all-important, we 
 shrink from giving to the middle-class spirit, 
 limited as we see it, with its sectarianism, its 
 
no A French Eton. 
 
 under-culture, its intolerance, its bitterness, its 
 unloveliness, too much its own way. Before we 
 give it quite its own way, we insist on its making 
 itself into something larger, newer, more fruitful. 
 This is what the recent Church-Rate divisions 
 really mean, and the lovers of perfection, there- 
 fore, may accept them without displeasure. They 
 are the voice of the nation crying to the trntrans- 
 formed middle class (if it will receive it) with a 
 voice of thunder : '' The future is not yours ! " 
 
 And let me say, in passing, that the indiffe- 
 rence, so irritating to some persons, with which 
 European opinion has received the break-up of 
 the old American Union has at bottom a like 
 ground. I put the question of slavery on one 
 side ; so far as the resolution of that question 
 depends on the issue of the conflict between 
 the North and the South, every one may wish 
 this party or that to prevail. But Mr. Bright 
 and Mr. Cobden extol the old American Re- 
 public as something interesting and admirable 
 in itself, and are displeased with those who are 
 not afflicted at its disaster, and not jealous for 
 its restoration. Mr. Bright is an orator of genius ; 
 Mr. Cobden is a man of splendid understanding. 
 But why do they refuse to perceive, that, apart 
 from all class-jealousy of aristocracies .towards 
 
A French Eton, 1 1 1 
 
 a democratic republic, there existed in the most 
 impartial and thoughtful minds a profound dis- 
 satisfaction with the spirit and tendencies of the 
 old American Union, a strong aversion to their 
 unchecked triumph, a sincere wish for the disci- 
 plining and correcting of them ? And what 
 were the old United States but a colossal ex- 
 pression of the English middle-class spirit, 
 somewhat more accessible to ideas there than 
 here, because of the democratic air it breathed, 
 much more arrogant and overweening there than 
 here, because of the absence of all check and 
 counterpoise to it — but there, as here, full of 
 rawness, hardness, and imperfection ; there, as 
 here, greatly needing to be liberalised, enlarged, 
 and ennobled, before it could with advantage be 
 suffered to assert itself absolutely ? All the 
 energy and success in the world could not have 
 made the United States admirable so long as 
 their spirit had this imperfection. Even if they 
 had overrun the whole earth, their old national 
 style would have still been detestable, and Mr. 
 Beecher would have still been a heated bar- 
 barian. But they could not thus triumph, they 
 could not make their rule thus universal, so long 
 as their spirit was thus imperfect. They had 
 not power enough over the minds of men. Now 
 
112 A French Eton. 
 
 they are transforming their spirit in the furnace 
 of civil war ; with what success we shall in due 
 time see. But the lovers of perfection in 
 America itself ought to rejoice — some of them, 
 no doubt, do rejoice — that the national spirit 
 should be compelled, even at any cost of suffer- 
 ing, to transform itself, to become something 
 higher, ampler, more gracious. To be glad that 
 it should be compelled thus to transform itself, 
 that it should not be permitted to triumph un- 
 transformed, is no insult, no unkindness ; it is a 
 homage to perfection. It is a religious devotion 
 to that providential order which forbids the final 
 supremacy of imperfect things. (God keeps toss- 
 ing back to the human race its failures, and 
 commanding it to try again. 
 
 In the Crusade of Peter the Hermit, where 
 the hosts that marched were not filled after the 
 usual composition of armies, but contained along 
 with the fighters whole families of people — old 
 men, women, and children, swept by the univer- 
 sal torrent of enthusiasm towards the Holy Land 
 — the marches, as might have been expected, 
 were tedious and painful. Long before Asia 
 was reached, long before even Europe was half 
 traversed, the little children in that travelling 
 multitude began to fancy, with a natural impa- 
 
A French Eton. 113 
 
 tience, that their journey must surely be drawing 
 to an end ; and every evening, as they came in 
 sight of some town which was the destination of 
 that day's march, they cried out eagerly to those 
 who were with them, *^Is this Jefusalem ? " No, 
 poor children, not this town, nor the next, nor 
 yet the next, is Jerusalem; Jerusalem is far off, 
 and it needs time, and strength, and much 
 endurance to reach it. Seas and mountains, 
 labour and peril, hunger and thirst, disease and 
 death, are between Jerusalem and you. 
 
 So, when one marks the ferment and stir of 
 life in the middle class at this moment, and sees 
 this class impelled to take possession of the 
 world, and to assert itself and its own actual 
 spirit absolutely, one is disposed to exclaim to 
 it, " Jerusalem is not yet!' Your present spirit 
 is not Jerusalem, is not the goal you have to 
 reach, the place you may be satisfied in. And 
 when one says this, they sometimes fancy that 
 one has the same object as others who say the 
 same to them ; that one means that they are to 
 yield themselves to be moulded by some existing 
 force, their rival ; that one wishes Nonconformity 
 to take the law from actual Anglicanism, and 
 the middle class from the present governing 
 H 
 
J 14 A French Eton 
 
 class ; that one thinks Anglicanism Jerusalem, 
 and the English aristocratic class Jerusalem. 
 
 I do not mean, or wish, or think this, though 
 many, no doubt, do. It is not easy for a re- 
 flecting man, who has studied its origin, to feel 
 any vehement enthusiasm for Anglicanism; 
 Henry the Eighth and his parliaments have 
 taken care of that. One may esteem it as a 
 beneficent social and civilising agent. One may 
 have an affection for it from life-long associa- 
 tions, and for the sake of much that is venerable 
 and interesting which it has inherited from 
 antiquity. One may cherish gratitude to it — 
 and here, I think, Mr. Goldwin Smith, who 
 fights against it the battle of the Nonconformists 
 with so much force and so much ability, is a 
 little ungrateful — for the shelter and basis for 
 culture which this, like other great nationally 
 established forms of religion, affords ; those who 
 are born in them can get forward on their road, 
 instead of always eyeing the ground on which 
 they stand and disputing about it. But actual 
 Anglicanism is certainly not Jerusalem, and I 
 should be sorry to think it the end which Non- 
 conformity and the middle class are to reach. 
 The actual governing class, again, the English 
 
A French Eton, 1 1 5 
 
 aristocratic class (in the widest sense of the word 
 aristocratic) — I cannot wish that the rest of the 
 nation, the new and growing part of the nation, 
 should be transformed in spirit exactly according, 
 to the image of that class. The merits and ser- 
 vices of that class no one rates higher than I do ; 
 no one appreciates higher than I do the value of 
 the relative standard of elevation, refinement 
 and grandeur, which they have exhibited ; no 
 one would more strenuously oppose the relin- 
 quishing of this for any lower standard. But I can- 
 not hide from myself that while modern societies 
 increasingly tend to find their best life in a free 
 and heightened spiritual and intellectual activity, 
 to this tendency aristocracies offer at least a strong 
 passive resistance, by their secular prejudices, 
 their incurable dearth of ideas. In modern, 
 rich, and industrial societies, they tend to mis- 
 place the ideal for the classes below them ; the 
 immaterial chivalrous ideal of high descent and 
 honour is, by the very nature of the case, of 
 force only for aristocracies themselves ; the im- 
 material modern ideal of spiritual and intellec- 
 tual perfection through culture, they have not to 
 communicate. What they can and do commu- 
 nicate is the material ideal of splendour of 
 wealth, and weight of property. And this ideal 
 H 2 
 
X i6 A French Eton. 
 
 is the ideal truly operative upon our middle 
 classes at this moment. To be as rich as they 
 can, that they may reach the splendour of wealth 
 and weight of property, and, with time, the im- 
 portance, of the actual heads of society, is their 
 ambition. I do not blame them, or the class 
 from which they get their ideal ; all I say is, 
 that the good ideal for humanity, the true Jeru- 
 I salem, is an ideal more spiritual than brilliant 
 ^ wealth and boundless property, an ideal in which 
 more can participate. The beloved friends of 
 humanity have been those who made it feel its 
 ideal to be in the things of the mind and spirit, 
 to be in an internal condition separable from 
 wealth and accessible to all — men like St. Francis, 
 the ardent bridegroom of poverty ; men like the 
 great personages of antiquity, almost all of them, 
 as Lacordaire Was so fond of saying, poor. 
 Therefore, that the middle class should simply 
 take its ideal from the aristocratic class, 1 do 
 not wish. That the aristocratic class should be 
 able absolutely to assert itself and its own spirit, 
 is not my desire. No, no; they are not Jeru- 
 salem. 
 
 The truth is, the English spirit has to accom- 
 plish an immense evolution ; nor, as that spirit 
 at this moment presents itself in any class ot 
 
A Frenc/i Eto7i. 1 17 
 
 description amongst us, can one be perfectly 
 satisfied with it, can one wish it to prevail just 
 as it is. 
 
 But in a transformed middle class, in a middle f 
 class raised to a higher and more genial culture, ; 
 we may find, not perhaps Jerusalem, but, I am , 
 sure, a notable stage towards it. In that great \ 
 class, strong by its numbers, its energy, its in- 
 dustry, strong by its freedom from frivolity, not 
 by any law of nature prone to immobility of 
 mind, actually at this moment agitated by a 
 spreading ferment of mind, in that class, libera- 
 lised by an ampler culture, admitted to a wider 
 sphere of thought, living by larger ideas, with 
 its provincialism dissipated, its intolerance cured, 
 its pettinesses purged away, — what a power there 
 will be, what an element of new life for England ! 
 Then let the middle class rule, then let it affirm 
 its own spirit, when it has thus perfected itself 
 
 And I cannot see any means so direct and " 
 powerful for developing this great and beneficent ^ 
 power as the public establishment of schools for ; 
 the middle class. By public establishment they 
 may be made cheap and accessible to all. By 
 public establishment they may give securities 
 for the culture offered in them being really 
 good and sound, and the best that our time 
 
Ii8 A French Eton. 
 
 knows. By public establishment they may 
 communicate to those reared in them the sense 
 of being brought in contact with their country, 
 with the national life, with the life of the world ; 
 and they will expand and dignify their spirits 
 by communicating this sense to them. I can 
 see no other mode of institution which will offer 
 the same advantages in the same degree. 
 
 I cannot think that the middle class will be 
 much longer insensible to its own evident in- 
 terests. I cannot think that, for the pleasure 
 of being complimented on their self-reliance 
 by Lord Fortescue and the Times, they will 
 much longer forego a course leading them to 
 their own true dignity instead of away from it. 
 I know that with men who have reached or 
 passed the middle of life, the language and 
 habits of years form a network round the 
 spirit through which it cannot easily break ; 
 and among the elder leaders of the middle 
 class there are men whom I would give much 
 to persuade — men of weight and character, like 
 Mr. Baines, men of character and culture too, 
 like Mr. Miall — whom I must not, I fear, hope 
 to persuade. But among the younger leaders 
 of this class — even of that part of it where 
 resistance is most to be apprehended, among 
 
A French Eton. 119 
 
 the younger Dissenting ministers, for instance 
 — there exists, I do believe, a disposition not 
 fixedly averse to the public establishment of 
 education for the middle classes — a willingness, 
 at any rate, to consider a project of this kind 
 on its merits. Amongst them particularly is 
 the ferment and expansion of mind, of which 
 I have spoken, perceptible ; their sense of the 
 value of culture, and their culture itself, in- 
 creases every day. Well, the old bugbear 
 which scares us all away from the great con- 
 fessed means of best promoting this culture — 
 the religious difficulty, as it is called — is potent 
 only so long as these gentlemen please. It rests 
 solely with themselves to procure the public 
 establishment of secondary instruction upon a 
 perfectly equitable basis as regards religious 
 differences. If its establishment is suffered to 
 fix itself in private hands, those hands will be 
 the clergy's. It is to the honour of the clergy 
 — of their activity, of their corporate spirit, of 
 their sense of a pressing want — that this should 
 be so. But in that case the dominant force in 
 settling the teaching in these schools will be 
 clerical. Their organisation will be ecclesias- 
 tical. Mr. Woodard tells us so himself; and 
 indeed he (very naturally) makes a merit of it. 
 
I20 A French Eton. 
 
 This is not what the Dissenters want, neither 
 is it what the movement of the modern spirit 
 tends to. But when instruction has once been 
 powerfully org-anised in this manner, it is very- 
 difficult for the State afterwards to interfere for 
 the purpose of giving effect to the requirements 
 of the modern spirit. It is met by vested inte- 
 rests—by legitimate vested interests — not to be 
 conciliated without great delay and difficulty. 
 It is not easy for the State to impose a con- 
 science clause on primary schools, when the 
 establishment of those schools has been for the 
 most part made by the clergy. It is not easy to 
 procure the full benefits of the national univer- 
 sities to Nonconformists, when Anglicanism has 
 got a vested interest in the colleges. Neither 
 will it be easy hereafter, in secondary instruc- 
 tion, to settle the religious difficulty equitably, 
 if the establishment of that instruction shall 
 have been effected by private bodies in which 
 clerical influence predominates. 
 
 I hope the middle class will not much longer 
 delay to take a step on which its future value 
 and dignity and influence so much depend. 
 By taking this step they will indirectly confer 
 a great boon upon the lower class also. This 
 obscure embryo, only just beginning to move,; 
 
A French Eton. 12 1 
 
 travailing in labour and darkness, so much left 
 out of account when we celebrate the glories of 
 our Atlantis, now and then, by so mournful a 
 glimpse, showing itself to us in Lambeth, or 
 Spitalfields, or Dorsetshire ; this immense work- 
 ing class, now so without a practicable passage 
 to all the joy and beauty of life, for whom in 
 an aristocratic class, which is unattainable by 
 them, there is no possible ideal, for whom in a 
 middle class, narrow, ungenial, and unattractive, 
 there is no adequate ideal, will have, in a cul- 
 tured, liberalised, ennobled, transformed middle 
 class, a point towards which it may hopefully 
 work, a goal towards which it may with joy 
 direct its aspirations. 
 
 Children of the future, whose day has not yet"^ 
 dawned, you, when that day arrives, will hardly 
 believe what obstructions were long suffered to 
 prevent its coming! You who, with all your 
 faults, have neither the aridity of aristocracies, 
 nor the narrow-mindedness of middle classes, 
 you, whose power of simple enthusiasm is your 
 great gift, will not comprehend how progress 
 towards man's best perfection — the adorning 
 and ennobling of his spirit — should have been 
 reluctantly undertaken; how it should have 
 been for years and years retarded by barren 
 
122 ' A French Eton, 
 
 commonplaces, by worn-out clap-traps. You 
 will wonder at the labour of its friends in 
 proving the self-proving ; you will know no- 
 thing of the doubts, the fears, the prejudices 
 they had to dispel ; nothing of the outcry they 
 had to encounter; of the fierce protestations of 
 life from policies which were dead and did not 
 know it, and the shrill querulous upbraiding 
 from publicists in their dotage. But you, in 
 your turn, with difficulties of your own, will 
 then be mounting some new step in the arduous 
 ladder whereby man climbs towards his perfec- 
 tion; towards that unattainable but irresistible 
 lode-star, gazed after with earnest longing, and 
 invoked with bitter tears ; the longing of thou- 
 sands of hearts, the tears of many generations. 
 
 PRINTED BY R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, LONDON. 
 
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