Various

“ Here, in close intercourse with their teachers, or under their immediate guidance, generation after generation of boys, fresh from school, have grown up into men during the three years of their academic life. Here, for the first time, each man has been encouraged to dare to be himself, to follow his own tastes, to depend on his own judgment, to try the wings of his mind, and, lo, like young eagles thrown out of their nest, they could fly. Here the old knowledge accumulated at school was tested, and new knowledge acquired straight from the fountain-head. ”

“ But surely every schoolmaster who is worth his salt should be able to teach children a love of Nature, a wondering at Nature, a curiosity to pry into the secrets of Nature, an acquisitiveness for some of the treasures of Nature, and all this acquired in the fresh air of the field and the forest, where, better than in frouzy lecture-rooms, the edge of the senses can be sharpened, the chest be widened, and that freedom of thought fostered which made England what it was even before the days of compulsory education. ”

“ This kind of forced labour may do some good to the incorrigibly idle, but it does the greatest harm to all the rest. If there is an examination at the end of each year, there can be no freedom left for any independent work. Both teachers and taught will be guided by the same pole-star—examinations; no deviation from the beaten track will be considered safe, and all the pleasure derived from work done for its own sake, and all the just pride and joy, which those only know who have ever ventured out by themselves on the open sea of knowledge, must be lost. ”

“ But if we admit the patent fact that pain exists, let us observe also the tendency which Spencer and Darwin establish towards its minimization. Evolution is a striving ever towards the better and the happier. There may be almost infinite powers against us, but at least there is a deep-laid scheme working towards goodness and happiness. So profound and wide-spread is this confederacy of the powers of good, that no failure and no series of failures can disconcert it. Let mankind be thrown back a hundred times, and a hundred times the better tendencies of evolution will re-assert themselves. ”

“ But in his Essay "On Liberty," Mill for once becomes passionate. In presenting his Bill of Rights, in stepping forward as the champion of individual liberty, a new spirit seems to have taken possession of him. He speaks like a martyr, or the defender of martyrs. The individual human soul, with its unfathomable endowments, and its capacity of growing to something undreamt of in our philosophy, becomes in his eyes a sacred thing, and every encroachment on its world-wide domain is treated as sacrilege. ”

“ When a young man goes to University, unless he means to make scholarship his profession, he ought to be free to enter upon a new career. If he has not learnt by that time so much of Greek and Latin as is absolutely necessary in after-life for a lawyer, or a student of physical science, or even a clergyman, either he or his school is to blame. I do not mean to say that it would not be most desirable for every one during his University career to attend some lectures on classical literature, on ancient history, philosophy, or art. ”

“ Equal and good men assemble in their natural condition to think on the basis of their future State. Each endows the new community with all liberty and property, in order to receive back an equal share of the management and the possessions of the whole. But this whole is omnipotent. No laws bind its will, for its will is the source of all law. No king, no official, no superior rules over it; each individual is only empowered to act, so far and so long as he upholds the plenipotence of the sovereign mass. ”

“ Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. ”

“ No one who knows what the real joy of learning is, how it lightens all drudgery and draws away the mind from mean pursuits, can see without indignation that what ought to be the freest and happiest years in a man's life should often be spent between cramming and examinations.
And here I have at last mentioned the word, which to many friends of academic freedom, to many who dread the baneful increase of uniformity, may seem the cause of all mischief, the most powerful engine for intellectual levelling—Examination. ”

“ There are few men who have a passion for all knowledge, there is hardly one who has not a hobby of his own. Those so-called hobbies ought to be utilized, and not, as they are now, discouraged, if we wish our Universities to produce more men like Faraday, Carlyle, Grote, or Darwin. I do not say that in an examination for a University degree a minimum of what is now called general culture should not be insisted on; but in addition to that, far more freedom ought to be given to the examiner to let each candidate produce his own individual work. ”

“ Education, as it has to be carried on, whether in elementary or in public schools, is no doubt a heavy weight which might well press down the most independent spirit; it is, in fact, neither more nor less than placing, in a systematized form, on the shoulders of every generation the ever-increasing mass of knowledge, experience, custom, and tradition that has been accumulated by former generations. ”

“ Until then the first class of a great nation had never been known to make the formation of an exquisite society its highest, nay, its only life-purpose, to subordinate and sacrifice mental activity, moral strength, and individuality of character to the promotion and claims of this cultus. Here the final end of existence was enjoyment in all imaginable degrees, and thought and action were rigidly directed to it. That the greatest part of life should be spent in society was the most pressing requirement of politeness, the reciprocal recognition without which all society becomes unendurable. ”

“ All this is left to the later struggle for life; and in that struggle it seems as if those who, after having surveyed the vast field of human knowledge, have settled on a few acres of their own and cultivated them as they were never cultivated before, who have worked hard and have tasted the true joy and happiness of hard work, who have gladly listened to others, but always depended on themselves, were, after all, the men whom great nations delighted to follow as their royal leaders in their onward march towards greater enlightenment, greater happiness, and greater freedom. ”

“ It is true that the dull public might plead that a real profession of religiousness on the part of a leading politician was such a novelty that it might be excused being a little puzzled, and believing the worst in its perplexity. Worst or best, Mr. Gladstone has gone on speaking and writing about his religion just as if a man's ethics and faith ought to have some connection with his politics, and, as time has passed, people appear to think it less strange. ”

“ With the Parisian catastrophes the whole Ancien Régime rocked and gave way from side to side; and not merely privileges and feudal rights, but all State authorities vanished at one blow, or at the first threat from an armed mob resigned their functions. The French nation had positively no government, no laws, no police, no taxation. In place of these they had journals, clubs, societies, popular songs, and Lynch law; security for person and property no longer existed; every one did according to his heart's desire till a stronger than he preferred the opposite and knocked him down. ”

“ Not that there is less work done at Oxford than at Leipzig, but that the work is done in a different spirit. It is free in Germany; it has now become almost compulsory in England. Though an old professor myself, I like to attend, when I can, some of the professorial lectures in Germany; for it is a real pleasure to see hundreds of young faces listening to a teacher on the history of art, on modern history, on the science of language, or on philosophy, without any view to examinations, simply from love of the subject or of the teacher. ”

“ But granting even that in Mill's time there existed some traces of social tyranny, where are they now? Look at the newspapers and the journals. Is there any theory too wild, any reform too violent, to be openly defended? Look at the drawing-rooms or the meetings of learned societies. Are not the most eccentric talkers the spoiled children of the fashionable world? When young lords begin to discuss the propriety of limiting the rights of inheritance, and young tutors are not afraid to propose curtailing the long vacation, surely we need not complain of the intolerance of English society. ”

“ I fully agree with Mill in recognizing the dangers of uniformity, but I doubt whether what he calls the régime of public opinion is alone, or even chiefly, answerable for it. No doubt there are some people in whose eyes uniformity seems an advantage rather than a disadvantage. If all were equally strong, equally educated, equally honest, equally rich, equally tall, or equally small, society would seem to them to have reached the highest ideal. ”