without going abroad to consult foreign libraries. No adequate provision is made for the higher class of liberal studies, for the higher branches of genuine scholarship. We have indeed a good military academy, a good naval school, perhaps, and some passable law schools; but in matters of political and civil administration, of statesmanship and diplomacy, we have no system of training and are compelled to rely on ineptness and inexperience. Yet we boast of being an enlightened people. Our whole land is, so to speak, covered over with common schools, filled with common school libraries composed of a few dozen wishy-washy volumes each, and we seem to imagine that to read, write, and cipher is all that is necessary to enlighten a people and to make them wise and virtuous, competent to all the complicated affairs of civil and social life.

I complain not that common schools are universal, I complain not that they do not teach more branches and turn out more thorough scholars. They already attempt too much, more than is requisite for the mass of a people, more than the great body of our children can study to any advantage. Common schools are well enough in their place, though less important than our age would have us believe. They can impart as much instruction as the people, considering their ordinary duties and avocations in life, can acquire; but they cannot suffice for the wants of a nation. You can never make all the people scholars, give to all a liberal training— not, if you will, for lack of ability on their part, but for lack of opportunity, and for the necessary incompatibility between such training and the menial offices of life, which require the constant labor and application of the great majority of every community. These offices unfit one for liberal studies and liberal studies unfit one for them. Give, if it were possible,

to the whole community the education, the culture, the refinement, and elevated manners and tastes of the few, and without which a nation remains uncivilized, the great business of life would come to a standstill and your nation would be like an army without privates or a ship without common sailors. On the other hand, to reduce all education and all culture to the level of your common schools is to have no officers, none qualified to take the command and fill the higher offices of civilized society. The Mexican war taught our Democratic statesmen the value of West Point, and we shall not very soon see again ignorant civilians chosen in preference to trained soldiers to command our troops. The great bulk of every community always has depended and always will depend on the leadership in all things of the few.

Here, then, you see the significance of liberal studies, and their absolute necessity to every enlightened and well-ordered state. Liberal studies are the studies of the few, they are the studies of freemen, that is, of gentlemen, and their office is to qualify them to be wise and prudent, just and noble, able guides and leaders, that is, the faithful and competent servants of the community. It is not because you have better blood than others, it is not that society exists for you, for you all nature blooms, and for you the people live and labor, that you are to pursue liberal studies and acquire the knowledge, the tastes, and accomplishments of gentlemen, but that you may exert a wise and salutary influence on the great body of the nation. You are for the nation, not the nation for you; you are to sustain it, not it you. Your liberal education is a trust which you hold from God for the people and you are to use it not for your own private benefit, but in their service; not as a facile means of compelling

them to serve you, but as the necessary means of serving them.

In the view of the case I have presented, the important thing in every nation, above all in every popularly constituted State, is not, as we have foolishly imagined, common school education, is not the education of the mass, but the education of the gentlemen. When what we call the upper classes are properly trained-which by the by they are not, with us— when they have the principles, the virtues, the habits and the tastes proper to their order your State will flourish. It is the few that lift the many, and the virtues of the aristocracy that secure the virtues of the people on the principle I have all along contended for, that all good is from above and operates from high to low, not, as a wild and inept democracy will have it, from low to high.

Do not suppose, gentlemen, that I am unaware that the doctrine I have set forth is directly opposed to the popular doctrine of our country or that I need to be told that it may easily be misapprehended, and made the occasion of representing me as opposed to the people and in favor of despotism, monarchy, and a titled aristocracy. I am well aware of all this, for I am not utterly without experience, and if I sought to win popularity or to gain the applause of the multitude I should have brought out a very different doctrine, and proved my utter unworthiness to be your orator on an occasion like this. I cannot boast of a long line of distinguished ancestors, I cannot boast of having received even a liberal education in any adequate sense of the word; but I can with honest pride boast that I am and always have been, according to the measure of my light and ability, a freeman. I glory in bending my knee to God and to God's minister, but I have never yet learned to bend it to the mob, or to

surrender the freedom and independence of my own soul to the despotism of public opinion. I claim to be a man, an individual, with rights which I will die sooner than surrender, and duties which I dare not neglect. As far as I am able I labor to form a true and noble public opinion, not to obey public opinion whatever it may be. I ask not what the people will say, but what is just, what is true, what is necessary or useful to be said.

Such, gentlemen, I conceive is the spirit of the true scholar, of the gentleman, of the freeman, and such is the spirit with which I wish you to be animated. You are, I take it for granted, Catholics, and as such you have been taught the truth from God himself and know what you are to believe and to do and have no need to learn it from popular opinion, from the Welt-Geist, or spirit of the age. You are instructed from above; therefore you can safely labor to form the popular mind, without danger of misforming it, and in your several spheres prove yourselves safe guides and leaders of the people. Understand well that this is your mission, and dare discharge it, fearlessly, bravely, heroically, whether you have the multitude with you or have, as most likely will be the case, the multitude against you. Be brave, courteous, chivalrous knights in defence of truth and justice, so shall you be without fear and without reproach; so shall you serve your country, avert, it may be, the dangers which threaten it, gain a name which "posterity will not willingly let die," and what is infinitely better, everlasting life and eternal glory in heaven.

BULWER

DWARD GEORGE EARLE LYTTON BULWER LYTTON, first Lord

English

25, 1803. He was the son of William Earle Bulwer, of Heydon Hall, Norfolk, and Elizabeth Lytton, of Knebworth, and upon the death of his mother in 1843 succeeded to her estate and assumed her family name of Lytton. He was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, and in 1827 married Rosina Wheeler, from whom he was separated in 1836. He entered Parliament in 1831, where his voice was heard in defence of the Reform Bill, and sat in the House of Commons until 1841, when he withdrew for a time from political life and gave himself up to literary work and to travel. He returned to Parliament in 1852 as a Conservative member for Hertfordshire, and spoke well and frequently. While colonial secretary, 1858-59, he provided for the organization of British Columbia and the separation of Queensland from New South Wales, a town in each colony being named in his honor. He became Baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1863, and entered the House of Lords, but took no part in its debates. He died at Torquay, Devonshire, January 11, 1873. Bulwer's earliest books obtained a remarkable popularity, although his latest writings are considered his best. He was one of the most energetic, versatile, and prolific authors of his time, and his writings include novels, essays, poems, and dramas. Among his principal works are Eugene Aram" (1832); "The Last Days of Pompeii' (1834); "The Lady of Lyons (1838); "Richelieu" (1839); "Rienzi " (1835); "The Last of the Barons " (1843), and "Harold, the Last of the Saxons " (1848).

"

ON THE CRIMEAN WAR

DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, JUNE 4, 1855

IR,-The right honorable gentleman the member for
Manchester [Mr. Milner Gibson], toward the close of

his able speech, summed up his strongest objections to the continuance of the war by asking how it would profit the country. In answer to that question let me remind the right honorable gentleman of the laudable earnestness with which, in a recent debate, he assured the House that he, and those with whom he concurred in the policy to be adopted for the restoration of peace, were no less anxious than we are for the due maintenance of the national honor.