and still less for the system of decorating men of distinction in
science, letters, or art, with orders and titles, or enriching them
with sinecures. What men of science want is only a fair day's wages
for more than a fair day's work; and most of us, I suspect, would be
well content if, for our days and nights of unremitting toil, we could
secure the pay which a first-class Treasury clerk earns without any
obviously trying strain upon his faculties. The sole order of nobility
which, in my judgment, becomes a philosopher, is that rank which
he holds in the estimation of his fellow-workers, who are the only
competent judges in such matters. Newton and Cuvier lowered themselves
when the one accepted an idle knighthood, and the other became a
baron of the empire. The great men who went to their graves as Michael
Faraday and George Grote seem to me to have understood the dignity of
knowledge better when they declined all such meretricious trappings.

But it is one thing for the State to appeal to the vanity and ambition
which are to be found in philosophical as in other breasts, and
another to offer men who desire to do the hardest of work for the most
modest of tangible rewards, the means of making themselves useful to
their age and generation. And this is just what the State does when it
founds a public library or museum, or provides the means of scientific
research by such grants of money as that administered by the Royal
Society.

It is one thing, again, for the State to take all the higher education
of the nation into its own hands; it is another to stimulate and to
aid, while they are yet young and weak, local efforts to the same
end. The Midland Institute, Owens College in Manchester, the newly
instituted Science College in Newcastle, are all noble products of
local energy and munificence. But the good they are doing is not