poor man could get an education, save by educating himself. For instance,
in February 1815, four months before Waterloo, George Stephenson took out
a patent for the locomotive engine which was to revolutionize the world.
But George Stephenson was a common laborer in the mines, who had no state
instruction available, nor had he even any private institution at hand in
which the workmen whom he employed in practical construction could be
taught. He and his son Robert, had to organize instruction for themselves
and their employees independently. So it was even with a man like Faraday,
who began life as an errand boy, and later on who actually went abroad as
a sort of valet to Sir Humphry Davy. Davy himself was a self-made man. In
short, England, as a community, did little or nothing by education for
those who had no means, and but little to draw any one toward science. It
was at this precise moment that Germany was cast into the furnace of
modern competition with England, who had, because of a series of causes,
chiefly geographical, topographical, and mineralogical, about a century
the start of her. Against this advantage Germany had to rely exclusively
upon civil and military education. At first this competition by Germany
took a military complexion, and very rapidly wrought the complete
consolidation of Germany by the Austrian and the French wars. But this
phase presently passed, and after the French campaign of 1870 the purely
economic aspect of the situation developed more strenuously still, so much
so that intelligent observers, among whom Lord Roberts was conspicuous,
perceived quite early in the present century that the heat generated in
the conflict must, probably, soon engender war. Nor could it either
theoretically or practically have been otherwise, for the relations
between the two countries had reached a point where they generated a
friction which caused incandescence automatically. And, moreover, the
inflammable material fit for combustion was, especially in Germany,
present in quantity. From the time of Fichte and Scharnhorst downward to
the end of the century, the whole nation had learned, as a sort of gospel,