in accordance with those which have been established in my own mind by
much and long-continued thought upon educational questions. Permit me
to place before you the result of my reflections.

Under one aspect a university is a particular kind of educational
institution, and the views which we may take of the proper nature of a
university are corollaries from those which we hold respecting
education in general. I think it must be admitted that the school
should prepare for the university, and that the university should crown
the edifice, the foundations of which are laid in the school.
University education should not be something distinct from elementary
education, but should be the natural outgrowth and development of the
latter. Now I have a very clear conviction as to what elementary
education ought to be; what it really may be, when properly organised;
and what I think it will be, before many years have passed over our
heads, in England and in America. Such education should enable an
average boy of fifteen or sixteen to read and write his own language
with ease and accuracy, and with a sense of literary excellence derived
from the study of our classic writers: to have a general acquaintance
with the history of his own country and with the great laws of social
existence; to have acquired the rudiments of the physical and
psychological sciences, and a fair knowledge of elementary arithmetic
and geometry. He should have obtained an acquaintance with logic rather
by example than by precept; while the acquirement of the elements of
music and drawing should have been pleasure rather than work.

It may sound strange to many ears if I venture to maintain the
proposition that a young person, educated thus far, has had a liberal,
though perhaps not a full, education. But it seems to me that such
training as that to which I have referred may be termed liberal, in