Mr. John Morley did a very difficult thing on Thursday.
He delivered a brilliant address at the Town Hall, Birmingham, in opening the session of the Midland Institute, on educa- tion of all subjects in the world,—a subject which usually
blunts the edge of the keenest intellect. We do not, however, admire his advice to working-men to study French for the sake of the agreeableness of French literature. We would much rather see our working-men studying all the dreams of the French Socialists, than filling themselves with the sweets of French literature, the Circean charm of which seems to have a peculiar power of sapping the earnestness of Englishmen, though it has not succeeded as yet with Mr. Morley. The most questionable of his remarks was, however, made in ad- vocating Dr. Arnold's suggestion for a history traced backwards from the modern problems to their roots in the past. "It is the pre- sent," said Mr. Morley, "that really interests us ; it is the present that we seek to understand and to explain. I do not in the least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my way more clearly through what is happening to-day." We repudiate that view altogether, and though it seems the view of a man with whom duty is the first consideration, we believe that it is by no means a morally ennobling view. The present writer at least wants to know "what happened in the thirteenth century," not by any means solely, not even chiefly, "be- cause the thirteenth century is at the root of what men think and do in the nineteenth," but because all forms of human action and thought are profoundly interesting in them- selves, and would be so, if one could never move a muscle to speak, or to act, again. It is, we are sure, a totally false philosophy which represents as pure "antiquarian's curiosity" the delight of men in the study of man, even without relation to problems of practical duty.
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