Mr. John Morley made an educational speech at the Battersea.
Polytechnic on Wednesday, after a distribution of prizes there, though he apologised for doing so on the ground Of the exceptional dullness of educational speeches for orator and audience alike, especially the latter, a dullness for which he did not try to account. Is it not that men and women gener-
ally are interested in the results of education, not in the means, and that the young people who are pursuing the methods which recommend themselves to their teachers, know nothing and care nothing about the theoretical discussions of the value of those methods P Mr. Morley thought tbat Germany had beaten us in technical education, and that it was very important for England to improve her system of technical edumtion,—all which is perfectly undeniable, and also perfectly uninteresting. He ended eloquently by declaring that the world is "in many respects a terrible place with its inequalities, its fierce struggle, its ghastly ironies. Sometimes one thought of the poet's description of it as a place—
Where men sit and hear each other groan, Where but to think, is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despair ; " and yet there was another side to that view of the case. Never, said Mr. Morley, had there been so many men and women who did their very best to reduce these miseries and "to soften and lighten the hard human lot." Yes ; but will education diminish the " inequalities " of which Mr. Morley complains,
or increase them P We suspect the latter. But we cannot believe that inequalities are in themselves evils ;—we believe that they are often absolutely good.
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