Lord Justice Bowen delivered a very striking address on popular
education to the Working Men's College in Great Ormond Street, last Saturday, which he made a kind of criti- cism on Professor lffahaffy's recent article on the superficiality and poverty of the education from which so much is expected. Sir Charles Bowen did not deny that superficiality and poverty ; indeed, he conceded it, and remarked that, though you may polish pewter till it shines, you cannot transform it into silver. Education had reached a high level in many nations whose civilisation had ultimately collapsed. "The hope entertained by the advocates of popular education is not that it will accomplish everything, bat that it will do some- thing." The literary taste of a half-educated public, he evidently did not greatly admire. "Memorials are erected to every one who will only die in the odour of respectability, We write long biographies of Nobody, and we celebrate the centenaries of Nothing." Still, though popular education is not very deep or very thoroughgoing, it will do something if it only introduces men to the great minds of former ages, and so creates a deeper sympathy between them and the smaller men of the present generation. Even University professors, Sir Charles Bowen suggested, would not effect as mach as this, if they take their stand too jealously on the pedantry of learning, and do not put learning to its proper use, by pro- moting a genuine communion between ourselves and the great men of other days.
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