Largely, if not entirely, owing to the expansion of our common school system—admirable in Ontario and Nova Scotia, but defective in Quebec—and the influence of our universities and colleges, the average intelligence of the people of this country is much higher than it was a very few years ago; but no doubt it is with us as with our neighbours—to quote the words of an eminent public speaker whose brilliancy sometimes leads one to forget his higher criticism—I refer to Dr. Chauncey Depew—"Speed is the virtue and vice of our generation. We demand that morning-glories and century plants shall submit to the same conditions and flower with equal frequency." Even some of our universities from which we naturally expect so much seem disposed from time to time to lower their standard and yield too readily to the demand for purely practical education when, after all, the great reason of all education is to draw forth the best qualities of the young man, elevate his intelligence, and stimulate his highest intellectual forces. The animating principle with the majority of people is to make a young man a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or teach him some other vocation as soon as possible, and the tendency is to consider any education that does not immediately effect that result as superfluous. Whilst every institution of learning must necessarily yield something to this pervading spirit of immediate utility, it would be a mistake to sacrifice all the methods and traditions of the past when sound scholars at least were made, and the world had so many men famous in learning, in poetry, in romance, and in history. For one I range myself among those who, like James Russell Lowell and Matthew Arnold, still consider the conscientious and intelligent study of the ancient classics—the humanities as they are called—as best adapted to create cultured men and women, and as the noblest basis on which to build up even a practical education with which to earn bread and capture the world. Goldwin Smith very truly says, "A romantic age stands in need of science, a scientific and utilitarian age stands in need of the humanities."[62] The study of Greek, above all others of the humanities, is calculated to stimulate50 the higher qualities of our nature. As Matthew Arnold adds in the same discourse from which I have quoted, "The instinct for beauty is set in human nature, as surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the instinct for conduct. If the instinct for beauty is served by Greek literature and art as it is served by no other literature or art, we may trust to the instinct of self-preservation in humanity for keeping Greek as part of our culture." With the same great critic and thinker, I hope that in Canada "Greek will be increasingly studied as men feel the need in them for beauty, and how powerfully Greek art and Greek literature can serve this need." We are as respects the higher education of this country in that very period which Arnold saw ahead for America—"a period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency"—a tendency to crowd into education too many matters; and it is for this reason I venture to hope that letters will not be allowed to yield entirely to the necessity for practical science, the importance of which I fully admit, while deprecating it being made the dominant principle in our universities. If we are to come down to the lower grades of our educational system I might also doubt whether despite all its decided advantages for the masses—its admirable machinery and apparatus, its comfortable school-houses, its varied systematic studies from form to form and year to year, its well managed normal and model schools, its excellent teachers—there are not also signs of superficiality. The tendency of the age is to become rich fast, to get as much knowledge as possible within a short time, and the consequence of this is to spread far too much knowledge over a limited ground—to give a child too many subjects, and to teach him a little of everything. These are days of many cyclop?dias, historical summaries, scientific digests, reviews of reviews, French in a few lessons, and interest tables. All is digested and made easy to the student. Consequently not a little of the production of our schools and of some of our colleges may be compared to a veneer of knowledge, which easily wears off in the activities of life, and leaves the roughness of the original and cheaper material very perceptible. One may well believe that the largely mechanical system and materialistic tendency of our education has some effect in51 checking the development of a really original and imaginat............