Individually, I have no love for academies on the continental model, and still less for the system of decorating men of distinction in science, letters, or art, with orders and titles, or enriching them with sinecures.  What men of science want is only a fair day’s wages for more than a fair day’s work; and most of us, I suspect, would be well content if, for our days and nights of unremitting toil, we could secure the pay which a first-class Treasury clerk earns without any obviously trying strain upon his faculties.  The sole order of nobility which, in my judgment, becomes a philosopher, is that rank which he holds in the estimation of his fellow-workers, who are the only competent judges in such matters.  Newton and Cuvier lowered themselves when the one accepted an idle knighthood, and the other became a baron of the empire.  The great men who went to their graves as Michael Faraday and George Grote seem to me to have understood the dignity of knowledge better when they declined all such meretricious trappings.

But it is one thing for the State to appeal to the vanity and ambition which are to be found in philosophical as in other breasts, and another to offer men who desire to do the hardest of work for the most modest of tangible rewards, the means of making themselves useful to their age and generation.  And this is just what the State does when it founds a public library or museum, or provides the means of scientific research by such grants of money as that administered by the Royal Society.

It is one thing, again, for the State to take all the higher education of the nation into its own hands; it is another to stimulate and to aid, while they are yet young and weak, local efforts to the same end.  The Midland Institute, Owens College in Manchester, the newly instituted Science College in Newcastle, are all noble products of local energy and munificence.  But the good they are doing is not local—­the commonwealth, to its uttermost limits, shares in the benefits they confer; and I am at a loss to understand upon what principle of equity the State, which admits the principle of payment on results, refuses to give a fair equivalent for these benefits; or on what principle of justice the State, which admits the obligation of sharing the duty of primary education with a locality, denies the existence of that obligation when the higher education is in question.

To sum up:  If the positive advancement of the peace, wealth, and the intellectual and moral development of its members, are objects which the Government, as the representative of the corporate authority of society, may justly strive after, in fulfilment of its end—­the good of mankind; then it is clear that the Government may undertake to educate the people.  For education promotes peace by teaching men the realities of life and the obligations which