| THE STORY OF ENGLISH EDUCATION. |
By J. E. G. DE MONTMORENCY, B.A., LL.B. (Cantab.),
BARRISTER-AT-LAW.
THE history of education in England is a subject of profound interest and of singular importance; for it is intimately associated with all the great crises of the national life, and exhibits, as no other subject can, the effects of the interplay of religion, learning and politics upon the sociological development of a great people. The subject is, moreover, one that belongs to all the daughter-nations of England, whether, like Canada, they are still, to use a simile from Roman law, within the English manus, or whether, like the United States, they have become sui juris. For it is necessary to go back far in time if we would trace with honesty the obscure streams of thought, learning and tendency that are responsible for the great systems of education in force in the various parts of the English-speaking world to-day. We have indeed to go back to times which are the common property of that world, and delve among the records of fifteen hundred years of strife and effort if we would understand the meaning and the direction of modern education as conceived by the Anglo-Saxon race. It is well sometimes to dwell, if only for a moment, on the permanence, the persistence, the soundness of the social forces that through a millennium and a half have emanated and still emanate from Britain. Fifteen hundred years almost exactly measured the period of the great Roman race from Romulus the first king to Romulus the last emperor. The Anglo-Saxon race at the end of a similar period shows little sign of exhaustion. It has, as we are often reminded by reformers of every possible type, faults and vices enough; but in the main they are the vices and faults of youth—of youth somewhat impatiently and curiously approaching adolescence after an infancy of fifteen centuries. I desire in these pages briefly to consider this infancy and to indicate the main educational lines that have been followed in so vast a period of preparation. To do so will, I believe, be valuable, for, in the storm and stress of modern times, men are perhaps a little apt to neglect the principles of progress that have been wrung, at the cost of infinite tears, from nature in the past—principles that are the motives of history if we will but read it.
We know from the writings of Tertullian and Origen that it is now at least seventeen hundred years since Christianity took root in Britain; while Zozomen and Euscbius reveal to us, in the fourth
