famously through two or three years of
competition—he is in the end weaker of wit. The
scholar who is crowding information into his
head all the day long, is of no use to his fellows
except as a compiler, and he compiles badly;
while the scholar who spends only a few hours
a day in the acquisition of fresh knowledge, and
gives all the rest of his time to fair bodily and
mental exercise, can get through twelve, or at a
pinch, even sixteen hours of the mental work
by which his fellows are most truly benefited.
The distinction is a wide one, in mind as in
body, between feeding that supports and
increases the strength, and the real use and
exercise of the strength so maintained. There are
plenty of books printed by men who throw their
time away on each extreme. Some cram, their
brains but never use them; others use their
brains but never feed them.

The hurt of competitive examinations among
students, and especially among students who
have passed their boyhood, is, that they are too
commonly made tests rather of memory than of
intelligence. They are based on the long accepted
dictum that young people have not to think, but
to fill their minds with facts taken for granted.
Whoever can show recollection of the greatest
number of such facts, or of the reasonings of
other people, which he has been taught in the
same manner to take without question and
repeat by rote, is the prize wit in whom examiners
delight: though they know well that memory is
no sign of intelligence, and has indeed not
seldom been found strong where the higher powers
of the mind are undeveloped. But the compulsion
to remember or be plucked, is at this day
forcing teachers and learners to feel that there
is no time for the deliberate study which aims
only at producing vigour of intellect. The
thing wanted, is power to turn facts to good
account, not transfer of the facts themselves in a
great heap into the mind out of the books in
which they can be kept on a shelf ready for use
as easily as drugs in jars. We make a doctor
of a man by teaching him to use drugs, not by
forcing him to carry them about upon his back.
Examinations of students, as they are
commonly conducted, have their good side, but
their bad side is that they offer premiums rather
upon repletion than on power. It is a vile
comparison, but not entirely an untrue one, to
compare them with a trial of bodily strength, in
which, instead of a fair test of the power of
endurance in running, leaping, hurling, wrestling,
every candidate should be required to cram
himself till he could cram no more, and then, basins
being set before the competitors, the praise
were to be to him who cast up most.

Much that we have here said, may be
illustrated by the unexpected success of a system of
instruction founded without any particular
reference to views like these. The secretary of a
great educational institution in the heart of
London saw outside its doors of an evening
young men set free from hours of business in
government offices, counting-houses and
elsewhere, willing to carry on steadily the work of
their own education if they could; and within
the building he saw all appliances for systematic
education locked up in deserted lecture-rooms.
He urged his views on the proper authorities,
and so it came to pass, four or five years ago,
that the evening classes at King's College were
established. The success of the experiment has
far exceeded every expectation. Young men,
generally between the ages of twenty and thirty,
flock to the classes, in numbers rapidly increasing
session after session, and, after the routine work
of their day, apply themselves for one or two,
seldom for so much as three hours, to the
reception of direct teaching. This involves, of
course, the application of spare time to
independent preparation and reflection, but until
last year the college itself was thrown open
only for two hours on five evenings, as now only
for three hours in five evenings of the week,
and they suffice. The students in these classes
face the lecturers with an energy of thoughtful
work, and make advances upon which nobody
had calculated when the plan was first
established. Where there was one class receiving
two lectures a week upon one branch of study,
there are now four classes, or even six. In four
years there has been fourfold increase of the
classes first established; and new classes for the
study of Natural Philosophy, of Political
Economy, of Italian, and so forth, have been
demanded. Of each subject there is elementary
teaching, and in most there is a demand also for
the highest forms of knowledge. There are
students of mathematics busying themselves
with the differential calculus, and the abstruser
refinements of that science; there are students
of English, studying difficult, problems of philology,
and creating out of their own healthy
spirit of inquiry a demand for the addition that
has just been made to the department of an
Anglo-Saxon class. The evening classes have in
fact outnumbered other departments of the
college, and have become an evening college in which
men, somewhat older than those who attend in
the morning, work as occasional students at
particular subjects, or, as regular matriculated
students, don the cap and gown, go through full
courses of study, earning college distinctions, and
obtaining at Burlington House—all being done
during the spare time between hours of office
work—their University degrees. The high
average of power shown by these men, and their
unfaltering attention, are, of course, owing in
some measure to their greater age and to the
common bond of earnestness implied in the fact
that each of them has paid his own money, out
of his own earnings, for the information he
receives. It is said to be a literal fact that during
these four or five years in a department which
last winter numbered five hundred and fifty
students, no class has once been disturbed by
active thoughtlessness or the most distant
approach to misconduct.

Assuredly, these good results depend in a
great measure upon the fact that there is brought
into every class-room, freshness of attention.
The pouring in of information and suggestion