ment-a true conception of what legislation is for, and what are its proper limits. This question, which our political discussions habitually ignore, is a question of greater moment than any other. Inquiries which statesmen deride as speculative and unpractical, will one day be found infinitely more practical than those which they wade through Blue Books to master, and nightly spend many hours in debating. The considerations that every morning fill a dozen columns of The Times, are mere frivolities when compared with the fundamental consideration-What is the proper sphere of government? Before discussing the way in which law should regulate some particular thing, would it not be wise to put the previous question, whether law ought, or ought not, to meddle with that thing? and before answering this, to put the more general question-What law should do, and what it should leave undone? Surely, if there are any limits at all to legislation, the settlement of these limits must have effects far more profound than any particular Act of Parliament can have; and must be by so much the more momentous. Surely, if there is danger that the people may misuse political power, it is of supreme importance that they should be taught for what purpose political power ought alone to be used. Did the upper classes understand their position, they would, we think, see that the diffusion of sound views on this matter more nearly concerns their own welfare, and that of the nation at large, than any other thing whatever. Popular influence will inevitably go on increasing. Should the masses gain a predominent power while their ideas of social arrangements and legislative action remain as crude as at present, there will certainly result disastrous meddlings with the relations of capital and labour, as well as a disastrous extension of State-administrations. Immense damage will be inflicted: primarily on employers; secondarily on the employed; and eventually on the nation as a whole. These evils can be prevented, only by establishing in the public mind a profound conviction that there are certain comparatively narrow limits to the functions of the State; and that these limits ought on no account to be transgressed. Having first learned what these limits are, the upper classes ought energetically to use all means of teaching them to the people. ON COLLEGE-EDUCATION AND SELF EDUCATION: A LECTURE DELIVERED IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON, BY DAVID MASSON, A. M. PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY ON COLLEGE-EDUCATION AND SELF EDUCATION. I MAY take it for granted that all here present have thoroughly freed their minds from that narrow view of Education which would make the word signify merely a customary course of training, during a certain period of life, in schools, academies, and colleges. We all know that the business of education, in its widest sense, is co-extensive with a man's life—that it begins with the first moment of life, and ends with the last; and that it goes on not alone in buildings like that in which we are now assembled, but in every combination of place, company, and circumstance, in which a man may voluntarily station himself, or into which he may be casually thrust. I may take it for granted, also, that we are all agreed that education, to be complete, must involve not only the process of the acquisition of knowledge or ideas, but also that of the formation of habits. Thus secure against misconception, I have the less hesitation in asking you to let go, for the while, these more comprehensive notions of what is meant by education, and to accept the word with me in a somewhat restricted sense. With your leave, I will here understand education as a process extending only over that preparatory period of U |