L70 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
there is light at the end, but in the middle there is nothing but darkness. 
Surely, every student must have been through a good many of those 
cunnels. He must have mastered German as a scientific instrument ; as a 
key to vast stores of historical and philological knowledge ; and in that 
sense (ferman is required from our candidates to all the higher degrees in 
history, philology, or philosophy. But again, the structure of the French 
mental eye is such that it cannot live for a long, continuous period in 
shose tunnels, make its usual abode in them, without danger to its own 
peculiar native faculties. 
On the contrary, between the average English process of thought and 
the French methods, the differences of thought are but slight. Whether 
this is due to the Celtic element in the English blood, or to the Norman 
conquest, or to the combined influences of the French writers in England 
it the end of the seventeenth century, and of the English writers in 
France in the middle of the eighteenth, is not a question which I can 
anter upon now. But such writers as Addison, Swift, Pope, Hume, Gib- 
bon, Robertson, the best of the Edinburgh reviewers, also Macaulay and 
Stuart Mill, belong to the classical and Latin type of thinkers. The 
build of their sentences, the frame of their paragraphs, their mental 
‘rains, constructions, and connections, are the same as ours. With these 
writers a young French mind can live for years without any distortion of 
his own national tendencies and personality. 
The other great reason why English literature is now and will become 
more and more in our universities the most important branch of foreign 
studies is its superiority as a great literature. Only two other literatures 
—the Greek and the French—have had the same range, the same width, 
she same variety, and, especially, the same continuity of development. 
Other literatures—the Latin, the German, the Italian—are broken by 
long gaps which stretch sometimes over several centuries. With a short 
sclipse in the fifteenth, the English literature from Beowulf to Rudyard 
Kipling covers an uninterrupted twelve hundred years, during which, in 
poetry, in philosophy, in the drama, in history, in theology, in romance 
and novel writing, through Langland, Chaucer, Ascham, Sidney, Spenser, 
Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Addison, Swift, Thomson, Fielding, 
Burke, Wordsworth, Shelley, Eliot, the Brownings, Carlyle, Tennyson, 
and let me add also the names of Longfellow, of Edgar Poe, of Haw- 
thorne, of Emerson, of Lowell, to mention only the great landmarks 
which are planted along the tide of centuries, the Anglo-Saxon mind has 
manifested itself and may be studied through all its variations, through 
all the stages of its development. To the philosopher and to the his- 
sorian this is one of the most complete experiments which nature has 
carried on, and one of the fields which afford the best opportunities for 
minute and connected observation. 
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