Note 474 — BOOK VIII THE AGE OF THE GREAT POWERS (continued 5)

The great Oxford school of Literæ Humaniores, which means a serious study of Ancient Philosophy and Ancient History, was already thirty years old in Gladstone’s time, and was a really serious training in solid philosophy and solid history. It was all the more serious, as every candidate for Honours had to take two schools and to offer Mathematics as well as Literæ Humaniores. Both Peel (about 1810) and Gladstone (about 1830) took these two schools, and both gained Firsts in both. (This, by the way, is the only true and genuine “double first.”) Men with such a training were genuinely and nobly trained for statesmanship.—E. B.

With no knowledge of ethnology, no vision of history as a whole, misconceiving the record of geology, ignorant of the elementary ideas of biological science, of modern political, social, and economic science and modern thought and literature!—H. G. W.