Academics From England

"It has been my endeavour for several years to inculcate this truth, that, if the principal writings of the Asiaticks, which are reposited in our public libraries, were printed with the usual advantage of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of Eastern nations were studied in our great seminaries of learning, where every other branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field would be opened for speculation; we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind; we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes; and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate."

"Plato drew many of his notions (through Egypt, where he resided for some time) from the sages of Hindustán."

"Than all Bocara's vaunted gold, Than all the gems of Samarcand."

"Go boldly forth, my simple lay, Whose accents flow with artless ease, Like orient pearls at random strung."

"I am in love with the gopis, ... charmed with Krishna, an enthusiastic admirer of Rama and a devout adorer of Brahma. Yudhisthir, Arjuna, Bhirna and other warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax, and Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad."

"Now it is certain that the genius of every nation is not a little affected by their climate; for whether it be that the immoderate heat disposes the Eastern people to a Life of indolence, which gives them full leisure to cultivate their talents, or whether the sun has a real influence on the imagination, ... whatever be the cause, it has always been remarked, that the Asiaticks excel the inhabitants of our colder regions in the liveliness of their fancy, and the richness of their invention."

"I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written."

"Voices of the glorified urge us onward. They who have passed from the semblances of time to the realities of eternity call upon us to advance. The rest that awaits us invites us forward. We do not pine for our rest before God wills it. We long for no inglorious rest. We are thankful rather for the invaluable training of difficulty, the loving discipline of danger and strife. Yet in the midst of it all the prospect of rest invites us heavenward. Through all, and above all, God cries, "Go forward!" "Come up higher!""

"Of armies on the chequer’d field array’d, And guiltless war in pleasing form display’d; When two bold kings contend with vain alarms, In ivory this, and that in ebon arms."

"Seven hours to law, to soothing slumber seven, Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven."

"Some intelligent and virtuous persons are inclined to doubt the authenticity of the accounts delivered by Moses."

"Some men never heard of the Asiatick writings, and others will not be convinced that there is anything valuable in them; some pretend to be busy, and others are really idle; some detest the Persians, because they believe in Mahomed, and others despise their language, because they do not understand it: we all love to excuse, or conceal, our ignorance, and are seldom willing to allow any excellence beyond the limits of our own attainments: like savages, who thought the sun rose and set for them alone, and could not imagine that the waves, which surrounded their island, left coral and pearls upon any other shore."

"Either the first eleven chapters of Genesis, all due allowances being made for a figurative Eastern style, are true, or the whole fabrick of our national religion is false, a conclusion which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn."

"A celebrated Eastern philosopher begins his first dissertation with the following period. "The perfect education of a great man, consists in three points: in cultivating and improving his underftanding; in assisting and reforming his countrymen; and in procuring to himself the chief good, or a fixed and unalterable habit of virtue." [...] I shall, however, make a slight deviation from the philosopher, by fixing the good of ourselves and our fellow-creatures as the primary end proposed by a liberal education; and considering the cultivation of our understanding, and the acquisition of knowledge, as the secondary objects of it. [...] Now, as neither this knowledge can be perfectly obtained, nor the reason completely improved, in the short duration of human life, unless the accumulated experience and wisdom of all ages and all nations, be added to that which we gain by our own researches, it is necessary to understand the languages of those people who have been, in any period of the world, distinguished for their superior knowledge. It follows, therefore, that the more immediate object of education is, to learn the languages of celebrated nations both ancient and modern."

"I...am obliged of course to believe the sanctity of the venerable books [of Genesis]."

"Labour can claim with some confidence that it is both voicing the demands of nearly all enlightened educationalists and working for the only organization of education which will enable the community to make the best use of the most precious of its natural resources — the endowments of its children."

"Its desire is that what is weak in the higher education of the country should be strengthened, and that what is already excellent should be made accessible to all."

"The organization of education on lines of class, which, though qualified in the last twenty years, has characterized the English system of public education since its very inception, has been at once a symptom, an effect, and a cause of the control of the lives of the mass of men and women by a privileged minority. The very assumption on which it is based, that all that the child of the workers needs is "elementary education" — as though the mass of the people, like anthropoid apes, had fewer convolutions in their brains than the rich — is in itself a piece of insolence."

"They would very strongly advise that in selecting children for higher education care should be taken to avoid creating, as was done, for example, in India, a large class of persons whose education is unsuitable for the employment they eventually enter."

"It is still possible for the largest education authority in the country to propose to erect inequality of educational opportunity into a principle of public policy by solemnly suggesting, with much parade of philosophical arguments, that the interests of the community require that the children of well-to-do parents, who pay fees, should be admitted to public secondary schools on easier intellectual terms than the children of poor parents who can enter them only with free places, and that the children who are so contemptible as to be unable to afford secondary education without assistance in the form of maintenance allowances shall not be admitted unless they reach a higher intellectual standard still!"

"Those who have hitherto governed the nation, believing, and believing with justice, that ignorance and docility go hand in hand, have taken care to ration the education of the workers in doses small enough to be innocuous to the established order."

"Defined by its purpose, its [education's] main aim is not to impart the specialized technique of any particular trade or profession, but to develop the faculties which, because they are the attribute of man, are not peculiar to any particular class or profession of men, and to build up the interests which, while they may become the basis of specialization at a later stage, have a value extending beyond their utility for any particular vocation, because they are the condition of a rational and responsible life in society."

"Even before 1918 we had traveled far from the doctrine of 1870, that "elementary" education was the education of a special class which would obtain no other — what the Committee of Council called in 1839 education "suited to the condition of workmen and servants" — and secondary education that of their masters."

"England has not yet imitated the example set by America and by most of the British Dominions in making public secondary education free."

"The primary school is like the rope which the Indian juggler throws into the air to end in vacancy; that while in the United States some twenty-eight per cent, of the children entering the primary schools pass to high schools, in England the percentage passing from elementary to secondary schools is less than ten."

"In place... of "elementary" education for nine-tenths of the children and "secondary" education for the exceptionally fortunate or the exceptionally able, we need to envisage education as two stages in a single course which will embrace the whole development of childhood and adolescence up to sixteen, and obliterate the vulgar irrelevances of class inequality and economic pressure in a new educational synthesis."

"Apart from the children of the well-to-do, who receive secondary education almost as a matter of course, and whose parents appear usually, though quite mistakenly, to believe that they pay the whole cost of it, secondary education is still commonly regarded as a "privilege" to be conceded only to the exceptionally brilliant or fortunate."

"The number both of pupils and school places in 1922 is... all too small. But, inadequate as they are, they represent something like an educational revolution compared with the almost complete absence of public provision which existed prior to 1902."

"The full comedy of the situation was revealed in 1900, when, nearly a century after France and Germany had laid the foundations of a public system of secondary education, the Court of Appeal virtually decided that there was no Public Authority in England with legal power to establish and maintain secondary schools."

"Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral owners today, can lead a crusade against royalties."

"...To abolish all advantages and disabilities which have their source, not in differences of personal quality, but in disparities of wealth, opportunity, social position, and economic power. It is , in short . . . a classless society, which does not mean a society without differentiated groups, but one in which varieties of individual endowment , not contrasts of property, income and access to education, are the basis of differentiation."

"Democracy is unstable as a political system as long as it remains a political system and nothing more, instead of being, as it should be, not only a form of government but a type of society, and a manner of life which is in harmony with that type. To make it a type of society requires an advance along two lines. It involves, in the first place, the resolute elimination of all forms of special privilege which favour some groups and depress other, whether their source be differences of environment, of education, or of pecuniary income. It involves, in the second place, the conversion of economic power, now often an irresponsible tyrant, into a servant of society, working within clearly defined limits and accountable for its actions to a public authority."

"An erring colleague is not an Amalkite to be smitten hip and thigh."

"Because men are men, social institutions - property rights and the organisation of industry, and the system of public health and education – should be planned...to emphasise and strengthen, not the class differences which divide but the common humanity which unites them."

"The wage-earner is as much entitled as the property-owner to claim equitable consideration for his established expectations...and that workmen have precisely the same right to be satisfied that organization is efficient, and management up to date, as management has that workmen are earning their wages."

"Transference from the primary school to higher education should depend solely upon whether it is likely to be for the benefit of the children concerned."

"If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, "trade is one thing and religion is another," they imply a not very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan. ..."

"In England it is not ungentlemanly to steal halfpennies from children, and industrial interests, it may be assumed, will oppose any reform which interferes with the supply of cheap juvenile labour."

"In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action."

"Tawney the politician barred the way to Tawney the scholar. Time which he might given to studying history was devoted instead to the Fabian Society and the Labour Party, and he tended to see the world past and present in terms of socialist dogma. Hence his wholly untrue picture of early capitalism as cruel and greedy, destructive alike of social welfare and true spiritual values. No one would wish to deny that Tawney was a great man, but this greatness caused him to lead whole generations of history students into grievous error."

"The entrenched left cannot identify with Tawney in honesty for several reasons: The patriotic old wounded soldier from the Somme was always contemptuous of those of us who were in CND, and he strongly supported Gaitskell's "fight, fight and fight again" speech; Tawney never accepted that conference decisions should overrule the judgment of the Parliamentary Labour Party or individual conscience... He did not accept majorities based on what he considered the total non-democracy of the block vote... The right would hesitate to vote for Tawney's ghost because his commitment to Clause 4, to extensive public ownership, to his philosophical attack on the sanctity of private property... The ghost of Tawney, the whole Tawney, would shake them all."

"I read R.H. Tawney's book, The Attack, which is a series of pieces written over the course of his life... Reading it, I realised that the right wing of the Labour Party, that is to say the Croslands and the Hattersleys, have really stolen Tawney and made him their apostle, whereas when you actually read what he had written you find he was an intensely radical man. I have been asked to write a preface for the new issue, and I intend to try to get him reinstated as the spokesman for the mainstream, democratic, Christian socialist left... The more I read Tawney, the more I become convinced that his words would be helpful and comforting to us now and would assist in preventing the so-called Social Democrats from breaking away from the Labour Party."

"It was the quality of life, not the quantity of possessions, that was the justification for him of a socialist programme. He showed his dedication to this ideal not only in his writing but also in his life, and it seems to me that in raising the question of the quality of life, as a corollary of the overwhelming change in sheer quantity brought about by the Industrial Revolution, Mr Thompson is restoring as a genuine concern of economic historians the spirit of what I understand the Tawney tradition to be."

"Tawney held out hopes of a better world to come, and he possessed a quality that impressed all who met him: purity of heart."

"With great regret I am coming to think increasingly that there is not a single work which Tawney wrote which can be trusted. I think that in all his work he was so dominated by his preconceptions, unconsciously (well, partly unconsciously), that everything he wrote was written to a propaganda purpose. And the result has been very drastic. People won't believe this, but when the historian comes to write – if an historian still comes to write – an intellectual history of the early twentieth century, Tawney will be one of the figures he will really have to concern himself with. Not Toynbee, whose influence is neither here nor there (not in this country at any rate). Not Maitland, who carried very little influence in the public mind, even indirectly. But Tawney, who wrote for a purpose – wrote beautifully, and wrote history which was in great parts – I am looking for a polite word – in great parts mistaken. And it was mistaken because he meant it to be so, though he didn't know this. He was proving a point."

"Mankind may wring her secrets from nature, and use their knowledge to destroy themselves."

"The certainties of one age are the problems of the next."

"Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow."

"Tawney's Socialism...derived from a Christian inspiration. Tawney's Socialism, thanks no doubt to his memories of the First World War, comprised a full-blooded defence of the way Britain must be physically defended... Tawney's Socialism was also inextricably soldered with his democratic faith; the two together so that no one could ever put them asunder. Tawney's Socialism could not be traced solely to William Morris...but Morris's ideas and idealism were woven into the rich pattern of his political faith... His writings were read and loved – it is not too much to say – by one generation of Socialists after another."

"The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, "What shall it profit a man?" carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well."