Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/26

 power should ever succeed in turning our old Modern History Course into a technical school for historians—technical in the sense that the education here in Medicine or Forestry is technical. I should myself—as I have said before—deplore any such transformation, holding as I do that the School is discharging a more generally useful function as it stands at present, than it would if it were equipped with a severely specialistic curriculum, intended only for those who were destined for the career of researchers in or teachers of history. Clearly a School reconstructed on such lines would cease to attract some four-fifths of those who at present enter for it It would be a wholly different affair.

Now there are some few of these young gentlemen whom we have at present to teach, whom I should be quite contented to evict; they read Modern History not because they have any vocation for its study, or any special interest in it, but simply and solely because their college compels them to offer some Honour School, and they hope to find this one rather less rebarbative than Law or Mathematics, Theology or Physical Science. These men. Passmen, Honour-men by external compulsion, are a nuisance to their tutors; it is heartbreaking to harangue them for forty minutes as they loll listless, after delivering their perfunctory weekly essay. They are a nuisance to the examiner, who sits doubting wearily whether he shall give them a 'group' or two, or simply relegate them to the limbo of non satis. They are ultimately a nuisance to the college which has unwisely forced them to take honours, since they are thrown back upon it in October, to take some sort of a pass—to the complete upsetting of tutorial arrangements.

But setting aside the 30 or 40 men a year who ought