With the reconquest of India and of the reform of the Army ...

With the reconquest of India and of the reform of the Army after the Crimea, it needed them in increasing numbers; and it was satisfied that the best way to get them was to begin by producing public-school boys and overlooking their deficiencies in 'everything which a well-educated Englishman ought to know'. For the civil branches, indeed, something more was required which Oxford and Cambridge would supply. Macaulay annexed the Indian Civil Service to the Universities: Jowett and Trevelyan, beaten in '53, had their victory in 1870, when Gladstone annexed the administrative grades of the English Civil Service.

Isolated by history as much as by the sea, the English

ruling class had bred true to the barbaric

type from which absolutism and revolution had deflected the foreign aristocracies; round this type, with its canons of leadership-respect for the past, energy in the present, and no

great thought for the future-Victorian

England formed a new ideal, in which the insolent humanism of the eighteenth century was refined by religion, and the industrious Puritanism of the early nineteenth century was mellowed by public spirit; and to disengage, to affirm, and to propagate the type, no better instrument could have been devised than the Universities and public schools, with their routine of authority and old websites and their home background of country life and sport. That the ideal was in many ways defective is too obvious to be asserted or denied: it was the flower of a brief moment of equipoise, Protestant, northern, respectable.

It omitted much that a Greek or Italian would have thought necessary to completeness: artistic sensibility, dialectic readiness, science, and the open mind-Aristophanes would have thought Sidney Herbert exceedingly superstitious:' Ariosto, one fears, would have set him / her down as a prig-and to its defects must be in large measure ascribed the imprecision of late Victorian thought and policy which contrasts so ominously with the rigorous deductions of the early Victorians.

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