actresses, or dramatic writers. This school, you will understand,
is to be equal to the best existing public school. It is to be
made to impart a sound, liberal, comprehensive education, and it is
to address the whole great middle class at least as freely, as
widely, and as cheaply as any existing public school.
Broadly, ladies and gentlemen, this is the whole design. There are
foundation scholars at Eton, foundation scholars at nearly all our
old schools, and if the public, in remembrance of a noble part of
our standard national literature, and in remembrance of a great
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humanising art, will do this thing for these children, it will at
the same time be doing a wise and good thing for itself, and will
unquestionably find its account in it. Taking this view of the
case – and I cannot be satisfied to take any lower one – I cannot
make a sorry face about “the poor player.” I think it is a term
very much misused and very little understood – being, I venture to
say, appropriated in a wrong sense by players themselves.
Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I can only present the player to
you exceptionally in this wise – that he follows a peculiar and
precarious vocation, a vocation very rarely affording the means of
accumulating money – that that vocation must, from the nature of
things, have in it many undistinguished men and women to one
distinguished one – that it is not a vocation the exerciser of
which can profit by the labours of others, but in which he must
earn every loaf of his bread in his own person, with the aid of his
own face, his own limbs, his own voice, his own memory, and his own
life and spirits; and these failing, he fails. Surely this is
reason enough to render him some little help in opening for his
children their paths through life. I say their paths advisedly,
because it is not often found, except under the pressure of
necessity, or where there is strong hereditary talent – which is
always an exceptional case – that the children of actors and
actresses take to the stage. Persons therefore need not in the
least fear that by helping to endow these schools they would help
to overstock the dramatic market. They would do directly the
reverse, for they would divert into channels of public distinction
and usefulness those good qualities which would otherwise languish
in that market’s over-rich superabundance.
This project has received the support of the head of the most
popular of our English public schools. On the committee stands the
name of that eminent scholar and gentleman, the Provost of Eton.
You justly admire this liberal spirit, and your admiration – which
I cordially share – brings me naturally to what I wish to say, that
I believe there is not in England any institution so socially
liberal as a public school. It has been called a little cosmos of
life outside, and I think it is so, with the exception of one of
life’s worst foibles – for, as far as I know, nowhere in this
country is there so complete an absence of servility to mere rank,
to mere position, to mere riches as in a public school. A boy
there is always what his abilities or his personal qualities make
him. We may differ about the curriculum and other matters, but of
the frank, free, manly, independent spirit preserved in our public
schools, I apprehend there can be no kind of question. It has
happened in these later times that objection has been made to
children of dramatic artists in certain little snivelling private
schools – but in public schools never. Therefore, I hold that the
actors are wise, and gratefully wise, in recognizing the capacious
liberality of a public school, in seeking not a little hole-andcorner
place of education for their children exclusively, but in
addressing the whole of the great middle class, and proposing to
them to come and join them, the actors, on their own property, in a
public school, in a part of the country where no such advantage is