To harangue on the question whether the life of a lawyer or a soldier is the best, is hardly so inspiring as to debate a question of the day about Ireland or India, which educates in living fact as well as in the rules of the orator's art.

Secondly, the whole aim and object of this "finishing" portion of a boy's education was a false one.

Even the excellent Quintilian, the best of all Roman teachers, believed that the statesman (civilis vir) and the orator are identical: that the statesman must be vir bonus because the vir bonus makes the best orator; that he should be sapiens for the same reason.[302] And the object of oratory is "id agere, ut iudici quae proposita fuerint, vera et honesta _videantur_":[303] i.e.the object is not truth, but persuasion.

We might get an idea of how such a training would fail in forming character, if we could imagine all our liberal education subordinated to the practice of journalism.

But fortunately for us, in this scientific age, words and the use of words no longer serve as the basis of education or as the chief nurture of young life.