Mr. Goschen made a most brilliant speech on Thursday at
the Liverpool Institute, which no one will read, because the reporter has headed it "Mr. Goschen on Education." It was not a speech on education at all, but a most powerful address on the cultiva- tion of the imagination, as essential to the highest success in politics, in learning, and in the commercial business of life. The cultivation of the imagination would no more enfeeble men's minds than a journey to a fine scene or a breezy shore would enfeeble their bodies. He preferred "Alice la Won- derland" for children, to any amount of verbal photo- graphs of good little Tommies. Imagination was needful for business, and he gave as an illustration his own father, who used to say he founded a firm because no one would employ him as a clerk, his handwriting being too bad, but who "was steeped to the lips in intellectual cultivation," and did not succeed the worse. And it was needful in politics, if an English democracy was to govern countries all over the world. It was through want of imagination, want of the power to understand them, that this country lost the American Colonies. We hope to return to a speech far above the intellectual level of any speech delivered in this Recess.
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