The Portland daily press., 1874-08-12
The Lords in Arithmetic.

The Lords in Arithmetic.
One of the most curious stories which has
come from England for long time is that
about Lord Chelmsford, who used to be Chan
cellor. The other day, wishing to Illustrate
the severity of the examination Tor admission
to the naval academy at Woolwich, he sub
mitted to his fellow members of the House
of Lords the examination papers which had
been used on recent occasion to test the
proficiency of lads thirteen or fourteen years
old. He rather thought that most of the
peers would fail to pass, and intimated that
the majority of them could not solve in three
hours the following problem on which the
boys were given only two hours aud half:
Suppose paper enough to cover the walls
of room to cost 81 IS I'D it is three-fourths
of yard wide and is worth AID yard what
would be the cost were it two feet wide and
worth 4d yard?" We are not told whether
the dukes, marquises and earls were''plucked'
or whether they "passed," but it is averred
that they took pencils and paper and vigor-
ously endeavored to find out the iniquity OF
Lord Chelmsford's problem. If they failed,
Cambridge and Oxford have not done so
much for the English nobility as has been
supposed, though we believe the late Lord
Derby was senior wrangler. There is
pretty good evidence that they found the
s'sum' knoity one, from the fact that they,
with one accord, lowered the standard of
scholarship for the cadets We should like
TO see this question submitted to some of the
bright classes in our Portland schools. We
have an idea that there are a good many of
the pupils, not even belonging to such ica-
thyod aristocracy as we have, who could
solve it readily and perhaps mentally. There
is many poor, melancholy little urchin who
would be glad to know that he is ''quicker at
figgers' than the great man who has sat on
the woolsack, and many a pale little miss
, who would feel some qualification at finding
that she has gone deeper into the mysteries
of proportion than the titled gentlemen
whose freebooting ancestors came over with
the filibustering William of Normandy.
To be born an English peer is indeed a
great piece of good luck. You are senator
for life and can vote as you please without
being troubled by constituents, and the peo-
Pile do not have al awkward habit of now
and then cutting off your head as they do In
France. Your property is entailed and there
is commonly good deal of it. Your game
is preserved andy you can make poor man,
who kills rabbit for his starving family, ex-
tremely uncomfortable. There is no position
in the world for moment comparable to il
in point of dignity, security and power. The
British lord is safe, on the one hand, from
the autocratic power Of the sovereign which
makes the Russian mobiles tenure of life and
property so insecure, and, on the other, from
the dem 1cratic fury that sometimes possesses
the peop,e of continental countries, and re-
suits in sudden thinning out of the peer
age.
If there be any comfort in believing that
the greater part of these favored beings are
Incompatible blockheads, there is little diff
Guilty in doing so. The fact that the soyer-
eign is, oftener than otherwise, compelled to
select premier from the ranks of her un-
titled subjects, while the hereditary rulers,
who are trained from youth for positions of
influence and authority, are content to occu-
by merely honorary and unessential places in
the successive cabinets, shows how small a
monopoly of brains is enjoyed by the great
monopolists of land. There is just now a
newspaper paragraph going the rounds, that
tells how certain British duke can ride
nearly all day by rail and not get beyond his
own domains. Think of this we-to-do old
Scot scratching his head over my Lord
Chelmsford question, and finally giving it
up in red-faced and hard-breathing confusion
The same paragraph tells of another duke
who has snug income Of three millions
sterling year, and of yet another who owns
six palaces besides acres of buildings in the
heart of London. Yet perhaps these two
splendid personages may have been made to
feel their mortality by the examination pa
pers Of the naval cadets 1t is plain that these
starred and gartered gentlemen would fail,
nine out OF ten of them, on application for
admission to any American college. Fol
the papers which created in them such pro-
found CONSERVATION appear TO have been
much less difficult than the published exam
ination papers for admission to Harvard Col
lege-less difficult even than the papers of a
middle class in a Newport high school, re-
Gently published by Col. T. w. Higginson.
Let our small people console themselves,
therefore, with the idea that, if they are not
lords, they are at least %mighty knowing"
ExyC NJ W. 90 r,