"I accept the conditions."

"Well then, with every new generation there springs up a new order of
ideas. The earlier the age at which a man seizes the ideas that will
influence his own generation, the more he has a start in the race with
his contemporaries. If Kenelm comprehends at sixteen those
intellectual signs of the time which, when he goes up to college, he
will find young men of eighteen or twenty only just /prepared/ to
comprehend, he will produce a deep impression of his powers for
reasoning and their adaptation to actual life, which will be of great
service to him later. Now the ideas that influence the mass of the
rising generation never have their well-head in the generation itself.
They have their source in the generation before them, generally in a
small minority, neglected or contemned by the great majority which
adopt them later. Therefore a lad at the age of sixteen, if he wants
to get at such ideas, must come into close contact with some superior
mind in which they were conceived twenty or thirty years before. I am
consequently for placing Kenelm with a person from whom the new ideas
can be learned. I am also for his being placed in the metropolis
during the process of this initiation. With such introductions as are
at our command, he may come in contact not only with new ideas, but
with eminent men in all vocations. It is a great thing to mix betimes
with clever people. One picks their brains unconsciously. There is
another advantage, and not a small one, in this early entrance into
good society. A youth learns manners, self-possession, readiness of
resource; and he is much less likely to get into scrapes and contract
tastes for low vices and mean dissipation, when he comes into life
wholly his own master, after having acquired a predilection for
refined companionship under the guidance of those competent to select