Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/244

230 The expense? It would be no greater than the expense of keeping up the army. And the maintenance and development of an army is of no greater importance to the safety and prosperity of the nation than the more complete education of the generation growing up around us. And besides: why can not the two aims be combined? Why can not the State feed and clothe the entire male generation until the seventeenth or eighteenth year, as it now feeds and clothes the regular army, and during this time, in connection with the primary and intermediate schooling given to them, let them be receiving their military instruction? The national labor would gain vastly by the substitution of the less costly arms of the scholar soldiers for those of the strong and trained young men of twenty to twenty three, of whose valuable labor the community is now deprived. The actual gain in this way to the nation would represent an amount of money sufficient to cover the entire extra expense of the scholar army over the present army, whose capability for labor is condemned to three years of unproductiveness, at the very blossoming time of its development.

Such a system to be complete, must be founded upon a certain other condition. Not every mind is capable of receiving and assimilating the higher and highest branches of learning. If the State is to take charge of the whole population of scholars throughout the country and thus make education possible to all, even to the son of the poorest man, then it must take care that its benefits are not wasted upon those who are unworthy or incapable of profiting by them. At the close of each school year a strict and exhaustive examination of the scholars should take place, and those only be allowed to enter the grade above, who were able to sustain the examination. In this way the talentless scholar would drop out of school after