Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/71

 way and with an eye to their own interests, spiritual or material. Which is why a free press and a free pulpit have often seemed worth dying for.

Wherever civilization exists various classes, sects and nations of men have, one by one, claimed the right to that examination of things for themselves which is called education. They have never attained to it without opposition; and one of the most frequent and specious forms of that opposition is embodied in the argument that education would not only be useless to them, but would unfit them for their duties. No doubt this argument was often put forward in all honesty as the outcome of a conviction that was none the less sincere because it was prompted by self-interest. That conviction had its roots in the common and widespread inability to realize the actual human identity of other persons—in the habit of summing them up and estimating them in the light only of the salient (and often superficial) characteristics which affect ourselves. I can best explain what I mean by saying that to many of us the word "clerk" does not summon up the mental representation