Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/657

Rh The voluntary plan has been tried by England ever since the island came under one rule. And this mode of application was not only not interfered with, but actually encouraged by the state. Immunity from certain punishments was granted to the man who could read. Even this low species of education was rewarded by the state with the title of "clerk, though neither initiated in holy orders nor trimmed with the clerical tonsure."—(Blackstone's "Commentaries," vol. iv, p. 366.) And, after this long reign of voluntary effort, encouraged for centuries by the state, and supplemented by the coöperative principle, the nation is now driven to assume the duty, as it has ever had the right, to control the educational system demanded not only by the parentage but by the whole people. Private efforts, individual and associated labors, all personal benefactions, and various national foundations, have severally exerted the voluntary and in part the coercive methods of education, and, under the most effective operation of them all combined, the national illiteracy has not been diminished, but is rather increasing with the growth in population. How, then, can this system, or, properly, no system, be relied on? With it, can England apply to practical demands the education which the slow growth of the ages has made ready for her hand? It is less a question how to create, than how to apply the knowledge now ready for the hungering masses.

Mr. Herbert objects seriously to state education, because "forced payments taken from other classes place the workman under an obligation; that, in consequence, the upper and middle classes interfere m the education of his children; that under a practical system there is no place for his personal views."

Now, it is hard to see how a tax for the education of the children of the workman should be more likely to create a feeling of obligation toward the tax-payer than would necessarily exist in any other case of taxation for the support of government, standing on the same legal foundation as a tax for education. Why should the feeling of obligation oppress the royal family, to know that royalty is upheld by a forced levy upon the property of the lords and landholders of the realm? It is certainly not such a feeling of dependence as the royal family wishes to discard. Royalty can certainly endure the strain quite as long as the tax-payers desire to continue the relation. But the feeling of obligation does not, in fact, exist between the workmen of England and the class taxed for education, while in this country, from the nature of our political society, it is not only unknown, but an impossible thing.

Labor, in all departments, physical and intellectual, working as a unit, produces a reservoir of wealth. This reservoir of wealth is leisure, a fund common to all, in which all are interested to the extent of their wants, natural or artificial. In the production of this common capital, the laborer, in the first form of production, is an