Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/369

Rh and penalties that follow the absence of these qualities; then the intelligent perception that we are meant for our happiness to have these qualities; then the moral attachment to these qualities that is developed as we struggle to have them. But how can any of these things be if you step in between the man and Nature's way of teaching him with your hasty and ill-advised compulsions? The parent's treatment of the child, as regards his labor, had been both to parent and child an ever-growing, an ever-widening education, if you had had a little more patience as regards learning Nature's ways, and a little less arrogance as regards your own methods.

And now see to-day the second chapter that is already following on the first. Over a long series of years we have been congratulating ourselves upon the philanthropy of these acts and their excellent effect upon the people. A universal system of national education accompanied with compulsion has succeeded to the acts as their logical complement; and now to-day—thanks to the efforts of a few discerning people who have not simply followed a fashion in this matter—we wake to find that we are applying this system in such a hasty and reckless manner that we are injuring the very brains and bodies that we intended to benefit. Of course, the responsible office can not see the mischief—what public office ever did see or understand the more remote and less direct consequences of its actions? Of course, the great mass of parents that have let the education and management of their children slip practically out of their hands, that have measured their duties by an official regulation, that have allowed a group of worthy gentlemen at Whitehall to think and act for them, and have accepted so much public cash for thus morally effacing themselves, that, in a word, are drowsing while others care for and control the very greatest of their interests, have, just so far as they have done this, disqualified themselves from exercising a wise and intelligent discernment as to where the true loss and the true gain lie. How can it be otherwise? All great state systems stupefy. Without dwelling upon the oppressive uniformity; the sacrifice of some to others, and of all to official mediocrity; the stiff wooden parts; the pedantries and complexities that accompany all attempts at official nursing of a nation; the hard and fast regulations that turn grants of public money into a curse and not a blessing; the moral deterioration that results from marrying together one of the noblest of all desires, that of gaining more knowledge, with the meanest of all precautions, "Let us do it at the public expense"—leaving all this out of consideration, the one great fact remains, sufficient in itself to damn the whole thing, that where you have a national and uniform system, there you necessarily have two political parties struggling for its management and blotting out all individual choice and perception by the discipline—in an intellectual sense the brutalizing discipline—that each party for the sake of defeating its opponent learns to submit to. All discipline for fighting