Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/717

Rh wealth and social station. "Gentlemen" (!) of education (save the mark!) and leisure have employed, annually, in the corruption of female youth and childhood, sums that would have afforded decent maintenance to numbers of poor families. Men whose own condition of life had been made in every way desirable, so far as money could accomplish that object, have found nothing better to do than to employ their means in spreading moral contagion and destruction among the families of the poor. Men who boast the name of Englishmen have thought it not beneath them to trade in the souls and bodies of unfortunate children. England, as a nation, struck the manacles from the hands of her negro slaves over fifty years ago; but some Englishmen to-day, belonging to the most favored social class, do not hesitate to practice, upon weaker members of their own race, crimes worse than those which made slavery a hissing and an abomination among the civilized races of mankind.

It is needless, however, to dwell further on the facts. Words can but feebly express the shame and horror that they involve. "What we may do with advantage is to consider whence such evils spring, and what is their most effectual remedy.

As regards the unhappy victims of the rich man's lust, there is an economic side to the problem which is doubtless difficult to deal with. That the pressure of life should be so hard upon some, as to render the path of virtue one almost impossible to tread, is in itself an evil of the first magnitude, and one which a more fully developed economic science must some day grapple with. The efforts at present being made, under the guidance of a purely sentimental impulse, to provide improved dwellings for the poor, and in other ways to force on them higher modes of living, we do not, we must confess, regard as very hopeful. It is seldom that the state succeeds in paying Peter without robbing Paul, or in closing the door to one social abuse without opening it to another and perchance a greater. The economic problem, however, is not the only one to consider, nor is it perhaps the most important. The educational problem demands equal and more immediate attention, seeing that the knowledge necessary for its solution is immediately available. As every one is aware, a vast amount has been done for popular education in England within the last fifteen years; yet it is precisely the children who have been growing up during the last fifteen years who are furnishing prey for the "Minotaurs" and other scoundrels of the metropolis. The theory of state education is that the state is bound to see that its juvenile members do not grow up ignorant, and, as a result of ignorance, prone to vice. It is also held that the state owes it to every youthful citizen to furnish him or her with such elements of education as may be needed to fit them for employments requiring a knowledge of reading and writing. From the latter point of view reading and writing are looked upon in the light of tools; but why the state should be required to furnish mental tools rather than material ones—to furnish the child's head with the multiplication-table, but not to provide his hands with saw, axe, or hammer—has never, to our mind, been entirely evident. It seems to us that if the state is to educate, the whole strain and stress of its effort should be to produce good citizens; not to fit this boy for a counting-house or that girl for a position as "sales-lady," but to impart to both that knowledge and imbue both with those principles that make for the right ordering of life and for the good of society. The multiplication-table and the rules of grammar may be found valuable aids to these all-important objects—we do not say they are not—but we insist that they should be looked upon and treated as means always, as ends never; and as means to no other objects than the ones