Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/367

Rh half-breeds, their protests availing nothing against the evidence of their skins. Whether the crusade inaugurated and sanctioned by the powers that constituted the Congo Free State will prove a more successful civilizer than the Arab's mission remains to be seen. If it fails to blanch the negro's skin, it may, and it is to be hoped that it will, liberate his mind from superstition and prejudice by its higher teaching and example.



HE interest of the community that its growing youth become good citizens, extending as it does almost to a necessity for self-preservation, has developed a system of public education, supported by taxation, like any other instrumentality of government. Besides this there are a great many institutions, particularly of a higher grade, which are of a private or perhaps semi-public character, maintained beyond tuition fees chiefly by individual gifts and bequests, but sometimes also by state aid in addition. Education in such schools of the one class and the other, rather than family education, it is the present purpose to consider with reference to the leading topic.

The maintenance of the social order depends upon the needs of mankind in this world; not upon their desires, their wants, their speculations regarding a life to come. To be sure the interests of men in the latter do influence their conduct in the present life and thus affect their character as citizens. Hence the religious creeds of its members are not matters of indifference to the community. At the same time the great heterogeneity of opinions and faiths makes it a perplexing question how to legislate for the common weal in such personal concerns as that of religion. But yet it may be urged with force that, if we waited for universal agreement before we taught anything, the instruction given in every department would be very scanty.

About all the higher studies, such as philosophy, psychology, political economy, and philosophy of history, would certainly have to be excluded, while in the ordinary branches of science there would be breaks wide enough to destroy continuity of teaching. Men, however, will often submit calmly to having their children taught erroneously in physics or psychology, while they are up in arms if heresies in religion are inculcated. Upon this latter subject there is extraordinary bitterness. What ought to be done under such circumstances?

First, with regard to schools supported by public moneys. Every one is taxed in this respect on equal principles of property-holding, not in proportion to the amount of his political, economical, or religious 