Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/28

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very lop-sided; that in discouraging our agriculture and sacrificing it to the supposed interests of the masses in our towns, we were deliberately throwing away a source of national strength and of political and he would warn our politicians that the continued and increasing bribery of the proletariat, by benefits at the expense of others, in exchange for votes, was simply the rake’s progress of the demagogue that had brought more than one Greek democracy to ruin in his own day.

Lastly he would say that in two important matters we had been foolishly heedless; that our system of national education had not been sufficiently designed to train up our citizens in the spirit of the State, and that we had made it too easy for the least valuable types to increase and multiply at the expense of the provident and the thrifty. ‘You must educate, but educate wisely,' he would say, ‘and you must exercise some selection as regards both the quantity and the quality of your citizens. Only by so doing will you be able to approximate to the end of the State—the good life.’ {{nop}