Page:The Education of the Conscience.djvu/8

4 should use it, and what each may do to make it flourish from year to year increasingly.

Now there is only one test which we can put to a place like this. It undertakes a great work, and a great responsibility: for it undertakes some hundred or more of those who will be men, during the years in which they grow and learn and are formed; and we cannot ask of it less than this: Does it fit them to reach their fullest manhood? does it help them to grow to their fullest growth? does it train them to fill their places in the world to the utmost of their own best?

So, then, we have to take a man, that which each boy is growing to be, and see what sort of creature he is, and how he will need to be trained. And first we get on quite simply. There is his body; and for this his school does well: it gives him wholesome and sufficient food (for which, I hope, when he thinks of the poor white, puny, underfed children in the slums, he sometimes not only 'says grace' but gives thanks); it has its games, its gymnastics, its fresh-air life, its bathing, its careful arrangements, such as modern science has brought them to be, for all that ministers to health. Yes, it will train these young growing bodies into strong and active men. And then their minds and wits. Here, again, the school does well for them: it has its careful system, working up from form to form, from the grammar and repetition at the bottom, to the study of the deeper laws and delicate distinctions of language, and of the great works of human thought, at the top; it has the competition for prizes and promotion which quickens zeal and brightens wits; it has the intercourse out of school of boys with boys, of masters with boys;