Page:The probable course of legislation on popular education, and the position of the church in regard to it.djvu/10

 fulfilling the obligation, it itself must do so, it will pass at once to furnishing the means and machinery by which its determination may be carried out.

It is not likely it will make or find much difficulty here. Up to this time, the State, or any thing like a National System, which alone the State properly can regard, has waited on Voluntaryism; henceforth Voluntaryism must wait on a National System. Doing as little violence as may be to existing methods and processes, and recognizing still such agencies, that will assert themselves under such regulations as it may lay down, the State will not any longer let the work come to a standstill any where, because such agencies are paralyzed or inoperative. The ground must be occupied by a System of its own, where not otherwise occupied.

The next step is not quite so certain, opinion being not yet fully formed upon it. Otherwise, it would seem to follow, that what the State determines to be necessary, and to supply because it is necessary, it would not allow to be rejected or disregarded; that compulsion, in short, would attend provision, the State finding its justification, if it wanted any, in its sanitary and maintenance laws. To be necessarily taught, differing only in degree, not in kind of obligation, from being necessarily fed or necessarily vaccinated, "You must go to school," would stand on the same footing, and be enforced by the same authority as, "You must go into the workhouse," or "You must take your child to the doctor." Perhaps Prussian and Saxon examples, spite of the recent marvellous results, will sway the conclusion on this point rather adversely, and the fear of assimilation to a despotic Government will outweigh evident advantages. Anyhow, though a sense of the need of compulsory Education has much grown of late, the public mind is not yet sufficiently disabused of the notion that it is an interference with due personal freedom to make compulsoriness a condition of an Educational System. This notion will be seen, sooner or later, to rest on that liberty of doing what one likes with one's own, which must be allowed to be either inapplicable or perforce to carry so much more as to be proved thereby to be absurd. In fact, this rule must give way somewhere. It is not allowed to the injury of a child's body, why then to that of his mind? or if to his mind, why not to his body?

It does not, however, much matter, as T think we shall see as we go on. The condition will probably take care of itself; and, with one or two more, may be left to the working of the experiment. If the State is in earnest about an Educational scheme, it will not allow it to become an idle effort through a false sentiment, or a practical counteraction.

But we are not left to any mere abstract or a priori regard of the question. It may be objected reasonably, that English legislation does not work in that way. We are not wont to meet necessities by anticipation, or deduce our measures from antecedent principles, however practical. We frame our legislation on such questions