EDITOR'S TABLE. 



703 



and runs of luck at the gaming-table. 

 In this aspect of its influence the school 

 of politics is thoroughly demoralizing. 

 Nothing is better calculated to subvert 

 all manliness and independence of char- 

 acter than the habit, now become so 

 general in this country, of making poli- 

 tics a business, and depending upon the 

 bounties of government as if it were a 

 kind of earthly providence. It is in 

 the wise order of things that people 

 shall depend upon their own efforts, and 

 prosper through the virtues of industry, 

 frugality, and self-denial. There will be 

 misfortune, and there is a function for 

 discriminating charity ; but no teaching 

 is more unwholesome than that which 

 encourages people to count upon the 

 generosity of the rich, government, 

 favor, or something to turn up. Miss 

 Dodge's view of life does not correspond 

 to the realities of hfe, and is, therefore, 

 a bad preparation for the experiences of 

 life. Quite other views must prevail 

 before we shall see the last of such piti- 

 able experiments as that of the Ladies' 

 Deposit. 



STATE education: 



"We last year republished an article 

 by Sir Auberon Herbert, questioning 

 on various grounds the policy of state 

 education. We received several answers 

 to it of various merit, and still more 

 various logic, but they all agreed upon 

 one thiug that state education is in- 

 dispensable to the preservation of the 

 republic. 



We print this month an answer to 

 Mr. Herbert, which is as able as any 

 that have reached us, and has a kind 

 of tacit authority as coming from a 

 public official engaged in the special 

 work of organizing and consolidating a 

 state school system. The writer, Mr. 

 Charles S. Bryant, is Secyetary of the 

 High School Board of the State of 

 Minnesota, which is charged with the 

 duty of prescribing and adjusting the 

 courses of study to be pursued in a con- 



catenated or unified system of state 

 schools, from the primary to the uni- 

 versity. Mr. Bryant is an advocate of 

 state education in its most compre- 

 hensive form, and he also maintains 

 that the right of the state to take 

 charge of this great work is necessary 

 to its self-preservation. 



We are abundantly told that this is, 

 to all intents and purposes, a -settled 

 question; that government education 

 is nothing less than manifest destiny, 

 and the most foregone of all American 

 conclusions. And we have just here 

 already one of the fruits of the experi- 

 ment the borrowing of the political 

 method of buncombe and bullying to 

 force the acceptance of a desired meas- 

 ure, and stave off criticism as a matter 

 of no account. But it is necessary that 

 the subject should be freely discussed, 

 and the more necessary that the princi- 

 ples involved should be thoroughly can- 

 vassed, and the objections to the policy 

 fully pointed out, because of the great 

 popularity of the policy and the dispo- 

 sition to push it to its utmost extremes. 

 The question is no longer of the expe- 

 diency of giving state aid for the pri- 

 mary instruction of the children of the 

 indigent classes who claim to need as- 

 sistance; but it is whether the govern- 

 ment shall undertake this work in all 

 its grades, and take the property of the 

 people to make this whole service a 

 gratuity. 



The advocates of government edu- 

 cation are given to representing it as 

 an issue between state education and 

 no education at all; and the opponents 

 of the measure are often stigmatized as 

 being in fiivor of illiteracy and igno- 

 rance. But this is a profound mistake. 

 State education is intelligently and 

 earnestly opposed in the highest inter- 

 est of education. The intervention of 

 the state is resisted because it can not 

 do in the best manner what it under- 

 takes to do because education by au- 

 thority and political machinery must 

 fall to a lower standard than that which 



