STATE EDUCATION: A HELP OR HINDRANCE? 595 



Add one more consideration. A great department must be by the 

 law of its own condition unfavorable to new ideas. To make a change 

 it must make a revolution. Our education department, for example, 

 can not issue an edict which applies to certain school boards and not 

 to others. It knows and can know of no exceptions. Our bastard 

 system of half-central half -local government is contrived with great 

 ingenuity to render all such experiments impossible. If the center 

 were completely autocratic (which Heaven forbid !), it could try such 

 experiments as it chose ; if the localities were independent, each could 

 act for itself. At present our arrangements permit of only intolerable 

 uniformity. Follow still further the awkward attempts of a depart- 

 ment at improvement. Influenced by a long-continued public pressure, 

 or moved by some new mind that has taken direction of it, it determines 

 to introduce a change, and it issues in consequence a wholesale edict 

 to its thousands of subordinates. But the conditions required for the 

 successful application of a new idea are, that it should be only tenta- 

 tively applied ; that it should be applied by those persons who have 

 some mental or moral affinity with it, who in applying it work intel- 

 ligently and with the grain, not mechanically and against the grain. 

 No wonder, therefore, that departments are so shy of new ideas, and 

 by a soft of instinct become aware of their own unfitness to deal with 

 them. If any one wishes to realize why officialism is what it is, let 

 him imagine himself at the center of some great department which 

 directs an operation in every part of the country. Whoever he was, 

 he must become possessed with the idea of perfect regularity and uni- 

 formity. His waking and sleeping thought would be the desire that 

 each wheel should perform in its own place exactly the same rotation 

 in the same time. His life would simply become intolerable to him if 

 any of his thousands of wheels began to show signs of consciousness, 

 and to make independent movements of their own. 



But suppose that a man of fresh mind and personal energy were 

 to be placed at the head of our education department who perceived 

 the mischievous effect of uniformity, could not this official tendency 

 be counteracted ? It might for a short space of time, just as the mus- 

 cles of a strong man can for some hours defeat the pull of gravitation, 

 but gravitation wins in the end. Such changes would be only spas- 

 modic ; they would not be the natural outcome of the system, and 

 therefore could not last. Moreover, for those who understand the 

 value of liberty and of responsibility, it is needless to point out how 

 utterly false the system must be which makes the nation depend upon 

 the intelligence of a minister, and not upon the free movement of the 

 different minds within itself. 



I come now to another great evil which accompanies an official 

 system. In granting public money for education you must either give 

 it on the judgment of certain public officers, which exposes you to 

 different standards of distribution and to personal caprice, or you must 



