59 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It only wants an effort to shake off the thralldom of familiar ideas 

 and to see with fresh eyes, and then the monstrous fact, that all Eng- 

 land is placing itself under official restraints as regards that which it 

 cares most about, would be enough to show us that there must be some- 

 thing radically wrong in a system which necessarily carries with it 

 such a disqualification. 



" But what are we to do ? " is the impatient exclamation of many 

 persons who feel both the pretensions and the poverty-stricken char- 

 acter of our present system. " Could education be supplied without 

 official assistance?" My answer is that it could ; that the combining 

 and cooperative power of our people would provide for this great 

 want, as it is providing for their religious and social wants ; that money 

 is waiting to flow from some of the richer people, if so plain and good 

 an outlet were left open money which is at present doing harm by 

 creating scholarships and increasing the power of examinations that 

 good citizenship essentially consists in those who have learned to value 

 some gift of civilization awakening the same sense in those who re- 

 main indifferent. " But why did not education spread quicker in the 

 earlier part of the century ? " No truly great thing grows like a mush- 

 room. An intelligent value for education can only spread slowly like 

 civilization itself. In our hurry to act we have not seen how much 

 life and movement is sacrificed to make place for an official system. 

 Those who administer such systems wish to get the flower ready-made 

 without any process of growth. They do not recognize in the early 

 and imperfect efforts the first stage of growth from which the better 

 form will spring, but they wish to start at once with that which will 

 satisfy their own rather prudish eyes. A certain uniform standard is 

 fixed, and all that falls short of it is declared infamous. Of course, it 

 is always possible to smear education, religion, or anything else, over 

 a country, as you might smear paint, by departments or boards, and in 

 five years be able to glorify your great work and to cram your speeches 

 with statistics of what you have done. Every autocrat with ideas in 

 his head has done the same thing, but he has also left it to his succes- 

 sors to moralize over the results of his work. Education when still left 

 to itself did spread, perhaps too rapidly, in the beginning of the cen- 

 tury. Presented to the English people by Lancaster, it was received 

 like a gospel of good news ; and, although many of the early schools 

 were of exceedingly humble and imperfect form, yet the want was 

 beginning to be felt, and the supply was following. Then came the 

 unwise, if well-intentioned, assistance of Government. As usual, the 

 political philanthropists could not endure to see a movement taking 

 its own direction and shaping itself. As soon as the idea of Govern- 

 ment responsibility had taken root, the evil was done. It is a mistake 

 to suppose that Government effort and individual effort can live side 

 by side. The habits of mind which belong to each are so different 

 that one must destroy the other. In the course of time there fell alike 



