STATE USURPATION OF PARENTAL FUNCTIONS. 355 



and penalties that follow the absence of these qualities ; then the in- 

 telligent perception that we are meant for our happiness to have these 

 qualities ; then the moral attachment to these qualities that is devel- 

 oped as we struggle to have them. But how can any of these things 

 be if you step in between the man and Nature's way of teaching him 

 with your hasty and ill-advised compulsions ? The parent's treatment 

 of the child, as regai'ds his labor, had been both to parent and child 

 an ever-growing, an ever-widening education, if you had had a little 

 more patience as regards learning Nature's ways, and a little less arro- 

 gance as regards your own methods. 



And now see to-day the second chapter that is already following 

 on the first. Over a long series of years we have been congratulating 

 ourselves upon the philanthropy of these acts and their excellent effect 

 upon the people. A universal system of national education accom- 

 panied with compulsion has succeeded to the acts as their logical com- 

 plement ; and now to-day — thanks to the efforts of a few discerning 

 people who have not simply followed a fashion in this matter — we 

 wake to find that we are applying this system in such a hasty and 

 reckless manner that we are injuring the very brains and bodies that 

 we intended to benefit. Of course, the responsible office can not see the 

 mischief — what public office ever did see or understand the more re- 

 mote and less direct consequences of its actions ? Of course, the great 

 mass of parents that have let the education and management of their 

 children slip practically out of their hands, that have measured their 

 duties by an official regulation, that have allowed a group of worthy 

 gentlemen at Whitehall to think and act for them, and have accepted 

 so much public cash for thus morally effacing themselves, that, in a 

 word, are drowsing while others care for and control the very greatest 

 of their interests, have, just so far as they have done this, disqualified 

 themselves from exercising a wise and intelligent discernment as to 

 where the true loss and the true gain lie. How can it be otherwise ? 

 All great state systems stupefy. Without dwelling upon the oppres- 

 sive uniformity ; the sacrifice of some to others, and of all to official 

 mediocrity ; the stiff wooden parts ; the pedantries and complexities 

 that accompany all attempts at official nursing of a nation ; the hard 

 and fast regulations that turn grants of public money into a curse and 

 not a blessing ; the moral deterioration that results from marrying 

 together one of the noblest of all desires, that of gaining more knowl- 

 edge, with the meanest of all precautions, " Let us do it at the public 

 expense" — leaving all this out of consideration, the one great fact 

 remains, sufficient in itself to damn the whole thing, that where you 

 have a national and imiform system, there you necessarily have two 

 political parties struggling for its management and blotting out all 

 individual choice and pei'ception by the discipline — in an intellectual 

 sense the brutalizing discipline — that each party for the sake of defeat- 

 ing its opponent learns to submit to. All discipline for fighting pur- 



