3s6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



poses brutalizes in this sense. It deprives men of more than half their 

 perceptions. And so it comes naturally about that, having adopted 

 the very best means to make ourselves thoroughly stupid about educa- 

 tion — ^first, by factory acts, and then by their logical completion, a 

 universal state system — we now find ourselves face to face with dan- 

 gers, the very possibility of which, in our hurry to manufacture intelli- 

 gence by state machinery, had never occurred to us. But this fright- 

 ful and almost immeasurable evil of over-pressure, which is certainly 

 not going to be charmed out of existence by any number either of 

 indignant or persuasive minutes written with an undisguised odor of 

 office about them by my friend Mr. Fitch, is not the only sign that you 

 can not make the state a parent without the logical consequence of 

 making the people children. Some years ago we were startled by the 

 reports of the ill-adapted food on which children in certain parts of 

 the manufacturing districts were fed, or rather were not fed ; we were 

 startled by the high death-rate of very young children in certain towns. 

 Yet we might have known it would be so. These are the necessary 

 fruits of all such legislation as that of factory acts or of state educa- 

 tion and compulsion, which forces on parents a certain view of their 

 duty instead of leaving them, slowly and painfully though it may be, 

 to learn it intelligently for themselves. Official regulation and free 

 mental perception of what is right and wise do not and can not co- 

 exist. I see no possible way in which you can reconcile these great 

 state services and the conditions under which men have to make true 

 progress in themselves. At least, if you are to do so, you must first 

 get rid of certain great facts in nature. At present we live under the 

 condition which, unfortunately, seems likely to last our time or a little 

 longer, that no great human qualities are developed where you take 

 away the opportunities for their development, that they do not grow 

 spontaneously and without pressure, that each action by which for the 

 moment the good and the bad are placed on the same level — for ex- 

 ample, the selfish and the unselfish parent, or the drunkard and the 

 sober man — tends to delay the emergence of the better type out of the 

 inferior type. Every such kind of action relieves the unworthy of the 

 consequences of their actions, and takes from the worthy the occasions 

 of acquiring, and preserving, and strengthening those qualities that are 

 good and useful. In a word, so far as you are able to do it for the 

 moment, you make goodness unnecessary ; and as unfortunately the 

 world was constructed on a plan which makes goodness an essential 

 element in obtaining happiness, you are trying to go by one road while 

 Nature is trying to go by another. My two friends, Mr. Mundella and 

 Sir TV. Lawson, both of them against their will architects of national 

 incapacity, may quarrel with my verdict on their work, but, quarrel or 

 not, they are both doing their best — the one to make temperance and 

 the other to make the intelligent care of parents for their children an 

 unnecessary part of human nature. They are both throwing all the 



