354 ^^^ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



does not send his child to school down to the abandoned city sinner 

 who outrages Mr. Dowsett's feelings by playing cards in the railway- 

 carriage. Why should we tread any longer that toilsome road by 

 which men have sought to better themselves and each other ? Why 

 paint a picture by hand, when you can do it so well by a chromo-litho- 

 graphic process? Why exert ourselves to enlist the active moral 

 forces of society on our side ; to work by sympathy, discussion, advice 

 and teaching of every kind ; by personal contact ; by that wonderful 

 force of example which makes every better kind of life a magnetic 

 power among the lower kinds ; by that softening of character and 

 greater gentleness that diffuse themselves everywhere, as savagery of 

 all kinds is just allowed to melt quietly away under the thousand in- 

 fluences of civilization ; by raising and ennobling our own motives 

 for helping each other, and, above all, by constant efforts to enlarge 

 and increase our own powers of seeing truly, so that we may under- 

 stand what are the causes of the evils we see round us, and what are 

 the conditions under which they can be successfully attacked ? All 

 this is simply superfluous in presence of the modern omniscient and 

 omnipotent act of Parliament. Think how much trouble, how many 

 long years of slow conversion are saved by our present admirable pro- 

 cess of compulsion. Charlemagne — not St. Paul or St. John — was the 



really enlightened Christian apostle. Be baptized, or , is the one 



argument specially fitted for the souls of men. But, however excel- 

 lent these compulsions may be for the first ten minutes, still every ten 

 minutes has its afterward ; and let me now ask, what is the after-fruit 

 borne by these compulsions ? Let us take for granted that before the 

 first factory acts were passed many children were overworked. There 

 were two ways open for those to take who felt the wrong and wished 

 to remedy it. There was the easy, rapid, and unfruitful parliamentary 

 way ; there was the way — slow, up-hill, but very rich in after-fruits — 

 of appealing directly to the people to reform the thing for themselves. 

 I know this last way would have been slow. I know that all those 

 who wish to gather fruit before the tree is planted would have ex- 

 claimed, " And meanwhile the children are left to suffer." I know it 

 would have required a personal devotion and belief in their work far 

 greater than that which is necessary for conducting a parliamentary 

 agitation, with its showy and rather sensational rewards ; but I also 

 know that in the end the parent would not simply be rendering me- 

 chanical obedience to a law ; I know that vigilant individual care and 

 intelligent appreciation of the interests of their children would, as a 

 consequence, have slowly grown to be a part of their character. How 

 can these things ever grow into being, if by a compulsory law you 

 make them as regards each special case in turn unnecessary? Did 

 anything in this world ever come into being if you had rendered its 

 growth superfluous ? What is it that develops all the best qualities 

 of human nature ? Simply the pressure upon us of those natural pains 



