4 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. [i. 



majority of cases, will be bitterly disappointed. It is 

 said : There must be hewers of wood and drawers of 

 water, scavengers and coalheavers, day labourers and 

 domestic servants, or the work of society will come to a 

 standstill. But, if you educate and refine everybody, 

 nobody will be content to assume these functions, and 

 all the world will want to be gentlemen and ladies. 



One hears this argument most frequently from the 

 representatives of the well-to-do middle class ; and, 

 coming from them, it strikes me as peculiarly incon 

 sistent, as the one thing they admire, strive after, and 

 advise their own children to do, is to get on in the world, 

 and, if possible, rise out of the class in which they were 

 born into that above them. Society needs grocers and 

 merchants as much as it needs coalheavers ; but if a 

 merchant accumulates wealth and works his way to a 

 baronetcy, or if the son of a greengrocer becomes a lord 

 chancellor, or an archbishop, or, as a successful soldier, 

 wins a peerage, all the world admires them ; and looks 

 with pride upon the social system which renders such 

 achievements possible. Nobody suggests that there is 

 anything wrong in their being discontented with their 

 station ; or that, in their cases society suffers by men of 

 ability reaching the positions for which nature has 

 fitted them. 



But there are better replies than those of the tu quoque 

 sort to the caste argument. In the first place, it is not 

 true that education, as such, unfits men for rough and 

 laborious, or even disgusting, occupations. The life of a 

 sailor is rougher and harder than that of nine landsmen 

 out of ten, and yet, as every ship s captain knows, no 

 sailor was ever the worse for possessing a trained 

 intelligence. The life of a medical practitioner, es 

 pecially in the country, is harder and more laborious 

 than that of most artisans, and he is constantly obliged 



