PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 81 



taught. I deny that in toto, because I never yet met 

 with anybody who could not learn to write. Writing 

 is a form of drawing; therefore if you give the same 

 attention and trouble to drawing as you do to writing, 

 depend upon it, there is nobody who cannot be made 

 to draw, more or less well. Do not misapprehend me. 

 I do not say for one moment you would make an artistic 

 draughtsman. Artists are not made; they grow. You 

 may improve the natural faculty in that direction, but 

 you cannot make it ; but you can teach simple drawing, 

 and you will find it an implement of learning of ex- 

 treme value. I do not think its value can be exagger- 

 ated, because it gives you the means of training the 

 young in attention and accuracy, which are the two 

 things in which all mankind are more deficient than 

 in any other mental quality whatever. The whole of 

 my life has been spent in trying to give my proper at- 

 tention to things and to be accurate, and I have not 

 succeeded as well as I could wish ; and other people, I 

 am afraid, are not much more fortunate. You cannot 

 begin this habit too early, and I consider there is no- 

 thing of so great a value as the habit of drawing, to 

 secure those two desirable ends. 



Then we come to the subject-matter, whether scien- 

 tific or aesthetic, of education, and I should naturally 

 have no question at all about teaching the elements 

 of physical science of the kind I have sketched, in a 

 practical manner; but among scientific topics, using 

 the word scientific in the broadest sense, I would also 

 include the elements of the theory of morals and of that 

 of political and social life, which, strangely enough, it 

 never seems to occur to anybody to teach a child. I 

 would have the history of our own country, and of all 

 the influences which have been brought to bear upon it, 



