Human Physiology. 465 



income of twenty or thirty thousand pounds a-year, with ermine 

 and a peerage in the distance. In medicine, rooms crowded 

 with patients, pockets full of guinea fees, royal patronage and 

 knighthood. Men of business, engineers, contractors, mer- 

 chants, bankers, brewers, look forward to great fortunes, landed 

 interests, seats in Parliament, the transition into county families, 

 noble alliances, baronetcies, peerages. 



This is the competition of life which follows competitive 

 studies and examinations the carrying out of the competitive 

 principle, by which each one seeks to mount on the shoulders 

 of his less fortunate comrades, fills his pockets with the gains 

 of their industry, wins money, reputation, a fortunate marriage, 

 and all that makes success, by luck or skill, by impudent auda- 

 city and shameless fraud, by means which give rogues an 

 advantage, because honourable men scorn to make use of them. 

 There are great and noble exceptions to all this ; but in the 

 scramble, the game of life, the fierce competition and gambling 

 for success, it must be that the hardest and worst qualities of 

 some men give them an advantage over the highest excellences 

 of character in others, and that social state must be radically 

 defective, where greed and craft can lead to wealth and power, 

 and the success of one is the impoverishment of many. The 

 blot of our actual society is its gambling character is in the 

 fact that the gain of a few is made up of the losses of millions. 

 In a true society all would advance, all improve in condition, 

 all grow in knowledge, in wealth, in. virtue not equally, foi 

 talents and capacities are unequal, but all in their degree, so 

 that the gain of one shall never depend upon the loss of 

 another, but the good of each be a benefit to all. This is the 

 object, as it is the test, of a true social organisation. 



And all education should have this object to prepare men 

 for, and improve them in, such a social condition. Children 

 should be trained to a horror of lying even in trade; to a 

 horror of stealing even in selling bad or adulterated merchan- 



2 G 



