no HEREDITY AND SOCIETY 



balance, a bias against the larger interests and emotions 

 of life. Yet the monastic orders and those who 

 directed them were sensible of the danger incurred, 

 and strove to guard against it in many ways. There 

 was always a fund of tradition, of experience, of re- 

 ligious purpose at the disposal of its disciples. The 

 fact that so many of our modern teachers, although 

 compelled by the exigencies of circumstances to lead 

 celibate lives, have not taken any binding vows to 

 that effect, does not do away with the objection to 

 placing educational influence in the hands of persons 

 whose outlook on existence is necessarily limited and 

 one-sided, and is especially curtailed in the direction 

 of family life and the domestic circle, subjects on 

 which right thinking and personal experience are of 

 supreme importance to the national welfare. Nor 

 does the encouragement of marriage among the women 

 teachers, as we have already pointed out in the 

 previous chapter, resulting as it does in a very limited 

 number of births, lead to conditions which can rightly 

 be termed " natural." The safeguards of definite 

 religious and educational training, and the creation 

 of a special atmosphere appropriate to the nature of 

 the work undertaken, conditions which have been 

 found to be necessary in the course of the vast ex- 

 perience of the Roman Catholic Church, do not exist 

 in the case of the lay teacher, who is nevertheless 

 rapidly acquiring many of the disabilities attached to 

 her conventual forebears. Even the old " dame " of 

 the village school was at least free from this defect 

 of her modern supplanter. 



The tendency which is growing among us to make 



