RELA TIVITY OF ED UCA TION 347 



tion and culture to which education generally should, Book iv 

 so far as is possible, be assimilated, is the kind of 

 education and culture that is actually prevalent 

 amongst the rich. 



It is impossible to meet these principles with too 

 emphatic a negative. 



The first of them is false because, as has just 

 been shown, there is a large amount of really 

 exceptional talent which, if developed, would work 

 nothing but mischief, and which ought, conse- 

 quently, for the sake of everybody, not to be 

 developed, but suppressed. The second is false so is the theory 

 because all tastes and talents are good or bad, should 1 ^ 63 

 useful for a man or useless, according to the cultl ted m 



all alike. The 



conditions under which his life will be passed ; and education 



, ,.. r i t. 1 1 -1 P ro P er for the 



the conditions of the rich are altogether exceptional, rich is not a 

 Societies have existed in which they have been exception*" 1 

 enjoyed by nobody. It would be impossible to con- 

 struct a society in which they should be enjoyed by 

 more than a few. The attempt, therefore, to give to 

 everybody a rich man's education is like including 

 skating in the curriculum, and fur coats in the 

 wardrobe, of a thousand boys, when nine hundred of 

 them are to spend their lives in the tropics. 



Both these false principles rest on that radically These false 

 false theory of society which it is the principal object 

 of the present volume to expose the theory that 



civilisation is the product of men approximately could ever P r - 



. . . 11- duce equal 



equal m capacities, and that in proportion as these social condi- 

 equal capacities have equal opportunities of develop- 

 ment, there will naturally be an approximation to an 



