could produce ideal men. It is only meant that in so far as the 

 treatment of children follows one or the other scheme, in so far 

 will it tend towards producing ideal men or paralytic idiots. 

 Unhappily, because it is generally more presently easy to 

 spoil than to make, there is a tendency to helpless sinking 

 towards the spurious method : — a tendency abetted in the home 

 by ignorance of what true education means, and in the schools 

 by the various State invented and State controlled systems of 

 school management which rely on methods, and ignore men, 

 and chill with the "dead hand, the pitiless hand of ignorant 

 power" that which should be warmed and vivified by the living 

 heart. 



The foregoing seems to present itself as a broad and general 

 view from which we may proceed to more detailed particulars. 



We have proposed as the aim of true education — the forma- 

 tion of ideal men and women. 



Thring in his Theory and Practise of Teaching says "Power, 

 or efficient life, is proposed as the aim of every educator ; " and 

 he proceeds in a very beautiful way to define true life. He 

 defines education as that process which best produces power in 

 man himself, and makes him capable of employing his faculties 

 in the best way. Not be it observed power over his fellow-man, 

 which Thring very forcibly likens to the slave driver's whip, at 

 every stroke of whose lash the real creature, as distinct from the 

 working machine, hides itself, and the love and hate which 

 is in the man himself, and which, whenever he does man's true 

 work, passes into that work, retires farther and farther into the 

 depths of the cavernous heart out of sight. Not this power, but 

 power in man's self for true work. 



Similarly the founders of the Prussian National System de- 

 fined education as " The harmonious and equable evolution of 

 the human powers : " implying probably a harmony of evolution 

 where an equable culture applied to all the human powers 

 would educe in their true largeness of individual growth those 

 whose embryo strength was naturally great, while not neglecting 

 the culture, as far as possible, of those which were naturally 

 deficient. 



