Notices of Books. 
123 
1876.] 
tend to develop a class of epicenes possessing the defeats of 
both sexes and the merits of neither. We submit that mannish 
women should be regarded with the same abhorrence which we 
instinctively mete out to womanish men. 
The writer, in a subsequent passage of his report, discusses 
the question of compulsory education, which in America, as in 
England, appears to be attracting great attention. It appears 
that in the Philadelphia district, although 100,000 pupils attend 
the public schools, yet no fewer than 20,000 children are stated 
to be “ growing up in ignorance and vice.” This is a much 
larger proportion than we should have expected. “ To give 
pauperism its death-blow we must rescue the children now be- 
yond the pale of our public schools.” But will education, even 
if universal, really extirpate pauperism ? We fear not. We 
must remember that, like most other possessions, the value of a 
good education is governed by the laws of supply and demand. 
The more general it becomes, the less is its value to the indivi- 
dual. Where educated men are few they can name their own 
terms, and, except dishonest or dissipated, may make sure of a 
comfortable position. But where there are more educated men 
than spheres of a<ftivity requiring their services, some must cer- 
tainly go to the wall. Few persons in modern England are in a 
more deplorable position than such as have received a good edu- 
cation, but have no special knowledge of any profession, business, 
or manufacture. Compulsory education, by increasing the num- 
ber of this class, will merely make the competition among them 
more frantic. It is — at least as far as England is concerned — an 
error to suppose “ illiteracy ” the only, or even the main, cause 
of pauperism. We see men scarcely able to sign their own 
names, or to speak their native language with moderate accuracy, 
amassing millions. We see, on the other hand, men of wide and 
profound culture, aad even of original thought, earning a bare 
pittance. We can scarcely point out an instance where a disco- 
verer, an inventor, a man who has enlarged the boundaries of 
human knowledge, has accumulated a fortune by his labours. 
The pauper, again, often inherits a low vital tone : no school 
can cure that. He frequently inherits an intense craving for 
alcoholic excitement. Can this be overcome by any amount of 
literary culture ? 
Statistics, the writer holds, “ prove by an inexorable logic that 
ignorance is the most prolific source of crime.” They prove 
certainly that criminals are generally ignorant ; but these two 
propositions, if carefully examined, will be found not identical. 
The man of the criminal type is ignorant because he has no 
innate love for knowledge ; but if you force knowledge upon him 
it may happen that you merely make him a more formidable 
enemy to society. The fallacy in question is something like that 
into which George III. fell in his inquiry into the cause of 
longevity : he found that all the very old men who came under 
