this kind. Undoubtedly more of political economy in our common-school education would be useful, but it must be remembered that our swindles are by no means limited to the financial sort, while the public mind is probably more alert in this direction than in any other. To rectify the evil by the application of special knowledge would require scores of new subjects to be introduced into our public-school curriculum. Besides, had political economy been taught in the New England schools as other things are there taught, we are not sure that it would have made much difference with the chances of Mrs. Howe's banking adventure. The difficulty was not so much a lack of knowledge on this particular subject as a lack of that mental preparation which would qualify for meeting the whole class of impositions of which the Ladies' Deposit was but a single example.
The Boston women were undoubtedly cheated through their credulity, and this state of mind was palpably exemplified by a thousand of them. But the same state of mind is exhibited by many other thousands of both men and women all over the country; and it is this which has to be met by education before any efficient protection can be gained against its mischievous results. Credulity is easy belief, and the correction of it is, of course, hardness of belief. The credulous person is careless of evidence, and is, therefore, readily duped; the only remedy for this is doubt, distrust, an appreciation of the importance of evidence, and a trained capacity to judge of it. It is necessary that this state of suspicion and questioning become a habit of the mind, and the sifting of evidence in practical affairs a distinct branch of mental cultivation. To escape the evil effects of credulity it is needful that disbelief as an attitude of mind be encouraged as a virtue. The resistance to evidence must be active and vigorous until it is proved to be not spurious and illusive, but sound and valid. Our current culture is here profoundly at fault. Literary education, as such, does not favor this habit of mind; scientific education properly pursued leads to it necessarily. Literature flourished in its highest forms in the ages of credulity, while modern science only arose with the growth of the spirit of doubt. Training in the methods of scientific study seems, therefore, to us, the only adequate remedy for that laxity of thinking and dull credulity of the popular mind in which widespread deceptions and impostures have their origin.
But science also greatly helps us here in the things it teaches. It familiarizes the mind with the conception of an order in human life, the invincible operation of cause and effect in social affairs, and the laws of proportion between actions and consequences to which all persons are subject. That there are natural laws in society which work out their inevitable results is a lesson that requires to be learned as well by the individual as by the state; and scientific education alone can familiarize the minds of the young with this vital truth.
Here our literary education fails. It does not reach, and expound, and enforce this class of ideas. It is so thoroughly verbal and critical in form and spirit as actually to arrest the mind on its way to the study of things. In this way absorption in literature becomes a barrier to science, which, by its nature, must deal directly with facts and principles. Science merely addressed to the apprehension, and lodged in the memory like literary acquisitions, is not true science; and little would be gained by introducing social science into our schools, to be pursued there in the manner of other studies. Literary culture, as it predominates in our educational institutions, neither prepares the mind to deal intelligently with questions of evidence nor does it imbue it with right conceptions of social order
