Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/370

poses brutalizes in this sense. It deprives men of more than half their perceptions. And so it comes naturally about that, having adopted the very best means to make ourselves thoroughly stupid about education—first, by factory acts, and then by their logical completion, a universal state system—we now find ourselves face to face with dangers, the very possibility of which, in our hurry to manufacture intelligence by state machinery, had never occurred to us. But this frightful and almost immeasurable evil of over-pressure, which is certainly not going to be charmed out of existence by any number either of indignant or persuasive minutes written with an undisguised odor of office about them by my friend Mr. Fitch, is not the only sign that you can not make the state a parent without the logical consequence of making the people children. Some years ago we were startled by the reports of the ill-adapted food on which children in certain parts of the manufacturing districts were fed, or rather were not fed; we were startled by the high death-rate of very young children in certain towns. Yet we might have known it would be so. These are the necessary fruits of all such legislation as that of factory acts or of state education and compulsion, which forces on parents a certain view of their duty instead of leaving them, slowly and painfully though it may be, to learn it intelligently for themselves. Official regulation and free mental perception of what is right and wise do not and can not co-exist. I see no possible way in which you can reconcile these great state services, and the conditions under which men have to make true progress in themselves. At least, if you are to do so, you must first get rid of certain great facts in nature. At present we live under the condition which, unfortunately, seems likely to last our time or a little longer, that no great human qualities are developed where you take away the opportunities for their development, that they do not grow spontaneously and without pressure, that each action by which for the moment the good and the bad are placed on the same level—for example, the selfish and the unselfish parent, or the drunkard and the sober man—tends to delay the emergence of the bettor type out of the inferior type. Every such kind of action relieves the unworthy of the consequences of their actions, and takes from the worthy the occasions of acquiring, and preserving, and strengthening those qualities that are good and useful. In a word, so far as you are able to do it for the moment, you make goodness unnecessary; and as unfortunately the world was constructed on a plan which makes goodness an essential element in obtaining happiness, you are trying to go by one road while Nature is trying to go by another. My two friends, Mr. Mundella and Sir W. Lawson, both of them against their will architects of national incapacity, may quarrel with my verdict on their work, but, quarrel or not, they are both doing their best—the one to make temperance and the other to make the intelligent care of parents for their children an unnecessary part of human nature. They are both throwing all the