l action, and the amelioration of the criminal
code, have been accompanied by a kindred progress towards non-coercive
education: the pupil is hampered by fewer restraints, and other means
than punishments are used to govern him. In those ascetic days when men,
acting on the greatest-misery principle, held that the more
gratifications they denied themselves the more virtuous they were, they,
as a matter of course, considered that the best education which most
thwarted the wishes of their children, and cut short all spontaneous
activity with--"You mustn't do so." While, on the contrary, now that
happiness is coming to be regarded as a legitimate aim--now that hours
of labour are being shortened and popular recreations provided--parents
and teachers are beginning to see that most childish desires may rightly
be gratified, that childish sports should be encouraged, and that the
tendencies of the growing mind are not altogether so diabolical as was
supposed. The age in which all believed that trades must be established
by bounties and prohibitions; that manufacturers needed their materials
and qualities and prices to be prescribed; and that the value of money
could be determined by law; was an age which unavoidably cherished the
notions that a child's mind could be made to order; that its powers were
to be imparted by the schoolmaster; that it was a receptacle into which
knowledge was to be put, and there built up after the teacher's ideal.
In this free-trade era, however, when we are learning that there is much
more self-regulation in things than was supposed; that labour, and
commerce, and agriculture, and navigation, can do better without
management than with it; that political governments, to be efficient,
must grow up from within and not be imposed from without; we are also
being taught that there is a natural process of mental evolution which
is not to be disturbed without injury; that we may not force on the
unfolding mind our artificial forms; but that psychology, also,
discloses to us a law of supply and demand to which, if we would not do
harm, we must conform. Thus, alike in its oracular dogmatism, in its
harsh discipline, in its multiplied restrictions, in its professed
asceticism, and in its faith in the devices of men, the old educational
regime was akin to the social systems with which it was contemporaneous;
and similarly, in the reverse of these characteristics, our modern modes
of culture correspond to our mo