, by felt and unfelt influences,
whether he will or no, into the national shape and figure.

And that is what nations are made for. They do not exist to produce
wheat, corn, cattle, cotton, or cutlery, but to produce _men_. The
wheat, corn, and the rest exist for the sake of the men. The real value
of the nation, to itself and to the world, is not the things it
produces, but the style of man it produces. That is the broad difference
between China and Massachusetts, between Japan and New York. Nations
exist to be training schools for men. That is their real business.
Accordingly as they do it better or worse they are prospering or the
reverse. What is France about? The newspaper people tell me she is
building ships, drilling zouaves, diplomatizing at Rome, brigandizing in
Mexico, huzzaing for glory and Napoleon the Third. That is about the
wisdom of the newspapers. She is moulding a million unsuspecting little
innocents into Frenchmen! That is what she is at, and nobody seems to
notice. What is England doing? Weaving cotton, when she can get it, I am
told, drilling rifle brigades, blustering in the _Times_, starving her
workmen in Lancashire, and feasting her Prince in London, talking
'strict neutrality' in Parliament, and building pirates on the Clyde.
She's doing worse than that. That is not half her wrong-doing. She is
taking thousands of plastic, impressible, innocent babes, into her big
hands, monthly, and kneading them and hardening them into regular John
Bulls! That's a pretty job to think of!

So the nations are at work all over the world. And the nation that, as a
rule, takes 'mamma's darling' into its arms, and in twenty or thirty
years makes him the best specimen of a man, is the most perfect nation
and best fulfils a nation's purpose.

For the business of Education, which so many consider the schoolmaster's
speciality, is a larger business than they think. The Family exists to
do it, the Church exists to do it. It is the real business of the State.
The great Universe itself, with all its vastness, its powers and its
mysteries, was created for this. It is simply God's great schoolroom. He
has floored it with the emerald queen of the earth and of the gleaming
seas. He has roofed it with a sapphire dome, lit with flaming starfire
and sun blaze. He has set the great organ music of the spheres
reverberating forevermore through its high arches. He has put his
children here, to train them for their grand inheritan