be
intolerable. How is such a boy to make an effort? His work wearies and
puzzles him--it does not seem to lead him anywhere; he has no gift for
games; he is neither amusing nor attractive; he gets no credit for
anything, and indeed he deserves none; he ought really to be in a kind
of moral sanatorium, guarded, guided, encouraged by wise and faithful
and compassionate pastors. The worst feature of school life is that if
it fortifies characters with some vigour about them, it implies that
others must inevitably go under and be turned out moral and mental
failures. It is the way of the world, says the philosopher, rough
justice! It may be justice, but it is certainly rough; and I look
forward to the time when we educators of the present generation will be
considered incredibly hard-hearted, unconscientious, immoral, for
acquiescing so contentedly in the ruthless sacrifice of the weak to the
culture of the strong.

Ought we then, it may be asked, to decide that if people are incapable
of sustained effort, no effort is to be expected of them? Are we to
decline upon a genial determinism, and to sweep away all belief in
moral responsibility? No! because even if we are determinists, we have
to take into account the fact that society does for some reason
advance. When we consider the fact that the rightness of humanitarian
principles, of anti-slavery movements, of popular education, of Factory
Acts, of public hospitals is universally admitted; when we compare the
current principles of the nineteenth-century man with the current
principles, say, of the fourteenth-century man, it is plain that there
has been a remarkable rise of the moral temperature, and that our
optimistic view of progress is a rational one.

The ordinary person is to-day quite as strongly convinced of the rights
of other men as he is of their duties; and thus the determinist is
bound to confess that there is an ameliorating and humanising principle
at work, if not in the world at large, at least in the Western races.
It is inconsistent to acquiesce in faulty practice and not to acquiesce
in the growth of ideals, even though one may believe that the advance
is due to some external cause and is not self-developed. If performance
is always more or less straining after the ideal, the determinist is
justified in expecting a higher standard of performance, and his
fatalism may take the direction of removing the obstacles to further
improvement. But in dealing wit