10, and had therefore the value
of one tenth of a gold shekel; and the half silver shekel, called by the
Greeks a drachma, was worth one twentieth of a gold shekel. The drachma,
or half silver shekel, may therefore be looked upon as the most ancient
type of our own silver shilling in its relation of one twentieth of our
gold sovereign.(10)

I shall mention only one more of the most essential tools of our mental
life--namely, our _figures_, which we call Arabic, because we received them
from the Arabs, but which the Arabs called Indian, because they received
them from the Indians--in order to show you how this nineteenth century of
ours is under the sway of centuries long past and forgotten; how we are
what we are, not by ourselves, but by those who came before us, and how
the intellectual ground on which we stand is made up of the detritus of
thoughts which were first thought, not on these isles nor in Europe, but
on the shores of the Oxus, the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus.

Now you may well ask, _Quorsum haec omnia?_ What has all this to do with
freedom and with the free development of individuality? Because a man is
born the heir of all the ages, can it be said that he is not free to grow
and to expand, and to develop all the faculties of his mind? Are those who
came before him, and who left him this goodly inheritance, to be called
his enemies? Is that chain of tradition which connects him with the past
really a galling fetter, and not rather the leading-strings without which
he would never learn to walk straight?

Let us look at the matter more closely. No one would venture to say that
every individual should begin life as a young savage, and be left to form
his own language, and invent his own letters, numerals, and coins. On the
contrary, if we comprehend all this and a great deal more, such as
religion, morality, and secular knowledge, under the general name of
_education_, even the most advanced defenders of individualism would hold
that no child should enter society without submitting, or rather without
being submitted, to education. Most of us would even go farther, and make
it criminal for parents or even for communities to allow children to grow
up uneducated. The excuse of worthless parents that they are at liberty to
do with their children as they like, has at last been blown to the winds,
and among the principal advocates of compulsory education, and of the
necessity of curtailing the freedom of sa