atic fashion, with the broad laws of morality, he has had no
training in the application of those laws to the difficult problems
which result from the complex conditions of modern civilization. Would
it not be very hard to expect anyone to solve a problem in conic
sections who had merely been taught the axioms and definitions of
mathematical science?

A workman has to bear hard labour, and perhaps privation, while he sees
others rolling in wealth, and feeding their dogs with what would keep
his children from starvation. Would it not be well to have helped that
man to calm the natural promptings of discontent by showing him, in his
youth, the necessary connexion of the moral law which prohibits stealing
with the stability of society--by proving to him, once for all, that it
is better for his own people, better for himself, better for future
generations, that he should starve than steal? If you have no foundation
of knowledge, or habit of thought, to work upon, what chance have you of
persuading a hungry man that a capitalist is not a thief "with a
circumbendibus?" And if he honestly believes that, of what avail is it
to quote the commandment against stealing, when he proposes to make the
capitalist disgorge?

Again, the child learns absolutely nothing of the history or the
political organization of his own country. His general impression is,
that everything of much importance happened a very long while ago; and
that the Queen and the gentlefolks govern the country much after the
fashion of King David and the elders and nobles of Israel--his sole
models. Will you give a man with this much information a vote? In easy
times he sells it for a pot of beer. Why should he not? It is of about
as much use to him as a chignon, and he knows as much what to do with
it, for any other purpose. In bad times, on the contrary, he applies his
simple theory of government, and believes that his rulers are the cause
of his sufferings--a belief which sometimes bears remarkable practical
fruits.

Least of all, does the child gather from this primary "education" of
ours a conception of the laws of the physical world, or of the relations
of cause and effect therein. And this is the more to be lamented, as the
poor are especially exposed to physical evils, and are more interested
in removing them than any other class of the community. If any one is
concerned in knowing the ordinary laws of mechanics one would think it
is the hand-labourer, who