constitutionally inclined to be cobblers, or
looking forward with unction to establishment in the oil and tallow
line, or fretting themselves for a flunkey's uniform, nothing that he
could say would make me agree with him. I know, as well as he does,
the unconquerable differences in the clay of the human creature: and I
know that, in the outset, whatever system of education you adopted, a
large number of children could be made nothing of, and would
necessarily fall out of the ranks, and supply candidates enough for
degradation to common mechanical business: but this enormous
difference in bodily and mental capacity has been mainly brought about
by difference in occupation, and by direct maltreatment; and in a few
generations, if the poor were cared for, their marriages looked after,
and sanitary law enforced, a beautiful type of face and form, and a
high intelligence, would become all but universal, in a climate like
this of England. Even as it is, the marvel is always to me, how the
race resists, at least in its childhood, influences of ill-regulated
birth, poisoned food, poisoned air, and soul neglect. I often see
faces of children, as I walk through the black district of St. Giles's
(lying, as it does, just between my own house and the British Museum),
which, through all their pale and corrupt misery, recall the old "Non
Angli," and recall it, not by their beauty, but by their sweetness of
expression, even though signed already with trace and cloud of the
coming life,--a life so bitter that it would make the curse of the
137th Psalm true upon our modern Babylon, though we were to read it
thus, "Happy shall _thy children_ be, if one taketh and dasheth them
against the stones."

108. Yes, very solemnly I repeat to you that in those worst treated
children of the English race, I yet see the making of gentlemen and
gentlewomen--not the making of dog-stealers and gin-drinkers, such as
their parents were; and the child of the average English tradesman or
peasant, even at this day, well schooled, will show no innate
disposition such as must fetter him forever to the clod or the
counter. You say that many a boy runs away, or would run away if he
could, from good positions to go to sea. Of course he does. I never
said I should have any difficulty in finding sailors, but I shall in
finding fishmongers. I am at no loss for gardeners either, but what
am I to do for greengrocers?

109. The fact is, a great number of quite necess