We may admit that the system of modern education works measurably well so far as intellectual training is concerned; training as distinguished from development.  It works measurably well also in preparing youth for participation in the life of applied science and for making money in business and finance.  Conscientious hard labour has been given, and is being given, to making it more effective along these lines, and almost every year some new scheme is brought forward enthusiastically, tried out painstakingly, and then cast aside ignominiously for some new and even more ingenious device.  The amount of education is enormous; the total of money spent on new foundations, courses, buildings, equipment—­on everything but the pay of the teachers—­is princely; the devotion of the teachers, themselves, in the face of inadequate wages, is exemplary, and yet, somehow the results are disappointing.  The truth is, the development of character is not in proportion to the development of public and private education.  The moral standing of the nation, taken as a whole, has been degenerating; in business, in public affairs, in private life, until the standards of value have been confused, the line of demarcation between right and wrong blurred to indistinctness, and the old motives of honour, duty, service, charity, chivalry and compassion are no longer the controlling motive, or at least the conscious aspiration, of active men.

This is not to say that these do not exist; the period that has seen the retrogression has recorded also a reaction, and there are now perhaps more who are fired by the ardent passion for active righteousness, than for several generations, but the average is lower, for where, many times in the past, there has been a broad, general average of decency, now the disparity is great between the motives that drive society as a whole, and its methods of operation, and the remnant that finds itself an unimportant minority.  Newspapers are perhaps hardly a fair criterion of the moral status of a people—­or of anything else for that matter—­but what they record, and the way they do it, is at least an indication of a condition, and after every possible allowance has been made, what they record is a very alarming standard of public and private morality, both in the happenings themselves and in the fashion of their publicity.

No one would claim that the responsibility for this weakening of moral standards rests predominantly on the shoulders of the educational system of today; the causes lie far deeper than this, but the point I wish to make is that the process has not been arrested by education, in spite of its prevalence, and that therefore it is unwise to continue our exclusive faith in its remedial offices.  The faith was never well founded.  Education can do much, but what it does, or can do, is to foster and develop inherent possibilities, whether these are of character, intelligence or aptitude: