it cannot put into a boy or man what was not there, in posse, at birth, and humanly speaking, the diversity of potential in any thousand units is limited only by the number itself.  Whether our present educational methods are those best calculated to foster and develop these inherent possibilities, so varied in nature and degree, is the question, and it is a question the answer to which depends largely on whether we look on intelligence, capacity or character as the thing of greatest moment.  For those who believe that character is the thing of paramount importance—­amongst whom I count myself—­the answer must be in the negative.

Nor is an affirmative reply entirely assured when the question is asked as to the results in the case of intellect and capacity.  There are few who would claim that in either of these directions the general standard is now as high as it was, for example, in the last half of the last century.  The Great War brought to the front few personalities of the first class, and the peace that has followed has an even less distinguished record to date.  We may say with truth, I think, that the last ten years have provided greater issues, and smaller men to meet them in the capacity of leaders, than any previous crisis of similar moment.  The art of leadership, and the fact of leadership, have been lost, and without leadership any society, particularly a democracy, is in danger of extinction.

Here again one cannot charge education with our lack of men of character, intelligence and capacity to lead; as before, the causes lie far deeper, but the almost fatal absence at this time of the personalities of such force and power that they can captain society in its hours of danger from war or peace, must give us some basis for estimating the efficiency of our educational theory and practice, and again raise doubts as to whether here also we shall be well advised if we rely exclusively upon it as the ultimate saviour of society, while we are bound to ask whether its methods, even of developing intelligence and capacity, are the best that can be devised.

Another point worth considering is this.  So long as we could lay the flattering unction to our souls that acquired characteristics were heritable, and that therefore if an outcast from Posen, migrating to America, had taken advantage of his new opportunities and so had developed his character-potential, amassed money and acquired a measure of education and culture, he would automatically transmit something of this to his offspring, who would start so much the further forward and would tend normally to still greater advance, and so on ad infinitum, so long we were justified in enforcing the widest measure of education on all and sundry, and in waiting in hope for a future when the cumulative process should have accomplished its perfect work.  Now, however, we are told that this hope is vain, that acquired characteristics are not transmitted by heredity, and that the old folk-proverb “it is only three generations between shirtsleeves and shirtsleeves,” is perhaps more scientifically exact than the evolutionary dictum of the nineteenth century.  Which is what experience and history have been teaching, lo, these many years.