to whom I have entrusted my little boy, can starve or neglect him?  How well I remember his words to the dear child when last we parted.  “You are leaving your friends,” he said, “but you will have a father in me, my dear, and a mother in Mrs. Squeers!” For all such rose-coloured dreams of the necessary immunity from human vices of educated men the facts in last week’s Spectator have a terrible significance.  “Trust no man further than you can see him,” they seem to say.  “Qui vult decipi, decipiatur.”

    Allow me to quote from a modern writer a few sentences
    bearing on this subject:—­

“We are at present, legislature and nation together, eagerly pushing forward schemes which proceed on the postulate that conduct is determined, not by feelings, but by cognitions.  For what else is the assumption underlying this anxious urging-on of organisations for teaching?  What is the root-notion common to Secularists and Denominationalists but the notion that spread of knowledge is the one thing needful for bettering behaviour?  Having both swallowed certain statistical fallacies, there has grown up in them the belief that State education will check ill-doing....  This belief in the moralising effects of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd a priori....  This faith in lesson-books and readings is one of the superstitions of the age....  Not by precept, though heard daily; not by example, unless it is followed; but only by action, often caused by the related feeling, can a moral habit be formed.  And yet this truth, which mental science clearly teaches, and which is in harmony with familiar sayings, is a truth wholly ignored in current educational fanaticisms.”

There need no praises of mine to commend to the consideration of all thoughtful readers these words of Herbert Spencer.  They are to be found in “The Study of Sociology” (pp. 36l-367).

Let us, however, do justice to science.  It is not so wholly wanting as Mr. Herbert Spencer would have us believe in principles of action—­principles by which we may regulate our conduct in life.  I myself once heard an accomplished man of science declare that his labours had taught him one special personal lesson which, above all others, he had laid to heart.  A minute study of the nervous system, and of the various forms of pain produced by wounds had inspired in him one profound resolution; and that was—­what think you?—­never, under any circumstances, to adventure his own person into the field of battle!  I have somewhere read in a book—­a rather antiquated book, I fear, and one much discredited by modern lights—­the words, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”  Truly we read these words with a new meaning in the present day!  “Groan and travail” it undoubtedly does still (more than ever, so far as the brute creation is concerned); but to what end?  Some higher and more glorious state?