away to nothing.  You write the principle which was so hard to receive upon the tablet of your memory; and day by day a gentle hand comes over it with a bit of india-rubber, till the inscription loses its clear sharpness, grows blurred and indistinct, and finally quite disappears.  Nor is the gentle hand content even then; but it begins, very faintly at first, to trace letters which bear a very different meaning.  Then it deepens and darkens them day by day, week by week, till at a month’s or a year’s end the tablet of memory bears, in great, sharp, legible letters, just the opposite thing to that which you had originally written down there.  These are my Things Slowly Learnt:  things you learn at first in the face of a strong bias against them; things, when once taught, you gradually forget, till you come back again to your old way of thinking.  Such things, of course, lie within the realm to which extends the influence of feeling and prejudice.  They are things in the accepting of which both head and heart are concerned.  Once convince a man that two and two make four, and he learns the truth without excitement, and he never doubts it again.  But prove to a man that he is of much less importance than he has been accustomed to think,—­or prove to a woman that her children are very much like those of other folk,—­or prove to the inhabitant of a country parish that Britain has hundreds of parishes which in soil and climate and production are just as good as his own,—­or prove to the great man of a little country town that there are scores of towns in this world where the walks are as pleasant, the streets as well paved, and the population as healthy and as well conducted; and in each such case you will find it very hard to convince the individual at the time, and you will find that in a very short space the individual has succeeded in entirely escaping from the disagreeable conviction.  You may possibly find, if you endeavor to instil such belief into minds of but moderate cultivation, that your arguments will be met less by force of reason than by roaring of voice and excitement of manner; you may find that the person you address will endeavor to change the issue you are arguing, to other issues, wholly irrelevant, touching your own antecedents, character, or even personal appearance; and you may afterwards be informed by good-natured friends, that the upshot of your discussion had been to leave on the mind of your acquaintance the firm conviction that you yourself are intellectually a blockhead and morally a villain.  And even when dealing with human beings who have reached that crowning result of a fine training, that they shall have got beyond thinking a man their “enemy because he tells them the truth,” you may find that you have rendered a service like that rendered by the surgeon’s amputating knife,—­salutary, yet very painful,—­and leaving forever a sad association with your thought and your name.  For among the things we slowly learn are truths and lessons which it goes terribly against the grain to learn at first, which must be driven into us time after time, and which perhaps are never learnt completely.