mental training, is a positively bad and dangerous state of feeling in this, that it encourages the inbred reluctance in humanity to submit to the demands which moral and mental cultivation must inevitably make on it.  Which am I, as a boy, naturally most ready to do—­to try how high I can jump? or to try how much I can learn?  Which training comes easiest to me as a young man?  The training which teaches me to handle an oar? or the training which teaches me to return good for evil, and to love my neighbor as myself?  Of those two experiments, of those two trainings, which ought society in England to meet with the warmest encouragement?  And which does society in England practically encourage, as a matter of fact?”

“What did you say yourself just now?” from One, Two, and Three.

“Remarkably well put!” from Smith and Jones.

“I said,” admitted Sir Patrick, “that a man will go all the better to his books for his healthy physical exercise.  And I say that again—­provided the physical exercise be restrained within fit limits.  But when public feeling enters into the question, and directly exalts the bodily exercises above the books—­then I say public feeling is in a dangerous extreme.  The bodily exercises, in that case, will be uppermost in the youth’s thoughts, will have the strongest hold on his interest, will take the lion’s share of his time, and will, by those means—­barring the few purely exceptional instances—­slowly and surely end in leaving him, to all good moral and mental purpose, certainly an uncultivated, and, possibly, a dangerous man.”

A cry from the camp of the adversaries:  “He’s got to it at last!  A man who leads an out-of-door life, and uses the strength that God has given to him, is a dangerous man.  Did any body ever hear the like of that?”

Cry reverberated, with variations, by the two human echoes:  “No!  Nobody ever heard the like of that!”

“Clear your minds of cant, gentlemen,” answered Sir Patrick.  “The agricultural laborer leads an out-of-door life, and uses the strength that God has given to him.  The sailor in the merchant service does the name.  Both are an uncultivated, a shamefully uncultivated, class—­and see the result!  Look at the Map of Crime, and you will find the most hideous offenses in the calendar, committed—­not in the towns, where the average man doesn’t lead an out-of-door life, doesn’t as a rule, use his strength, but is, as a rule, comparatively cultivated—­not in the towns, but in the agricultural districts.  As for the English sailor—­except when the Royal Navy catches and cultivates him—­ask Mr. Brinkworth, who has served in the merchant navy, what sort of specimen of the moral influence of out-of-door life and muscular cultivation he is.”

“In nine cases out of ten,” said Arnold, “he is as idle and vicious as ruffian as walks the earth.”

Another cry from the Opposition:  “Are we agricultural laborers?  Are we sailors in the merchant service?”