as putting your hand in the fire, or jumping out of a garret window.  Again, though the scholar may have been made acquainted, in dogmatic fashion, with the broad laws of morality, he has had no training in the application of those laws to the difficult problems which result from the complex conditions of modern civilization.  Would it not be very hard to expect anyone to solve a problem in conic sections who had merely been taught the axioms and definitions of mathematical science?

A workman has to bear hard labour, and perhaps privation, while he sees others rolling in wealth, and feeding their dogs with what would keep his children from starvation.  Would it not be well to have helped that man to calm the natural promptings of discontent by showing him, in his youth, the necessary connexion of the moral law which prohibits stealing with the stability of society—­by proving to him, once for all, that it is better for his own people, better for himself, better for future generations, that he should starve than steal?  If you have no foundation of knowledge, or habit of thought, to work upon, what chance have you of persuading a hungry man that a capitalist is not a thief “with a circumbendibus?” And if he honestly believes that, of what avail is it to quote the commandment against stealing, when he proposes to make the capitalist disgorge?

Again, the child learns absolutely nothing of the history or the political organization of his own country.  His general impression is, that everything of much importance happened a very long while ago; and that the Queen and the gentlefolks govern the country much after the fashion of King David and the elders and nobles of Israel—­his sole models.  Will you give a man with this much information a vote?  In easy times he sells it for a pot of beer.  Why should he not?  It is of about as much use to him as a chignon, and he knows as much what to do with it, for any other purpose.  In bad times, on the contrary, he applies his simple theory of government, and believes that his rulers are the cause of his sufferings—­a belief which sometimes bears remarkable practical fruits.

Least of all, does the child gather from this primary “education” of ours a conception of the laws of the physical world, or of the relations of cause and effect therein.  And this is the more to be lamented, as the poor are especially exposed to physical evils, and are more interested in removing them than any other class of the community.  If any one is concerned in knowing the ordinary laws of mechanics one would think it is the hand-labourer, whose daily toil lies among levers and pulleys; or among the other implements of artisan work.  And if any one is interested in the laws of health, it is the poor workman, whose strength is wasted by ill-prepared food, whose health is sapped by bad ventilation and bad drainage, and half whose children are massacred by disorders which might be prevented.  Not only