And so you and I reflect in our occasional moments of pessimism that generic situation which inheres in the very work that we do.  The constantly accelerated progress of civilization lays constantly increasing burdens upon us.  In some way or another we must accomplish the task.  In some way or another we must lift the child to the level of society, and, as society is reaching a continually higher and higher level, so the distance through which the child must be raised is ever increased.  We would like to think that all this progress in the race would come to mean that we should be able to take the child at a higher level; but you who deal with children know from experience the principle for which the biologist Weismann stands sponsor—­the principle, namely, that acquired characteristics are not inherited; that whatever changes may be wrought during life in the brains and nerves and muscles of the present generation cannot be passed on to its successor save through the same laborious process of acquisition and training; that, however far the civilization of the race may progress, education, whose duty it is to conserve and transmit this civilization, must always begin with the “same old child.”

This, I take it, is the deep-lying cause of the schoolmaster’s pessimism.  In our work we are constantly struggling against that same inertia which held the race in bondage for how many millenniums only the evolutionist can approximate a guess,—­that inertia of the primitive, untutored mind which we to-day know as the mind of childhood, but which, for thousands of generations, was the only kind of a mind that man possessed.  This inertia has been conquered at various times in the course of recorded history,—­in Egypt and China and India, in Chaldea and Assyria, in Greece and Rome,—­conquered only again to reassert itself and drive man back into barbarism.  Now we of the Western world have conquered it, let us hope, for all time; for we of the Western world have discovered an effective method of holding it in abeyance, and this method is universal public education.

Let Germany close her public schools, and in two generations she will lapse back into the semi-darkness of medievalism; let her close both her public schools and her universities, and three generations will fetch her face to face with the Dark Ages; let her destroy her libraries and break into ruin all of her works of art, all of her existing triumphs of technical knowledge and skill, from which a few, self-tutored, might glean the wisdom that is every one’s to-day, and Germany will soon become the home of a savage race, as it was in the days of Tacitus and Caesar.  Let Italy close her public schools, and Italy will become the same discordant jumble of petty states that it was a century ago,—­again to await, this time perhaps for centuries or millenniums, another Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel to work her regeneration.  Let Japan close her public schools, and Japan in two generations