pleasant talk and interesting thoughts; but then I have always suffered from the Anglo-Saxon failing of disliking responsibility except in the case of those for whom one’s efforts are definitely pledged on strict business principles.  I cannot deliberately assume a sense of responsibility towards people in general; to do that implies a sense of the value of one’s own influence and example, which I have never possessed; and, indeed, I have always heartily disliked the manifestation of it in others.  Indeed, I firmly believe that the best and most fruitful part of a man’s influence, is the influence of which he is wholly unconscious; and I am quite sure that no one who has a strong sense of responsibility to the world in general can advance the cause of equality, because such a sense implies at all events a consciousness of moral superiority.  Moreover, my educational experience leads me to believe that one cannot do much to form character.  The most one can do is to guard the young against pernicious influences, and do one’s best to recommend one’s own disinterested enthusiasms.  One cannot turn a violet into a rose by any horticultural effort; one can only see that the violet or the rose has the best chance of what is horribly called self-effectuation.

My own belief is that these great ideas like Equality and Justice are things which, like poetry, are born and cannot be made.  That a number of earnest people should be thinking about them shows that they are in the air; but the interest felt in them is the sign and not the cause of their increase.  I believe that one must go forwards, trying to avoid anything that is consciously harsh or pompous or selfish or base, and the great ideas will take care of themselves.

The two great obvious difficulties which seem to me to lie at the root of all schemes for producing a system of social equality are first the radical inequality of character, temperament, and equipment in human beings.  No system can ever hope to be a practical system unless we can eliminate the possibility of children being born, some of them perfectly qualified for life and citizenship, and others hopelessly disqualified.  If such differences were the result of environment it would be a remediable thing.  But one can have a strong, vigorous, naturally temperate child born and brought up under the meanest and most sordid conditions, and, on the other hand, a thoroughly worthless and detestable person may be the child of high-minded, well-educated people, with every social advantage.  My work as a practical educationalist enforced this upon me.  One would find a boy, born under circumstances as favourable for the production of virtue and energy as any socialistic system could provide, who was really only fitted for the lowest kind of mechanical work, and whose instincts were utterly gross.  Even if the State could practise a kind of refined Mendelism, it would be impossible to guard against the influences of heredity.  If one traces back the hereditary influences of a child for ten generations, it will be found that he has upwards of two thousand progenitors, any one of whom may give him a bias.