Mankind in the Making

1

Published by Harper Bros.

2

Nature, vol. lxv. (1901-2), p. 326, and reprinted in the Smithsonian Report for 1902

3

The Meditations of M. A. Antoninus, ix. 40.

4

Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.

5

The Republic, Bk. V.

6

Nature, vol. lxiv. p. 659.

7

This idea of attempting to define the elements in inheritance, although it is absent from much contemporary discussion, was pretty evidently in mind in the very striking researches of the Abbé Mendel to which Mr. Bateson—with a certain intemperance of manner—has recently called attention. (Bateson, Mendel's Principles of Heredity, Cambridge University Press, 1902.)

8

No doubt the home of the criminal and social failure is generally disastrous to the children born into it. That is a question that will be fully dealt; with in a subsequent paper, and I note it here only to point out that it is outside our present discussion, which is concerned not with the fate of children born into the world, but with the prior question whether we may hope to improve the quality of the average birth by encouraging some sorts of people to have children and discouraging or forbidding others. It is of vital importance to keep these two questions distinct, if we are to get at last to a basis for effective action.

9

Since the above was written, a correspondent in Honolulu has called my attention to a short but most suggestive essay by Doctor Harry Campbell in the Lancet, 1898, ii., p. 678. He uses, of course, the common medical euphemism of "should not marry" for "should not procreate," and he gives the following as a list of "bars to marriage": pulmonary consumption, organic heart disease, epilepsy, insanity, diabetes, chronic Bright's disease, and rheumatic fever. I wish I had sufficient medical knowledge to analyze that proposal. He mentions inherited defective eyesight and hearing also, and the "neurotic" quality, with which I have dealt in my text. He adds two other suggestions that appeal to me very strongly. He proposes to bar all "cases of non-accidental disease in which life is saved by the surgeon's knife," and he instances particularly, strangulated hernia and ovarian cyst. And he also calls attention to apoplectic breakdown and premature senility. All these are suggestions of great value for individual conduct, but none of them have that quality of certainty that justifies collective action.

10

If at any time certainties should replace speculations in the field of inheritance, then I fancy the common-sense of humanity will be found to be in favour of the immediate application of that knowledge to life.

11

It has been pointed out to me by my friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, that although the State may not undertake any positive schemes for selective breeding in the present state of our knowledge, it can no more evade a certain reaction upon these things than the individual can evade a practical solution. Although we cannot say of any specific individual that he or she is, or is not, of exceptional reproductive value to the State, we may still be able, he thinks, to point out classes which are very probably, as a whole, good reproductive classes, and we may be able to promote, or at least to avoid hindering, their increase. He instances the female elementary teacher as being probably, as a type, a more intelligent and more energetic and capable girl than the average of the stratum from which she arises, and he concludes she has a higher reproductive value—a view contrary to my argument in the text that reproductive and personal value are perhaps independent. He tells me that it is the practice of many large school boards in this country to dismiss women teachers on marriage, or to refuse promotion to these when they become mothers, which is, of course, bad for the race if personal and reproductive value are identical. He would have them retain their positions regardless of the check to their efficiency maternity entails. This is a curiously indirect way towards what one might call Galtonism. Practically he proposes to endow mothers in the name of education. For my own part I do not agree with him that this class, any more than any other class, can be shown to have a high reproductive value—which is the matter under analysis in this paper— though I will admit that an ex-teacher will probably do infinitely more for her children than if she were an illiterate or untrained woman. I can only reiterate my conviction that nothing really effective can be organized in these matters until we are much clearer than we are at present in our ideas about them, and that a public body devoted to education has no business either to impose celibacy, or subsidize families, or experiment at all in these affairs. Not only in the case of elementary teachers, but in the case of soldiers, sailors, and so on, the State may do much to promote or discourage marriage and offspring, and no doubt it is also true, as Mr. Wallas insists, that the problems of the foreign immigrant and of racial intermarriage, loom upon us. But since we have no applicable science whatever here, since there is no certainty in any direction that any collective course may not be collectively evil rather than good, there is nothing for it, I hold, but to leave these things to individual experiment, and to concentrate our efforts where there is a clearer hope of effective consequence. Leave things to individual initiative and some of us will, by luck or inspiration, go right; take public action on an insufficient basis of knowledge and there is a clear prospect of collective error. The imminence of these questions argues for nothing except prompt and vigorous research.

12

He would certainly try to discourage this sort of thing. The paragraph is from the Morning Post (Sept., 1902):—

"Wedded in Silence.—A deaf and dumb wedding was celebrated at Saffron Walden yesterday, when Frederick James Baish and Emily Lettige King, both deaf and dumb, were married. The bride was attended by deaf and dumb bridesmaids, and upwards of thirty deaf and dumb friends were present. The ceremony was performed by the Rev. A. Payne, of the Deaf and Dumb Church, London."

13

This aspect of New Republican possibilities comes in again at another stage, and at that stage its treatment will be resumed. The method and possibility of binding up discredit and failure with mean and undesirable qualities, and of setting a premium upon the nobler attributes, is a matter that touches not only upon the quality of births, but upon the general educational quality of the State in which a young citizen develops. It is convenient to hold over any detailed expansions of this, therefore, until we come to the general question, how the laws, institutions and customs of to-day go to make or unmake the men of to-morrow.

14

It is a digression from the argument of this Paper, but I would like to point out here a very popular misconception about the birth-rate which needs exposure. It is known that the birth-rate is falling in all European countries—a fall which has a very direct relation to a rise in the mean standard of comfort and the average age at marriage—and alarmists foretell a time when nations will be extinguished through this decline. They ascribe it to a certain decay in religious faith, to the advance of science and scepticism, and so forth; it is a part, they say, of a general demoralization. The thing is a popular cant and quite unsupported by facts. The decline in the birth-rate is—so far as England and Wales goes—partly a real decline due to a decline in gross immorality, partly to a real decline due to the later age at which women marry, and partly a statistical decline due to an increased proportion of people too old or too young for child-bearing. Wherever the infant mortality is falling there is an apparent misleading fall in the birth-rate due to the "loading" of the population with children. Here are the sort of figures that are generally given. They are the figures for England and Wales for two typical periods.

Period 1846-1850 33 8 births per 1000

Period 1896-1900 28 0 births per 1000

——————————————

5.8 fall in the birth-rate.

This as it stands is very striking. But if we take the death-rates of these two periods we find that they have fallen also.

Period 1846-1850 23 3 deaths per 1000

Period 1896-1900 17 7 deaths per 1000

——————————————

5.6 fall in the death-rate.

Let us subtract death-rate from birth-rate and that will give the effective rate of increase of the population.

Period 1846-1850 10 5 effective rate of increase

Period 1896-1900 10 3 effective rate of increase

————————————————-

.2 fall in the rate of increase.

But now comes a curious thing that those who praise the good old pre- Board School days—the golden age of virtuous innocence—ignore. The Illegitimate births in 1846-1850 numbered 2.2 per 1000, in 1896- 1900 they numbered 1.2 per 1000. So that if it were not for this fall in illegitimate births the period 1896-1900 would show a positive rise in the effective rate of increase of .8 per thousand. The eminent persons therefore who ascribe our falling birth-rate to irreligion and so forth, either speak without knowledge or with some sort of knowledge beyond my ken. England is, as a matter of fact, becoming not only more hygienic and rational, but more moral and more temperate. The highly moral, healthy, prolific, pious England of the past is just another poetical delusion of the healthy savage type.

15

Mr. C. G. Stuart Menteath has favored me with some valuable comments upon this point. He writes: "I agree that calling such persons as have shown themselves incapable of parental duties debtors to the State, would help to reconcile popular ideas of the 'liberty of the subject' with the enforcement as well as the passing of such laws. But the notions of drastically enforcing parental duties, and of discouraging and even prohibiting the marriages of those unable to show their ability to perform these duties, has long prevailed. See Nicholl's History of the Poor Law (1898, New Edition), i. 229, and ii. 140, 278, where you will find chargeable bastardy has been punishable in the first offence by one year's imprisonment, and in the second, by imprisonment until sureties are given, which thus might amount to imprisonment for life. See also, J. S. Mill, Political Economy, Bk. II., ch. ii., for extreme legislation on the Continent against the marriage of people unable to support a family. In Denmark there seem to be very severe laws impeding the marriage of those who have been paupers. The English law was sufficiently effective to produce infanticide, so that a law was passed making concealment of birth almost infanticide."

16

In the returns I have quoted from Blackburn, Leicester, and Preston the number of deaths from suffocation per 100,000 infants born was 232 in the first year of life.

17

It is less within the range of commonly grasped ideas, it is therefore less within the range of practical expedients, to point out that a graduated scale of building regulation might be contrived for use in different localities. Districts could be classed in grades determined by the position of each district in the scale of infant mortality, and in those in which the rate was highest the hygienic standard could be made most stringent and onerous upon the house owner. This would force up the price of house- room, and that would force up the price of labour, and this would give the proprietors of unwholesome industries a personal interest in hygienic conditions about them. It would also tend to force population out of districts intrinsically unhealthy into districts intrinsically healthy. The statistics of low-grade districts could be examined to discover the distinctive diseases which determine their lowness of grade, and if these were preventable diseases they could be controlled by special regulations. A further extension of these principles might be made. Direct inducements to attract the high birth-rates towards exceptionally healthy districts could be contrived by a differential rating of sound families with children in such districts, the burthen of heavy rates could be thrown upon silly and selfish landowners who attempted to stifle sound populations by using highly habitable areas as golf links, private parks, game preserves, and the like, and public- spirited people could combine to facilitate communications that would render life in such districts compatible with industrial occupation. Such deliberate redistribution of population as this differential treatment of districts involves, is, however, quite beyond the available power and intelligence of our public control at present, and I suggest it here as something that our grandchildren perhaps may begin to consider. But if in the obscurity of this footnote I may let myself go, I would point out that, in the future, a time may come when locomotion will be so swift and convenient and cheap that it will be unnecessary to spread out the homes of our great communities where the industrial and trading centres are gathered together; it will be unnecessary for each district to sustain the renewal and increase of its own population. Certain wide regions will become specifically administrative and central—the home lands, the mother lands, the centres of education and population, and others will become specifically fields of action. Something of this kind is to a slight degree already the case with Scotland, which sends out its hardy and capable sons wherever the world has need of them; the Swiss mountains, too, send their sons far and wide in the world; and on the other hand, with regard to certain elements of population, at any rate, London and the Gold Coast and, I suspect, some regions in the United States of America, receive to consume.

18

An excellent account of experiments already tried in the establishment of a Minimum Wage will be found in W.P. Reeves' State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, vol. ii., p. 47 et seq.

19

"I wonder whether there is any legal flaw in the second section of the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act of 1894, which may have been specially aimed at beggars with offspring. It is specially punishable to beg having an infant in their arms, quite apart from teaching the infant in question to beg. Or is this law insufficiently enforced through popular apathy?"—C. G. STUART MENTEATH.

20

My friend, Mr. L. Cope Cornford, writes apropos of this, and I think I cannot do better than print what he says as a corrective to my own assertions: "All you say on the importance of letting a child hear good English cleanly accented is admirable; but we think you have perhaps overlooked the importance of ear-training as such, which should begin by the time the child can utter its first attempts at speech. By ear-training I mean the differentiation of sounds—articulate, inarticulate, and musical— fixing the child's attention and causing it to imitate. As every sound requires a particular movement of the vocal apparatus, the child will soon be able to adapt its apparatus unconsciously and to distinguish accurately. And if it does not so learn before the age of five or six, it probably will never do so. By the age of two—or less— the child should be able to imitate exactly any speech-sound. Our youngsters can do so; and, consequently, the fact that they had a nurse with a Sussex accent ceased to matter, because they learned to distinguish her talk from correct English. So in the case of a foreign nurse; the result of a foreigner's influence would be good in this way, that it would train a child to a new series of speech-sounds, thus enlarging its ear capacity. Nor need it necessarily adopt these speech-sounds as those which it should use; it merely knows them; and if the foreigner have a good accent, and speaks her own tongue well, the child's ear is trained for life, irrespective of expression. Experience shows that a child can keep separate in its mind two or three languages—at first the speech-sounds, later the expression. Modes of expression need not begin till after five, or later. With regard to music, every child should begin to undergo a simple course of ear-training on the sol-fa system as elaborated and taught by McNaught, because the faculty of so learning is lost—atrophied—by the age of twelve or fourteen. But, beginning early—as early as possible— every child, 'musical' or not, can be trained, just as every child, 'artistic' or not, may be taught to draw accurately up to a certain point."

21

Messrs. Heath of Boston, U.S.A., have sent me a book of Nursery Rhymes, arranged by Mr. Charles Welsh, which is certainly the best thing I have seen in this way. It is worthy of note that the neglect of pedagogic study in Great Britain is forcing the intelligent British parent and teacher to rely more and more upon American publishers for children's books. The work of English writers is often very tasteful and pretty, but of the smallest educational value.

22

Peccavi.

23

There could be a set of colour bands in the book that the English Language Society might publish.

24

There can be little doubt that many of us were taught to count very badly, and that we were hampered in our arithmetic throughout life by this defect. Counting should be taught be means of small cubes, which the child can arrange and rearrange in groups. It should have at least over a hundred of these cubes—if possible a thousand; they will be useful as toy bricks, and for innumerable purposes. Our civilization is now wedded to a decimal system of counting, and, to begin with, it will be well to teach the child to count up to ten and to stop there for a time. It is suggested by Mrs. Mary Everest Boole that it is very confusing to have distinctive names for eleven and twelve, which the child is apt to class with the single numbers and contrast with the teens, and she proposes at the beginning (The Cultivation of the Mathematical Imagination, Colchester: Benham & Co.) to use the words "one-ten," "two-ten," thirteen, fourteen, etc., for the second decade in counting. Her proposal is entirely in harmony with the general drift of the admirably suggestive diagrams of number order collected by Mr. Francis Gallon. Diagram after diagram displays the same hitch at twelve, the predominance in the mind of an individualized series over quantitatively equal spaces until the twenties are attained. Many diagrams also display the mental scar of the clock face, the early counting is overmuch associated with a dial. One might perhaps head off the establishment of that image, and supply a more serviceable foundation for memories by equipping the nursery with a vertical scale of numbers divided into equal parts up to two or three hundred, with each decade tinted. When the child has learnt to count up to a hundred with cubes, it should be given an abacus, and it should also be encouraged to count and check quantities with all sorts of things, marbles, apples, bricks in a wall, pebbles, spots on dominoes, and so on; taught to play guessing games with marbles in a hand, and the like. The abacus, the hundred square and the thousand cube, will then in all probability become its cardinal numerical memories. Playing cards (without corner indices) and dominoes supply good recognizable arrangements of numbers, and train a child to grasp a number at a glance. The child should not be taught the Arabic numerals until it has counted for a year or more. Experience speaks here. I know one case only too well of a man who learnt his Arabic numerals prematurely, before he had acquired any sound experimental knowledge of numerical quantity, and, as a consequence, his numerical ideas are incurably associated with the peculiarities of the figures. When he hears the word seven he does not really think of seven or seven-ness at all, even now, he thinks of a number rather like four and very unlike six. Then again, six and nine are mysteriously and unreasonably linked in his mind, and so are three and five. He confuses numbers like sixty-three and sixty-five, and finds it hard to keep seventy-four distinct from forty-seven. Consequently, when it came to the multiplication table, he learnt each table as an arbitrary arrangement of relationships, and with an extraordinary amount of needless labour and punishment. But obviously with cubes or abacus at hand, it would be the easiest thing in the world for a child to construct and learn its own multiplication table whenever the need arose.

25

One may note here, perhaps, the desirability too often disregarded by over-solicitous parents, and particularly by the parents of the solitary children who are now so common, of keeping the child a little out of focus, letting it play by itself whenever it will, never calling attention to it in a manner that awakens it to the fact of an audience, never talking about it in its presence. Solitary children commonly get too much control, they are forced and beguiled upward rather than allowed to grow, their egotism is over-stimulated, and they miss many of the benefits of play and competition. It seems a pity, too, in the case of so many well-to-do people, that having equipped nurseries they should not put them to a fuller use—if in no other way than by admitting foster children. None of this has been very fully analyzed, of course (there are enormous areas of valuable research in these matters waiting for people of intelligence and leisure, or of intelligence and means), but the opinion that solitary children are handicapped by their loneliness is very strong. It is nearly certain that as a rule they make less agreeable boys and girls, but to me at any rate it is not nearly so certain that they make adult failures. It would be interesting to learn just what proportion of solitary children there is on the roll of those who have become great in our world. One thinks of John Ruskin, a particularly fine specimen of the highly focussed single son. Prig perhaps he was, but this world has a certain need of such prigs. A correspondent (a schoolmistress of experience) who has collected statistics in her own neighbourhood, is strongly of opinion not only that solitary children are below the average, but that all elder children are inferior in quality. I do not believe this, but it would be interesting and valuable if some one could find time for a wide and thorough investigation of this question.

26

Piano playing as an accomplishment is a nuisance and encumbrance to the school course and a specialization that surely lies within the private Home province. To learn to play the piano properly demands such an amount of time and toil that I do not see how we can possibly include it in the educational scheme of the honourable citizens of the coming world state. To half learn it, to half learn anything, is a training in failure. But it is probable that a different sort of music teaching altogether—a teaching that would aim, not at instrumentalization, but at intelligent appreciation—might find a place in a complete educational scheme. The general ignorance that pervades, and in part inspires these papers, does, in the matter of music, become special, profound, and distinguished. It seems to me, however, that what the cultivated man or woman requires is the ability to read a score intelligently rather than to play it—to distinguish the threads, the values, of a musical composition, to have a quickened ear rather than a disciplined hand. I owe to my friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, the suggestion that the piano is altogether too exacting an instrument to use as the practical vehicle for such instruction, and that something simpler and cheaper—after the fashion of the old spinet—is required. Possibly some day a teacher of genius will devise and embody in a book a course of class lessons, sustained by simple practice and written work, that would attain this end. But, indeed, after all is said and done, music is the most detached and the purest of arts, the most accessory of attainments.] Apart from the piano work, the special teaching of elegant accomplishments seems just at present on the wane. And on the whole I think what one might call useful or catchpenny accomplishments are also passing their zenith—shorthand lessons, book-keeping lessons, and such-like impostures upon parental credulity.

There is, however, a thing that was once done in schools as a convenient accomplishment, and which has—with that increase in communication which is the salient material fact of the nineteenth century—developed in Western Europe to the dimensions of a political necessity, and that is the teaching of one or more modern foreign languages. The language-teaching of all previous periods has been done with a view to culture, artistic, as in the case of Elizabethan Italian, or intellectual as with English Latin. But the language- teaching of to-day is deliberately, almost conscientiously, not for culture. It would, I am sure, be a very painful and shocking thought indeed to an English parent to think that French was taught in school with a view to reading French books. It is taught as a vulgar necessity for purposes of vulgar communication. The stirring together of the populations that is going on, the fashion and facilities for travel, the production of the radii from the trading foci, are rapidly making a commonplace knowledge of French, German, and Italian a necessity to the merchant and tradesman, and the ever more extensive travelling class. So that so far as Europe goes, one may very well regard this modern modern-language teaching as—with the modern mathematics—an extension of the trivium, of the apparatus, that is, of thought and expression. [Footnote: In the United States there is less sense of urgency about modern languages, but sooner or later the American may wake up to the need of Spanish in his educational schemes.

27

In one way the foreign language may be made educationally very useful, and that is as an exercise in writing translations into good English.

28

This way of putting it may jar a little upon the more or less explicit preconceptions of many readers, who are in reality in harmony with the tone of thought of this paper. They will have decided that the school work is to "train the mind," to "teach the pupil to think," or upon some similar phrase. But I venture to think that most of these phrases are at once too wide and too narrow. They are too wide because they ignore the spontaneous activity of the child and the extra-scholastic forces of mind-training, and they are too narrow because they ignore the fact that we do not progress far with our thoughts unless we throw them out into objective existence by means of words, diagrams, models, trial essays. Even if we do not talk to others we must, silently or vocally or visibly, talk to ourselves at least to get on. To acquire the means of intercourse is to learn to think, so far as learning goes in the matter.

29

I have discussed this fully in Anticipations, Chapter III., Developing Social Elements.

30

It is not only British subjects that are assimilated in this way, the infection of the British system, the annexation of certain social strata in the Republic by the British crown, is a question for every thoughtful American. America is less and less separate from Europe, and the social development of the United States cannot be a distinct process—it is inevitably bound up in the general social development of the English-speaking community. The taint has touched the American Navy, for example, and there are those who discourage promotion from the ranks—the essential virtue of the democratic state—because men so promoted would be at a disadvantage when they met the officers of foreign navies, who were by birth and training "gentlemen." When they met them socially no doubt was meant; in war the disadvantage might prove the other way about.

31

There is a very suggestive book on this aspect of our general question, The Crowd, by M. Gustave le Bon, which should interest any one who finds this paper interesting. And the English reader who would like a fuller treatment of this question has now available also Ostrogorski's great work, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties.

32

The statement of the case is not complete unless we mention that, to the method of rule by hereditary rulers and the appointment of officials by noble patrons on the one hand, and of rule by politicians exercising patronage on the other, there is added in the British system the Chinese method of selecting officials by competitive examination. Within its limits this has worked as a most admirable corrective to patronage; it is one of the chief factors in the cleanhandedness of British politicians, and it is continually importing fresh young men from outside to keep officialdom in touch with the general educated world. But it does not apply, and it does not seem applicable, to the broader issues of politics, to the appointment and endorsement of responsible rulers and legislators, where a score of qualities are of more importance than those an examination can gauge.

33

There are excellent possibilities, both in the United States and in this Empire, of trying over such a method as this, and of introducing it tentatively and piecemeal. In Great Britain already there are quite different methods of election for Parliament existing side by side. In the Hythe division of Kent, for example, I vote by ballot with elaborate secrecy; in the University of London I declare my vote in a room full of people. The British University constituencies, or one of them, might very readily be used as a practical test of this jury suggestion. There is nothing, I believe, in the Constitution of the United States to prevent any one State resorting to this characteristically Anglo-Saxon method of appointing its representatives in Congress. It is not only in political institutions that the method may be tried. Any societies or institutions that have to send delegates to a conference or meeting might very easily bring this conception to a practical test. Even if it does not prove practicable as a substitute for election by polling, it might be found of some value for the appointment of members of the specialist type, for whom at present we generally resort to co-option. In many cases where the selection of specialists was desirable to complete public bodies, juries of educated men of the British Grand Jury type might be highly serviceable.

34

In the case of the House of Lords, for example, the process of conversion might begin by extending the Scotch and Irish system to England, and substituting a lesser number of representative peers for the existing English peerage. Then it would merely revive a question that was already under discussion in middle Victorian times, to create non-hereditary peerages in the three kingdoms. The several Privy Councils might next be added to the three national constituencies by which and from which the representative peers were appointed, and then advisory boards might be called from the various Universities and organized professions, and from authoritative Colonial bodies to recommend men to be added to the voting peerage. Life peers already exist. The law is represented by life peers. The lords spiritual are representative life peers—they are the senior bishops, and they are appointed to represent a corporation—the Established Church. So a generally non-hereditary functional nobility might come into being without any violent break with the present condition of things. The conversion of the American Senate would be a more difficult matter, because the method of appointment of Senators is more stereotyped altogether, and, since 1800, unhappily quite bound up with the political party system. The Senate is not a body of varied and fluctuating origins into which new elements can be quietly inserted. An English writer cannot estimate how dear the sacred brace of Senators for each State may or may not be to the American heart. But the possibility of Congress delegating the power to appoint additional Senators to certain non-political bodies, or to juries of a specific constitution, is at least thinkable as the beginning of a movement that would come at last into parallelism with that in the British Empire.

35

See Appendix I.

36

Something of the sort is already secured in France by the power of the Conseil de Famille to expropriate a spendthrift.

37

See Clouston's Mental Diseases, fifth edition, p. 535, for insanity caused by these pamphlets; see also p. 591 et seq. for "adolescent" literature.

38

In most big public schools, I am told, there is a system of superannuation about sixteen, but I know nothing of the provision for those who are weeded out.

39

There are three very fine libraries in the adjacent South Kensington Museum, especially available to students, but, like almost all existing libraries, they are managed in most respects on lines conceived when a copy of a book was an almost unique thing made specially by the copyist's hand. However much a book is in demand, however cheap its price of publication may be, no library in England, unless it is a modern subscription library, ever gets duplicate copies. This is the cause of the dearness of serious books; they are bought as rarities, and have to be sold in the same spirit. But when libraries learn to buy by the dozen and the hundred, there is no reason why the sort of book now published at 10s. 6d. should not be sold at a shilling from the beginning.

40

But I may perhaps point out here how integral to a sane man-making scheme is the raising of the minimum age at which children may work. A day will come, I hope, when even the partial employment of children under fifteen will be prohibited, and when, as Mr. Sidney Webb suggested some time ago, employment up to the age of twenty-one will be limited to so few hours a week—his suggestion was thirty—as to leave a broad margin for the more or less compulsory college work and physical training that are becoming essential to the modern citizen.

41

I may perhaps explain that my conception of military organization is a universal service of citizens —non-professional soldiers—who will be trained—possibly in boyhood and youth, to shoot very well indeed, to ride either horses or bicycles, and to take up positions and move quickly and easily in organized bodies, and, in addition, a special graduated profession of soldiers who will be in their various ranks engineers, gunners, special-force men of various sorts, and, in the higher ranks, masters of all the organization and methods necessary for the rapid and effective utilization of the non-professional manhood of the country, of volunteers, militia, or short-service enlistment levies, drawn from this general supply, and of all the machinery of communication, provisioning, and so forth. They will not be necessarily the "social superiors" of their commands, but they will naturally exercise the same authoritative command in warfare that a doctor does in a sick-room.

42

One may, however, suggest one other course as possible under special conditions. There is one sort of art that requires not only a very rigorous and exhaustive training, but also an early commencement, and that is music, at once the most isolated and the most universal of arts. Exceptional gifts in the direction of music will have appeared in the schooling stage, and it is quite conceivable that the college phase for those who are destined for a musical career should have as its backbone a "grind" in the theory and practice of music, with languages and general culture relegated to a Section ii.

43

As things are, there is no doubt a considerable advantage in the child from a good home going on to a good preparatory school instead of entering a public elementary school, and the passage above must not be misread as a sweeping condemnation of such establishments.

44

In America Mr. George Iles is already organizing the general appraisement of books for the public library reader in a most promising manner. The Bibliography of the Literature of American History, with an appraisal of each book, which has appeared under his direction, is edited by Mr. Larned, and is a most efficient performance; it is to be kept up to date by Mr. P. P. Wells, librarian of the Yale Law School. It includes an appendix by Professor Channing, of Harvard, which is on the lines of the "Guides" I suggest, though scarcely so full as I should like them. This appendix is reprinted separately for five cents, and it is almost all English public librarians and libraries need so far as American history goes. The English Fabian Society, I may note, publishes a sixpenny bibliography of social and economic science, but it is a mere list for local librarians, and of little use to the uninitiated reader.

45

Dr. Beattie Crozier, in his most interesting and suggestive History of Intellectual Development, terms the literary apparatus that holds a people together to a common purpose, the "Bible" of that people, and suggests that the "Bible" of a modern people should be the History of Civilization. His work expresses by very different phrases and methods a line of thought closely akin to the thesis of this paper.

46

Anticipations, Chapter III. Developing Social Elements.

47

It may be suggested that among other methods of putting the criticism of contemporary literature upon a better footing is one that might conceivably be made to pay its own expenses. There is so much room for endowments nowadays that where one can get at the purse of the general public one should certainly prefer it to that of the generous but overtaxed donor. The project would require a strong endowment, but that endowment might be of the nature of a guarantee fund, and might in the end return unimpaired to the lender. The suggestion is the establishment of a well-planned and reasonably cheap monthly or weekly critical magazine, written on a level at present unattainable—chiefly because of the low rate of payment for all literary criticism. There can be no doubt among those who read much among literary and quasi-literary periodicals in English that there is a very considerable amount of high critical ability available. Buried and obscured to an ineffectual degree among much that is formal, foolish, and venial, there is to be found to-day a really quite remarkable number of isolated reviews, criticisms and articles in which style is apparent, in which discrimination shines fitfully, in which there is the unmistakable note of honest enthusiasm for good work. For the most part, such criticism bears also the marks of haste— as, indeed, it must do when a review as long as the column of a daily paper, a day's work, that is, of steady writing, earns scarcely a pound. But the stuff is there. Scarcely a number of the Academy, or the Spectator, scarcely a week of the Morning Post, the Daily News, or the Daily Chronicle, but there is a review, or a piece of a review, that has the stigmata of literature. And this suggestion is that some of these writers shall be got together, shall be paid at least as well as popular short-story writers are paid, shall each have a definite department marked out under a trustworthy editor, and be pledged to limit their work to the pages of this new critical magazine. Their work would be signed, and there they would be, conspicuously urged to do the best that was in them, apropos of more or less contemporary books and writers. They would have leisure for deliberate judgments, for the development of that consistency of thought which the condition of journalism renders so impossible. This review would mean for them status, reputation, and opportunity. They would deal with contemporary fiction, with contemporary speculative literature, and with the style, logic, methods and vocabulary of scientific and philosophical writers. Their work would form the mass of the magazine, but there would also be (highly paid) occasional writers, towards whose opinions the regular staff would very carefully define their attitude. The project, of course, in foolish hands, might be very foolishly misinterpreted. It might be quite easy to drive a team of egregious asses in this way over contemporary work, leaving nothing but hoof-marks and injuries, but we are assuming the thing to be efficiently done. It is submitted that such a magazine, patiently and generously sustained for a few years, would at last probably come to pay its way. Unless the original selection of the staff was badly done, it would by sheer persistent high quality win its way to authority with the reading public, and so fill its covers with a swelling mass of advertisement pages. And once it paid, then forthwith a dozen rivals would be in the field, all of them, of course, also paying highly for critical matter and competing for critics of standing. Such an enterprise would be a lever for criticism through the whole of our literary world.

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I am indebted to Mr. E. R. Pease for some valuable corrections.—H. G. W.