muscular work every day, they say, they have no inclination or fitness for serious literature, serious lectures, or serious art. They prefer a drink, a bioscope, a music-hall. Eight hours’ work, eight hours’ play, eight hours’ sleep; that is the ideal. A very natural and symmetrical ideal, but—it is just the ideal which “the capitalist” wishes them to cultivate, and this might suggest reflection. Someone will do the thinking while they play. Democratic government is a mischief and a blunder unless Demos is capable of thinking. If the workers of the world have an ambition to control their destinies, they must realise that their destinies are things too large and complex and important to be controlled by men with sleepy brains. There is no solution of the broad social problem of this planet which does not imply that every adult man and woman, of normal powers, shall be alert and informed and self-assertive enough to take an intelligent part in its administration.
Therefore, it seems to many that a scheme of education which ceases to operate at the age of fourteen, which teaches children to read and has no further concern with what they read, which impresses on their cortex a mass of facts of no utility or stimulation, is not a fulfilment of a nation’s duty, or a proper consideration of a nation’s interest. The grander lessons of history, the more impressive truths of science, the vital features of economics and sociology, the ennobling characters of fine art, cannot be even faintly impressed on the young
