personality and self-assertion. Some day we shall regard education as half of the nation’s serious business, and will devote half our national revenue to it. Let it not be imagined that this suggests a generation of dour and frightfully serious people who never smoke or play bridge. I omit the function of entertainment only because it has never been neglected. The supreme business of a State is to make its people happy, strong, and prosperous. We shall approach the ideal when we abolish war and reduce pauperism and crime by registering all workers, organising all industry, reforming justice and the penal system, and removing the morally diseased.
In those days education will be a vast, humane, scientific scheme for guiding the growth of human embryos into industrious and orderly citizens, and enabling the adult citizen pleasurably to cultivate his mind and taste. The development of each child will be followed as the development of a pupil is followed in the Jesuit Society, but with a care to develop its individuality fully, in harmony with the individualities of others. The child will not pass from the sphere of the educator at puberty, with unformed mind and character, to swell the great army of the intellectually listless. Ruskin’s noble ideal of “as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures” will replace the narrow standards of our Education Department, with which the child can have no sympathy. From the first dawn of intelligence it
