ed by a State
system of education.

But if any further illustration be needed of the superficiality and
harmfulness of the education forced upon the masses, we have it
glaringly enough in the cheap literature of to-day. This stupendous
mass of bosh could not have been produced unless there were a demand for
it. Some people are never tired of abusing the millionaires who have
made their fortunes by providing the illiterate nonsense that forms the
intellectual food of the vast majority of the public. It is wholly
unjustifiable and illogical to blame them. They are not founders of new
schools of thought in the field of literature; they are men of business,
and do not pretend to be anything worse. As such, it is their vocation
to find out what the public want, and to supply it to them. They have no
interest in making the million take their literature after it has been
passed through a mincer. They chop up news and hash grammar at half
price because the patrons of cheap papers and periodicals like their
literature served up in that fashion.

It is not the millionaire trader who is to blame for this state of
affairs--he merely profits by its existence. The real culprit is the
education system, which is the universal provider of the peculiar type
of culture that interests itself in the number of beef sandwiches that
would be required to encircle the earth, or the rate at which the
population of the world would have to increase within a given time to
enable its inhabitants, by mounting upon each other's heads, to reach
the moon.

The enormous demand for this class of literature is the most pregnant
evidence of the miserable effects of misapplied education and defective
instruction that could well be brought forward. But it is by no means
confined to the uncultured masses who have been driven through the
standards of an elementary school. Thousands who have been put through
the paces of what is called 'higher education' may be seen in
railway-carriages, at health resorts, or in the public libraries, deeply
immersed in cheap-jack reading-matter that no self-respecting person of
moderate intelligence would care even to be capable of specifying.

This painful sight, which cannot have escaped the notice of the least
observant, must surely lead the reflective man or woman to doubt the
value of educational methods that have led to no better result. It is
monstrous to think of years spent in grinding out syntax rules,
mathematics,