lord, will stand second
to that. This conception of the responsibility of the parents and the
State to the child and the future runs quite counter to the general
ideas of to-day. These general ideas distort grim realities. Under the
most pious and amiable professions, all the Christian states of to-day
are, as a matter of fact, engaged in slave-breeding. The chief result,
though of course it is not the intention, of the activities of priest
and moralist to-day in these matters, is to lure a vast multitude of
little souls into this world, for whom there is neither sufficient food,
nor love, nor schools, nor any prospect at all in life but the
insufficient bread of servitude. It is a result that endears religion
and purity to the sweating employer, and leads unimaginative bishops,
who have never missed a meal in their lives, and who know nothing of the
indescribable bitterness of a handicapped entry into this world, to draw
a complacent contrast with irreligious France. It is a result that must
necessarily be recognized in its reality, and faced by these men who
will presently emerge to rule the world; men who will have neither the
plea of ignorance, nor moral stupidity, nor dogmatic revelation to
excuse such elaborate cruelty.

And having set themselves in these ways to raise the quality of human
birth, the New Republicans will see to it that the children who do at
last effectually get born come into a world of spacious opportunity. The
half-educated, unskilled pretenders, professing impossible creeds and
propounding ridiculous curricula, to whom the unhappy parents of to-day
must needs entrust the intelligences of their children; these
heavy-handed barber-surgeons of the mind, these schoolmasters, with
their ragtag and bobtail of sweated and unqualified assistants, will be
succeeded by capable, self-respecting men and women, constituting the
most important profession of the world. The windy pretences of "forming
character," supplying moral training, and so forth, under which the
educationalist of to-day conceals the fact that he is incapable of his
proper task of training, developing and equipping the mind, will no
longer be made by the teacher. Nor will the teacher be permitted to
subordinate his duties to the entirely irrelevant business of his
pupils' sports. The teacher will teach, and confine his moral training,
beyond enforcing truth and discipline, to the exhibition of a capable
person doing his duty as well as i