vice and misery.
Let Ignorance start how it will, it must run the same round of low
appetites, poverty, slavery, and superstition. Some of us know this
well--nay, I will say, feel it; for knowledge of this kind cuts deep; and
to us it is one of the most painful facts belonging to our condition that
there are numbers of our fellow-workmen who are so far from feeling in
the same way, that they never use the imperfect opportunities already
offered them for giving their children some schooling, but turn their
little ones of tender age into bread-winners, often at cruel tasks,
exposed to the horrible infection of childish vice. Of course, the
causes of these hideous things go a long way back. Parents' misery has
made parents' wickedness. But we, who are still blessed with the hearts
of fathers and the consciences of men--we who have some knowledge of the
curse entailed on broods of creatures in human shape, whose enfeebled
bodies and dull perverted minds are mere centres of uneasiness in whom
even appetite is feeble and joy impossible--I say we are bound to use all
the means at our command to help in putting a stop to this horror. Here,
it seems to me, is a way in which we may use extended co-operation among
us to the most momentous of all purposes, and make conditions of
enrolment that would strengthen all educational measures. It is true
enough that there is a low sense of parental duties in the nation at
large, and that numbers who have no excuse in bodily hardship seem to
think it a light thing to beget children, to bring human beings with all
their tremendous possibilities into this difficult world, and then take
little heed how they are disciplined and furnished for the perilous
journey they are sent on without any asking of their own. This is a sin
shared in more or less by all classes; but there are sins which, like
taxation, fall the heaviest on the poorest, and none have such galling
reasons as we working men to try and rouse to the utmost the feeling of
responsibility in fathers and mothers. We have been urged into
co-operation by the pressure of common demands. In war men need each
other more; and where a given point has to be defended, fighters
inevitably find themselves shoulder to shoulder. So fellowship grows, so
grow the rules of fellowship, which gradually shape themselves to
thoroughness as the idea of a common good becomes more complete. We feel
a right to say, If you will be one of us, you must