which slaves cannot possibly feel. So, many
intelligent adults, including many parents and teachers, have come to
believe it possible that children will learn to do hard work, both in
school and in after life, through the free play of interior motives
which appeal to them, and prompt them to persistent exertion.

The justice of Spencer's views about training through pleasurable
sensation and achievement in freedom rather than through uninterested
work and pain inflicted by despotic government, is well illustrated by
the recent improvements in the discipline of reformatories for boys and
girls and young men and women. It has been demonstrated that the only
useful reformatories are those which diminish the criminal's liberty of
action as little as possible, require him to perform productive labour,
educate him for a trade or other useful occupation, and offer him the
reward of an abridgment of sentence in return for industry and
self-control. Repression and compulsion under penalties however severe
fail to reform, and often make bad moral conditions worse. Instruction,
as much freedom as is consistent with the safety of society, and an
appeal to the ordinary motives of emulation, satisfaction in
achievement, and the desire to win credit, can, and do, reform.

Many schools, both public and private, have now adopted--in most cases
unconsciously--many of Spencer's more detailed suggestions. The
laboratory method of instruction, for example, now common for scientific
subjects in good schools, is an application of his doctrines of concrete
illustration, training in the accurate use of the senses, and
subordination of book-work. Many schools realise, too, that learning by
heart and, in general, memorising from books are not the only means of
storing the mind of a child. They should make parts of a sound
education, but should not be used to the exclusion of learning through
eye, ear, and hand. Spencer pointed out with much elaboration that
children acquire in their early years a vast amount of information
exclusively through the incessant use of their senses. To-day teachers
know this fact, and realise much better than the teachers of fifty years
ago did, that all through the school and college period the pupils
should be getting a large part of their new knowledge through the
careful application of their own powers of observation, aided, indeed,
by books and pictures which record the observations, old and new, of
other people.