interest is not enough,' 'need of public spirit and intelligence for
good Government,' 'need of honesty in giving a vote,' 'the vote a trust
as well as a right.' Almost every school publisher rushed out a
text-book on the subject, and many School Boards encouraged its
introduction; and yet the experiment, after a careful trial, was an
acknowledged failure. The new text-books (all of which I had at the time
to review), constituted perhaps the most worthless collection of printed
pages that have ever occupied the same space on a bookshelf, and the
lessons, with their alternations of instruction and edification, failed
to stimulate any kind of interest in the students. If our youths and
maidens are to be stirred as deeply by the conception of the State as
were the pupils of Socrates, teachers and the writers of text-books must
apparently approach their task with something of Socrates' passionate
love of truth and of the searching courage of his dialectic.

If again, at an earlier age, children still in school are to be taught
what Mr. Wells calls 'the sense of the State,'[63] we may, by remembering
Athens, get some indication of the conditions on which success depends.
Children will not learn to love London while getting figures by heart as
to the millions of her inhabitants and the miles of her sewers. If their
love is to be roused by words, the words must be as beautiful and as
simple as the chorus in praise of Athens in the _Oedipus Coloneus_. But
such words are not written except by great poets who actually feel what
they write, and perhaps before we have a poet who loves London as
Sophocles loved Athens it may be necessary to make London itself
somewhat more lovely.

[63] _The future in America_, chapter ix.

The emotions of children are, however, most easily reached not by words
but by sights and sounds. If therefore, they are to love the State, they
should either be taken to see the noblest aspects of the State or those
aspects should be brought to them. And a public building or ceremony, if
it is to impress the unflinching eyes of childhood, must, like the
buildings of Ypres or Bruges or the ceremonies of Japan, be in truth
impressive. The beautiful aspect of social life is fortunately not to be
found in buildings and ceremonies only, and no Winchester boy used to
come back uninfluenced from a visit to Father Dolling in the slums of
Landport; though boys' eyes are even quicker to see what is genuine in
personal