, I clearly perceive this horrible cloaca of
Pauperism, wearing nearly bottomless now, is the point where we
must begin. Here, in this plainly unendurable portion of the general
quagmire, the lowest point of all, and hateful even to M'Croudy, must
our main drain begin: steadily prosecuting that, tearing that along with
Herculean labor and divine fidelity, we shall gradually drain the entire
Stygian swamp, and make it all once more a fruitful field!

For the State, I perceive, looking out with right sacred earnestness for
persons able to command, will straightway also come upon the question:
"What kind of schools and seminaries, and teaching and also preaching
establishments have I, for the training of young souls to take command
and to yield obedience? Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of
these two is the net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man;
all good lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil,
wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these. He is a good man that
can command and obey; he that cannot is a bad. If my teachers and my
preachers, with their seminaries, high schools and cathedrals, do train
men to these gifts, the thing they are teaching and preaching must be
true; if they do not, not true!"

The State, once brought to its veracities by the thumb-screw in this
manner, what will it think of these same seminaries and cathedrals!
I foresee that our Etons and Oxfords with their nonsense-verses,
college-logics, and broken crumbs of mere _speech_,--which is not even
English or Teutonic speech, but old Grecian and Italian speech, dead
and buried and much lying out of our way these two thousand years last
past,--will be found a most astonishing seminary for the training of
young English souls to take command in human Industries, and act a
valiant part under the sun! The State does not want vocables, but manly
wisdoms and virtues: the State, does it want parliamentary orators,
first of all, and men capable of writing books? What a rag-fair of
extinct monkeries, high-piled here in the very shrine of our existence,
fit to smite the generations with atrophy and beggarly paralysis,--as we
see it do! The Minister of Education will not want for work, I think, in
the New Downing Street!

How it will go with Souls'-Overseers, and what the _new_ kind will be,
we do not prophesy just now. Clear it is, however, that the last finish
of the State's efforts, in this operation of reg