o outspoken, so confiding,
can be supplying me with an adulterated article? That the
schoolmaster, to whom I have entrusted my little boy, can
starve or neglect him? How well I remember his words to the
dear child when last we parted. "You are leaving your
friends," he said, "but you will have a father in me, my
dear, and a mother in Mrs. Squeers!" For all such
rose-coloured dreams of the necessary immunity from human
vices of educated men the facts in last week's
_Spectator_ have a terrible significance. "Trust no man
further than you can see him," they seem to say. "Qui vult
decipi, decipiatur."

Allow me to quote from a modern writer a few sentences
bearing on this subject:--

"We are at present, legislature and nation together,
eagerly pushing forward schemes which proceed on the
postulate that conduct is determined, not by feelings, but
by cognitions. For what else is the assumption underlying
this anxious urging-on of organisations for teaching? What
is the root-notion common to Secularists and
Denominationalists but the notion that spread of knowledge
is the one thing needful for bettering behaviour? Having
both swallowed certain statistical fallacies, there has
grown up in them the belief that State education will
check ill-doing.... This belief in the moralising effects
of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is
absurd _a priori_.... This faith in lesson-books and
readings is one of the superstitions of the age.... Not by
precept, though heard daily; not by example, unless it is
followed; but only by action, often caused by the related
feeling, can a moral habit be formed. And yet this truth,
which mental science clearly teaches, and which is in
harmony with familiar sayings, is a truth wholly ignored
in current educational fanaticisms."

There need no praises of mine to commend to the
consideration of all thoughtful readers these words of
Herbert Spencer. They are to be found in "The Study of
Sociology" (pp. 36l-367).

Let us, however, do justice to science. It is not so wholly
wanting as Mr. Herbert Spencer would have us believe in
principles of action--principles by which we may regulate
our conduct in life. I myself once heard an accomplished man
of science declare that his labou