dy response. Of the truth of this statement
I could, if necessary, give many proofs. One must suffice. The
children, who are adepts at drawing with brush and pencil, wander in
field and lane with sketch-books in their hands; and one of them at
least was so moved by the beauty of a winter sunrise, as seen from
his cottage window, that, in his own words, he felt he _must_ try to
paint it, the result being a water-colour sketch which I have shown
to a competent artist, who tells me that the _feeling_ in the sky is
quite wonderful.

In this brief preliminary sketch of the more salient features of the
Utopian school, I have, I hope, said enough to show that its scholars
differ _toto coelo_ from those who attend that familiar type of
school which I have recently described. Yet the Utopian children are
made of the same clay as the children of other villages. If anything,
indeed, the clay is heavier and more stubborn in Utopia than
elsewhere. Some ten or twelve years ago, when Egeria took charge of
the school, the children were dull, lifeless, listless, resourceless.
Now they are bright, intelligent, happy, responsive, overflowing with
life, interested in many things, full of ability and resource. How
has this change been wrought? Not by veneering or even inoculating
the children with good qualities, but simply by allowing their better
and higher nature to evolve itself freely, naturally, and under
favourable conditions.

That the child's better and higher nature is his real nature, is the
assumption--let me rather say, the profound conviction--on which
Egeria's whole system of education has been based. In basing it on
this assumption, she has made a bold departure from the highway which
has been blindly followed for many centuries. We have seen that the
basis of education in this country, as in Christendom generally, is
the doctrine of original sin. It is taken for granted by those who
train the child that his nature, if allowed to develop itself freely,
will grow in the wrong direction, and will therefore lead him astray;
and that it is the function of education to counteract this
tendency, to do violence to the child's nature, to compel it by main
force to grow (or make a pretence of growing) in the right direction,
to subject it to perpetual repression and constraint. The wild whoops
to which children so often give vent, when released from school, show
that a period of unnatural tension has come to an end; and in these,