y those
who organise his life and labour, that it ceases to be necessary for
him, except within narrow limits, to shift for himself. In a less
civilised community men have to use their wits as well as their hands
at every turn; and resourcefulness and versatility are therefore in
constant demand. The industrial life of a Russian peasant, who is of
necessity a Jack-of-many-trades, is incomparably more educative than
that of the Lancashire cotton operative, most of whose thinking and
much of whose operating may be said to be done for him by the
complicated machinery which he controls; who does, indeed, learn to
do one thing surpassingly well, but in doing that one thing becomes,
as he progresses, more and more automatic, so that the highest praise
we can give him is to say that he does his work with the sureness and
accuracy of a machine. It follows that the more civilised a country
becomes, the more important is the part that the elementary school
plays in the life of the nation,--and that not merely because the
ability to read, write, and cipher is, in the conditions which modern
civilisation imposes, almost as much a "necessary of life" as the
ability to walk or talk, but also and more especially because it
devolves upon the school to do for the citizen in his childhood what
life will not do for him in his manhood, or will do for him but in
scant measure, to stimulate his vital powers into healthful activity,
to foster the growth of his soul. And the more the people in a
civilised country are withdrawn from the soil and herded into mines
and mills and offices, the more imperative is it that the school
should quicken rather than deaden the child's innate faculties,
should bring sunshine rather than frost into his adolescent life. In
such a country as ours the responsibilities of the teacher are only
equalled by his opportunities; for the child is in his hands during
the most impressionable years of life; and those years will have been
wasted, and worse than wasted, unless they have fitted the child to
face the world with resourcefulness, intelligence, and vital energy,
ready to wrest from his environment, by enlarging and otherwise
transforming it, those educative influences which are still to be had
for the seeking, but are no longer automatically supplied.

_The Moral Aspect of Self-Realisation._

If Man, if each man in turn, is born _good_, the process of growth,
or self-realisation, which is presumably taking hi