hem or their parents the liberty of
using, misusing, or non-using the instruments provided. Moreover, we do
nothing of a systematic nature to instil into the youth of our poorer
citizens the fact that they are members of a corporate community and
future citizens of a State, and that hereafter they have duties towards
that State the performance of which is the only rational ground of their
possession of rights as against the State. _E.g._, in many of our slums
we have the best examples of individualism run mad, of the conception
that the individual is a law unto his private self, and that all
government is something alien, something forced upon the individual from
the outside and impinging upon his private will, instead of law being
what it really is, an expression of the social conditions under which
the welfare of the individual and of society may be attained.

Further, it must be maintained that our present policy in education is
economically wasteful. To spend, as we do yearly, larger and larger sums
of money on the elementary education of our children, and then, in a
large number of cases, to fail to reach the ends of securing either the
social efficiency of the individual or the protection of society against
the ignorance of its members, is surely, to say the least, unwise.
Again, if we really set before us this aim of the social efficiency of
the future individual, we must do something to carry on the education of
the children of the poorer classes after the Elementary School stage has
been passed.

One of the strongest points in the German system of education, as
compared and contrasted with our own, is the care which is taken of the
higher education of the children of the working classes during the
period when it is most important that some control should be exercised
over the youth of the country, throughout the time when the boy is most
open to temptation, and when the moral forces of society are potent for
good and evil in shaping and forming his character. The great majority
of the children in a modern State are and must be destined for
industrial service; the great majority of the children of the working
classes must, at or about the age of fourteen, leave the Primary School
and enter upon the learning of some trade. But manifestly at this early
stage the larger number are not fitted to guide and control their own
lives; and if moral education aims, as it ought to aim, at fitting the
individual for freedom