cation on such terms.

94. The first condition under which it can be given usefully is, that
it should be clearly understood to be no means of getting on in the
world, but a means of staying pleasantly in your place there. And the
first elements of State education should be calculated equally for the
advantage of every order of person composing the State. From the
lowest to the highest class, every child born in this island should be
required by law to receive these general elements of human discipline,
and to be baptized--not with a drop of water on its forehead--but in
the cloud and sea of heavenly wisdom and of earthly power.

And the elements of this general State education should be briefly
these:

95. First--The body must be made as beautiful and perfect in its youth
as it can be, wholly irrespective of ulterior purpose. If you mean
afterwards to set the creature to business which will degrade its body
and shorten its life, first, I should say, simply,--you had better let
such business alone;--but if you must have it done, somehow, yet let
the living creature, whom you mean to kill, get the full strength of
its body first, and taste the joy, and bear the beauty of youth. After
that, poison it, if you will. Economically, the arrangement is a wiser
one, for it will take longer in the killing than if you began with it
younger; and you will get an excess of work out of it which will more
than pay for its training.

Therefore, first teach--as I have said in the preface to 'Unto this
Last'--"The Laws of Health, and exercises enjoined by them;" and, to
this end, your schools must be in fresh country, and amidst fresh air,
and have great extents of land attached to them in permanent estate.
Riding, running, all the honest, personal exercises of offense and
defense, and music, should be the primal heads of this bodily
education.

96. Next to these bodily accomplishments, the two great mental graces
should be taught, Reverence and Compassion: not that these are in a
literal sense to be "taught," for they are innate in every well-born
human creature, but they have to be developed exactly as the strength
of the body must be, by deliberate and constant exercise. I never
understood why Goethe (in the plan of education in 'Wilhelm Meister')
says that reverence is not innate, but must be taught from without; it
seems to me so fixedly a function of the human spirit, that if men can
get nothing else to reverence they will wor