If the Utopian scheme of education were widely adopted, an antidote would be found to a grave and growing evil which is beginning to imperil the mental health of every civilised community, and of this more than any other.

The more civilised (in the Western sense of the word) a country becomes, the less educative does life--the rough-and-tumble life of the work-a-day world--tend to become.

In a thoroughly "civilised" country, where the material conditions of life are highly organised, and where industry is highly specialised, so much is done for the individual by 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.