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And the more the people in a civilised country are withdrawn from the soil and herded into mines and mills and offices, the more imperative is it that the school should quicken rather than deaden the child's innate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 him towards the perfection of which his nature admits, must needs make him continuously _better_.

In other words, growth, provided that it is healthy, harmonious, and many-sided, provided that it is growth of the whole being, is in itself and of inner necessity the most moralising of all processes.

Nay, it is the only moralising process, for in no other way can what is naturally good be transformed into what is ideally best.
This argument, apart from its being open to the possible objection that it plays on the meaning of the word "good," is perhaps too conclusive to be really convincing.