Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
For the State, I perceive, looking out with right sacred earnestness for
persons able to command, will straightway also come upon the question:
"What kind of schools and seminaries, and teaching and also preaching
establishments have I, for the training of young souls to take command
and to yield obedience? Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of
these two is the net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man;
all good lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil,
wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these. He is a good man that
can command and obey; he that cannot is a bad. If my teachers and my
preachers, with their seminaries, high schools and cathedrals, do train
men to these gifts, the thing they are teaching and preaching must be
true; if they do not, not true!"
The State, once brought to its veracities by the thumb-screw in this
manner, what will it think of these same seminaries and cathedrals!
I foresee that our Etons and Oxfords with their nonsense-verses,
college-logics, and broken crumbs of mere _speech_,--which is not even
English or Teutonic speech, but old Grecian and Italian speech, dead
and buried and much lying out of our way these two thousand years last
past,--will be found a most astonishing seminary for the training of
young English souls to take command in human Industries, and act a
valiant part under the sun! The State does not want vocables, but manly
wisdoms and virtues: the State, does it want parliamentary orators,
first of all, and men capable of writing books? What a rag-fair of
extinct monkeries, high-piled here in the very shrine of our existence,
fit to smite the generations with atrophy and beggarly paralysis,--as we
see it do! The Minister of Education will not want for work, I think, in
the New Downing Street!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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