It is such idiots that the little red school-house operates upon, in the hope of unearthing an occasional first-rate man. Is that hope ever fulfilled? Despite much testimony to the effect that it is, I am convinced that it really isn’t. First-rate men are never begotten by Knights of Pythias; the notion that they sometimes are is due to an optical delusion. When they appear in obscure and ignoble circles it is no more than a proof that only an extremely wise sire knows his own son. Adultery, in brief, is one of nature’s devices for keeping the lowest orders of men from sinking to the level of downright simians: sometimes for a few brief years in youth, their wives and daughters are comely—and now and then the baron drinks more than he ought to. But it is foolish to argue that the gigantic machine of popular education is needed to rescue such hybrids from their environment. The truth is that all the education rammed into the average pupil in the average American public school could be acquired by the v larva of any reasonably intelligent man in no more than six weeks of ordinary application, and that where schools are unknown it actually _is_ so acquired. A bright child, in fact, can learn to read and write without any save the most casual aid a great deal faster than it can learn to read and write in a class-room, where the difficulties of the stupid retard it enormously and it is further burdened by the crazy formulæ invented by pedagogues. And once it can read and write, it is just as well equipped to acquire further knowledge as ninetenths of the teachers it will subsequently encounter in school or college. IV