Signs are sometimes visible of a reaction from the enthusiasm for educational progress that has engaged the national energies during the last half century. There is a danger, one is told, of educating boys or girls beyond their capacities, and above their station. The increased competition for the positions of governess and clerk, means misery and ruin to many of the candidates who would be more suitably, comfortably, and far more remuneratively employed in domestic service, or in manual labour according to their sex. The virtues of humility and respect for superiors are said to be crushed out in the scramble for knowledge that may enable its possessors to better themselves. Servant maids, one is told, no longer confine their demands to permission to wear a fringe, but stipulate for a pianoforte in the basement, or a bicycle with which to take their airing on their Sundays out. That upon the humbler levels of the community the progress from ignorance to education should be accompanied by real or apparent disturbances of the personal relations between classes was to have been expected. Seasons of transition such as the present always generate a certain amount of personal friction or of social displacement. Those just being emancipated from the illiteracy or semi-barbarism which have been the traditions of centuries have not yet overcome the agitating strangeness of their new and improved condition. Those above them in the social scale have not yet been able to decide whether to conciliate their educated inferiors as possible friends, or to stand on their guard against them as actual enemies. As the situation becomes more familiar, it will prove less strained. Common sense as a supplement to their zeal, seems the chief want of the educational reformers, official or private, of the day. The tendency is to postpone the development of intelligence to the acquisition of knowledge. The masters whom we are now educating are not in the habit of using their minds for the mere pleasure of intellectual exertion. Hence they often give an impression of being far less intelligent than they really are. The correct use of common words in the mother tongue ought orally, not out of any lesson book, to be taught all boys and girls. The difficulty experienced by the persons now spoken of in clearly answering a simple question is often insurmountable. The tendency is, not to digest the query as a whole, but to catch some word used in it and then to make a remark suggested by the association of the sound of the syllables, and so practically to evade the question put. The cheap diffusion of newspapers and magazines confirms rather than corrects these failures to concentrate the mind in the casual talk of everyday life. It is not beneath the dignity of the State educator to deal with the defect.[40] CHAPTER XIII THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE