THEO. It is so. But, strange to say, the faithful of the cult of the “Survival of the fittest” do not practice their creed; for their whole exertion is to make the naturally unfit supplant the fit. Thus, by bribes of large sums of money, they allure the best teachers from their natural pupils to mechanicalise their naturally unfit progeny into professions which they uselessly overcrowd. ENQ. And you attribute all this to what? THEO. All this is owing to the perniciousness of a system which turns out goods to order, irrespective of the natural proclivities and talents of the youth. The poor little candidate for this progressive paradise of learning, comes almost straight from the nursery to the treadmill of a preparatory school for sons of gentlemen. Here he is immediately seized upon by the workmen of the materio-intellectual factory, and crammed with Latin, French and Greek Accidence, Dates and Tables, so that if he have any natural genius it is rapidly squeezed out of him by the rollers of what Carlyle has so well-called “dead vocables.” ENQ. But surely he is taught something besides “dead vocables,” and much of that which may lead him direct to _Theosophy_, if not entirely into the Theosophical Society? THEO. Not much. For of history, he will attain only sufficient knowledge of his own particular nation to fit him with a steel armour of prejudice against all other peoples, and be steeped in the foul cess-pools of chronicled national hate and blood-thirstiness; and surely, you would not call that—_Theosophy_? ENQ. What are your further objections? THEO. Added to this is a smattering of selected, so-called, Biblical facts, from the study of which all intellect is eliminated. It is simply a memory lesson, the “Why” of the teacher being a “Why” of circumstances and not of reason. ENQ. Yes; but I have heard you congratulate yourself at the ever-increasing number of the Agnostics and Atheists in our day, so that it appears that even people trained in the system you abuse so heartily _do_ learn to think and reason for themselves.