What, it will be said, and is all this to be taught to schoolboys? No;
but the first elements of it, all that are necessary to be known by an
individual in order to his acting wisely in any station of life, might
be taught, not only to every schoolboy, but to every peasant. The
impossibility of equality among men; the good which arises from their
inequality; the compensating circumstances in different states and
fortunes; the honorableness of every man who is worthily filling his
appointed place in society, however humble; the proper relations of poor
and rich, governor and governed; the nature of wealth, and mode of its
circulation; the difference between productive and unproductive labor;
the relation of the products of the mind and hand; the true value of
works of the higher arts, and the possible amount of their production;
the meaning of "Civilization," its advantages and dangers; the meaning
of the term "Refinement;" the possibilities of possessing refinement in
a low station, and of losing it in a high one; and, above all, the
significance of almost every act of a man's daily life, in its ultimate
operation upon himself and others;--all this might be, and ought to be,
taught to every boy in the kingdom, so completely, that it should be
just as impossible to introduce an absurd or licentious doctrine among
our adult population, as a new version of the multiplication table. Nor
am I altogether without hope that some day it may enter into the heads
of the tutors of our schools to try whether it is not as easy to make an
Eton boy's mind as sensitive to falseness in policy, as his ear is at
present to falseness in prosody.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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