“Education teaches in what social welfare consists. It is of first importance to you that your sons should be taught what are the ruling principles and beliefs which guide the lives of their fellowmen in their own times and in their own country; what the moral, social and political programme of their nation is; what the spirit of the legislation by which their deeds will have to be judged; what degree of progress Humanity has already attained and that which it has yet to attain. And it is important to you that they should feel themselves from their earliest years, united in the spirit of equality and of love for a common aim, with the millions of brothers that God has given them.”—MAZZINI. I “IT was,” says Mr. Benjamin Kidd, “with a well-founded instinct that William II. of Germany, on his accession turned to the elementary school teachers of his country when he aimed to impose the elements of a new social heredity on the whole German people.” It is impossible at this time of day not to go far in agreement with Mr. Kidd when he tells us that it is not so much what is born in a man as what he is born into that shapes his life. The most powerful formative influence in the shaping of character and outlook is “social heredity,” “imposed on the young at an early age and under conditions of emotion.”[55] This judgment is no longer a matter of speculation. Dr. Stanley Hall’s work upon the phenomena of adolescence has made it clear that the plastic and absorbent stuff of youth will inevitably take its abiding shape and colour from the cultural setting in which it finds itself. The advocates of sectarian education in the famous English controversy about the Balfour Acts were, from their own point of view, speaking within the universe of the soundest possible psychology when they insisted that in religious education “atmosphere” was paramount. It was a piece of very astute observation on the part of the ancient Jews that led to the practice of bringing their twelve-year-old boys to Jerusalem for the Passover ceremonies. All the early training was crystallised into a definite direction of life by the induction of the youth at his most sensitive moment into the highly charged emotional atmosphere of the Holy City at the great festival of national remembrance and hope. He went there a boy; he returned home a Jew. Footnote 55: Benjamin Kidd, _The Science of Power_, p. 305.