I could easily make a long list of Utopian virtues and graces, but I must content myself with touching on one more typical product of Egeria's philosophy of education,--the joy which the children wear in their faces and bear in their hearts. The sense of well-being which must needs accompany healthy and harmonious growth is realised by him who experiences it as joy. The Utopian children are by many degrees the happiest that I have met with in an elementary school, and I must therefore conclude that all is well with them, that their well-being--the true end of all education--has been, and is being, achieved. If you look at any of them with more than a mere passing glance, you will be sure to win from him the quick response of a sunny smile,--a smile which is half gladness, half goodwill. And the joy of their hearts goes with them when their schooldays are over and they begin to work for their bread. Last year one of the boys, on leaving school, found employment in a large field on the lower slopes of the hills, where he had to collect flints and pile them in heaps, his wage for this dull and tiresome work being no more than fivepence a day. But he found the work neither dull nor tiresome; for as he marched up and down the field, collecting and piling the flints with cheery goodwill, he sang his Folk Songs with all the spontaneous happiness of a soaring lark. Activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a wide and free outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,--these are qualities which might be expected to unfold themselves under the influence of the Utopian training, and which do, in point of fact, flourish vigorously in the soil and atmosphere of Utopia. They are the outcome of a type of education which differs radically from that which has hitherto been accepted as orthodox,--differing from it with the unfathomable difference between vital and mechanical obedience, between life and machinery. FOOTNOTES: [16] The child is struggling to do this, and more than this. The search for order resolves itself into the search for cause; and the search for cause will resolve itself, in the last resort, into the greatest of all adventures,--the search for that pure essence of things on which all the deeper desires of the soul converge, which imagination dreams of as absolute beauty, and reason as a beacon-lamp of all-illuminating light, flashing forth alternately as absolute reality and absolute truth. [17] I shall perhaps be told that my extravagant idealism is out of place in a book on elementary education. To this possible reproach I can but answer, in Mrs. Browning's words, that-- It takes the ideal to blow a hair's breadth off The dust of the actual. My experience of Utopia has convinced me that in taking thought for the education of the young it is impossible to be too idealistic, and that the more "commonsensical" and "utilitarian" one's philosophy of education, the shallower and falser it will prove to be.