[22] I was once present when the Utopian children were going through a programme of Folk Songs and Morris Dances in the village hall. A lady who was looking on remarked to me: "This is all very fine; but if this sort of thing goes on, where are we going to find our servants?" The selfishness of this remark is obvious. What is less obvious, but more significant, is its purblindness. In point of fact the Utopian girls make excellent domestic servants, and are well content to "go into service." [23] Some two or three years ago it was seriously proposed that _marine navigation_ should be taught in all the elementary schools of a certain maritime county! [24] The parent who wrote to a schoolmaster, "Please do not teach my boy any more poetry, as he is going to be a grocer," must have been under the influence of this conception of usefulness. CHAPTER VI SALVATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION In Utopia the transition from _education_ to _salvation_, both in theory and practice, is obvious and direct. The difference between education and salvation is, indeed, purely nominal: in their essence the two processes are one. As the education given in Utopia is, in the main, self-education, there is no reason why it should not be continued indefinitely after the child has left school; and as its function is to foster the growth of the child's many-sided nature (with its vast potentialities), there is every reason why it should be continued as long as he lives. In other words, the path of salvation is the path of self-realisation, the most important part of which is traversed in childhood; and to attain to salvation (which is in a sense unattainable) is to remain faithful to that path till it passes beyond our thought. Outside Utopia there is a widely different conception of the meaning and purpose of education, and a correspondingly different conception of the nature of salvation and the means by which it is to be achieved. The idea of salvation, with the complementary idea of perdition, may be regarded as the crown and completion of that scheme of external rewards and punishments which plays so prominent a part in Western education. Salvation, which is the highest of all external rewards, just as perdition is the severest of all external punishments, is not a path to be followed, but a state of happiness to be won and enjoyed. It follows that the relation between education and salvation is, in the main, one of analogy, rather than of identity (as in Utopia), or even of vital connection. Or shall we say that education is not so much the first act in the drama of salvation as the first rehearsal of the play? There are, of course, two conceptions of salvation in the West, just as there are two worlds to be lived in,--the Supernatural world and the world of Nature.