individual is deprived of the right to plan and work out his own methods of industry. The individual is dwarfed and his development prevented. Under Bolshevism these evils are greatly accentuated for the reason that the directors of industry, instead of being industrial leaders, are of necessity the proletariat, men who are not technical experts and who also lack experience in the management of industry. Not only do the soviet tenets lead to economic ruin, but they aim to destroy the bulwarks of morality and of the present social order. The Bolshevik leaders have forbidden the teaching of religion; have disfranchised the clergy; have made marriage a mere civil contract, which may be broken by either party; and have in certain instances declared women common property. Bolshevism, in spite of its formal declarations, in fact destroys representative government which from the time of Magna Charta the world has generally regarded as the essential political factor of the state. The Bolshevik program ignores the fundamental laws of economics. It is the negation of democratic government. It violates the commonly accepted principles of morality and overthrows the generally accepted doctrines of religion. XVII EDUCATION THE problems which beset a nation do not, like mushrooms, grow up over night. Rather, they are of slow growth and their solution is likely to be gradual. They thus pass on from one generation to the next. It is not to ourselves alone but to those who follow us that we must look for the settlement of perplexities which now confront us. The hope of the future lies in building up a generation of men capable of grappling with its issues. This for us means a full understanding of the needs and scope of education and an answer to the following serious questions: Is the training which we give our children in harmony with the requirements of modern life? Have we ever clearly formulated the actual and practical aim of education? Should the aim of education be chiefly cultural? Should its object be to put the youth of the country in a position from which, between the years of eighteen and twenty, they can advantageously approach the question of a particular occupation in life? Should it at an early stage of youth, after a thorough drilling in reading, writing and arithmetic, concern itself with vocational training? Should it be part of the duty of the teacher to advise a parent as to what fitness his child shows for a particular walk of life? How far should we carry the principle of a uniform curriculum for children of widely different bents and talents? Is not our present system too largely based upon getting results through formal examinations? These questions must be examined carefully and the answers must take account of a number of factors which, though they are of vital importance, are seldom discussed. For instance: We know that at least seventy-five per cent of the children who go to our public schools will join the ranks of skilled or unskilled labor; that of the remaining twenty-five per cent, at least twenty per cent will become clerks, shop assistants, and so forth; and that the remaining five per cent will enter the professional classes. Is our present system of education well adjusted to meet such a condition? Another point: Broadly speaking, our adult manhood and womanhood can be divided into two classes-a directly productive class and a so-called non-productive class. Is our educational system concerned with turning the minds of children toward the directly productive employments, and with impressing upon them the fact that most of the professions are overcrowded? Some very remarkable figures are available which show for the past few decades the great decrease in the numbers employed in producing, and the increase in the non-productive class. To what extent is our educational system, with its lack of guidance to youth, responsible for the general aversion to the manual occupations, and for the false pride which favors the clerical occupations? How far do the schools counteract this false ideal and snobbish turn of mind? The feeling is widespread that the discipline in our public schools has of late years grown slack. Certainly it is no longer so rigorous as it was thirty years ago. This deterioration, as many conceive it to be, is not wholly the fault of our school authorities. Though some of them cannot be absolved from a certain leaning toward a weak sentimentalism, which desires to banish every harsh or jarring note from the lives of children, there is no doubt that the weakening of restraints has its origin in the homes of the people, where too often indulgence replaces discipline. It is, therefore, not a matter of surprise or objection that the schools should exhibit some departure from rigid and vigorous older standards, though they have not fallen so far away from them as has the family life of our people. Another general factor operating against the efficiency of our present method of education is that it is permeated by a kind of intellectual Bolshevism-rooted partly in the soil of political expediency, partly in a complete ignorance of general biological laws-which neglects to draw a distinction between equality of opportunity on the one hand and an inequality of talent, industriousness and character, with its necessary concomitant inequality of reward, on the other. It is in a great measure because of their false interpretation of the privilege of equal opportunity, and their overwhelming emphasis upon the rights of children in contrast with their duties and responsibilities, that we frequently find in the matured man and woman an unreasoning jealousy of all success; in the inefficient it displays itself by what might be described as a permanent state of "grouch" caused by the spectacle of efficiency shown by others. This symptom is one of the most dangerous of the day, for it expresses itself among the great mass of inefficients in an impulse to "level down," since they know that they themselves cannot be "leveled up." In a word, there is the danger that much of our teaching is making against national betterment. Although it gives to millions the rudiments of education, much of its good work may easily be offset at times because it divorces the curriculum and the facts of life; it neglects character building, and it instils into the youthful mind the insidious poison of a false and perverted doctrine of equality. Underlying all the faults in our schools, aside from questions of character and morals, is the almost universal refusal to recognize the rigid limitations which the nature of the human material imposes upon the possibilities of education. What, in fact, can a school education do for anybody? Very much less than most of us are prepared to admit. Every child starts with some natural endowment, and the true function of education should be to foster and develop that endowment. Every failure to realize that education must build upon this foundation of native quality can lead to nothing but a measure of disappointment. Allowing for differences in the rate of mental development—an allowance seldom given its due weight-education alone cannot make a stupid child into an intelligent one. By the expenditure of great effort education can teach a stupid child to read and write and can impress upon its memory a considerable number of facts; but education does not impart to a stupid child the ability to make the most intelligent use of its knowledge. We must be careful, however, to discriminate between a slow mind and a stupid one; a child may be slow yet possess excellent judgment, or be quick in perception with little sense of relation. Even what education does for an intelligent child who has been properly taught is generally misunderstood. The facts which such a child learns at school, or even later at college, are of comparatively little importance in themselves. Such facts are always at the disposal of any one who can read, and a lack of facts can be remedied at any time of life, What education should do for an in |