on the Life and Duties of the Citizen.  It consisted of statements of the part played in social life by the rate-collector, the policeman, and so on, accompanied by a moral for each section, such as ’serving personal interest is not enough,’ ’need of public spirit and intelligence for good Government,’ ‘need of honesty in giving a vote,’ ’the vote a trust as well as a right.’  Almost every school publisher rushed out a text-book on the subject, and many School Boards encouraged its introduction; and yet the experiment, after a careful trial, was an acknowledged failure.  The new text-books (all of which I had at the time to review), constituted perhaps the most worthless collection of printed pages that have ever occupied the same space on a bookshelf, and the lessons, with their alternations of instruction and edification, failed to stimulate any kind of interest in the students.  If our youths and maidens are to be stirred as deeply by the conception of the State as were the pupils of Socrates, teachers and the writers of text-books must apparently approach their task with something of Socrates’ passionate love of truth and of the searching courage of his dialectic.

If again, at an earlier age, children still in school are to be taught what Mr. Wells calls ’the sense of the State,’[63] we may, by remembering Athens, get some indication of the conditions on which success depends.  Children will not learn to love London while getting figures by heart as to the millions of her inhabitants and the miles of her sewers.  If their love is to be roused by words, the words must be as beautiful and as simple as the chorus in praise of Athens in the Oedipus Coloneus.  But such words are not written except by great poets who actually feel what they write, and perhaps before we have a poet who loves London as Sophocles loved Athens it may be necessary to make London itself somewhat more lovely.

[63] The future in America, chapter ix.

The emotions of children are, however, most easily reached not by words but by sights and sounds.  If therefore, they are to love the State, they should either be taken to see the noblest aspects of the State or those aspects should be brought to them.  And a public building or ceremony, if it is to impress the unflinching eyes of childhood, must, like the buildings of Ypres or Bruges or the ceremonies of Japan, be in truth impressive.  The beautiful aspect of social life is fortunately not to be found in buildings and ceremonies only, and no Winchester boy used to come back uninfluenced from a visit to Father Dolling in the slums of Landport; though boys’ eyes are even quicker to see what is genuine in personal motive than in external pomp.