But there are better replies than those of the tu quoque sort to the caste argument.  In the first place, it is not true that education, as such, unfits men for rough and laborious, or even disgusting, occupations.  The life of a sailor is rougher and harder than that of nine landsmen out of ten, and yet, as every ship’s captain knows, no sailor was ever the worse for possessing a trained intelligence.  The life of a medical practitioner, especially in the country, is harder and more laborious than that of most artisans, and he is constantly obliged to do things which, in point of pleasantness, cannot be ranked above scavengering—­yet he always ought to be, and he frequently is, a highly educated man.  In the second place, though it may be granted that the words of the catechism, which require a man to do his duty in the station to which it has pleased God to call him, give an admirable definition of our obligation to ourselves and to society; yet the question remains, how is any given person to find out what is the particular station to which it has pleased God to call him?  A new-born infant does not come into the world labelled scavenger, shopkeeper, bishop, or duke.  One mass of red pulp is just like another to all outward appearance.  And it is only by finding out what his faculties are good for, and seeking, not for the sake of gratifying a paltry vanity, but as the highest duty to himself and to his fellow-men, to put himself into the position in which they can attain their full development, that the man discovers his true station.  That which is to be lamented, I fancy, is not that society should do its utmost to help capacity to ascend from the lower strata to the higher, but that it has no machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from the higher strata to the lower.  In that noble romance, the “Republic” (which is now, thanks to the Master of Balliol, as intelligible to us all, as if it had been written in our mother tongue), Plato makes Socrates say that he should like to inculcate upon the citizens of his ideal state just one “royal lie.”

“‘Citizens,’ we shall say to them in our tale—­’You are brothers, yet God has framed you differently.  Some of you have the power of command, and these he has composed of gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again, who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen, he has made of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children.  But as you are of the same original family, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son.  And God proclaims to the rulers, as a first principle, that before all they should watch over their offspring, and see what elements mingle with their nature; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards his child because he has to descend