But along with a due proficiency in the use of the means of learning, a certain amount of knowledge, of intellectual discipline, and of artistic training should be conveyed in the elementary schools; and in this direction—­for reasons which I am afraid to repeat, having urged them so often—­I can conceive no subject-matter of education so appropriate and so important as the rudiments of physical science, with drawing, modelling, and singing.  Not only would such teaching afford the best possible preparation for the technical schools about which so much is now said, but the organization for carrying it into effect already exists.  The Science and Art Department, the operations of which have already attained considerable magnitude, not only offers to examine and pay the results of such examination in elementary science and art, but it provides what is still more important, viz. a means of giving children of high natural ability, who are just as abundant among the poor as among the rich, a helping hand.  A good old proverb tells us that “One should not take a razor to cut a block:”  the razor is soon spoiled, and the block is not so well cut as it would be with a hatchet.  But it is worse economy to prevent a possible Watt from being anything but a stoker, or to give a possible Faraday no chance of doing anything but to bind books.  Indeed, the loss in such cases of mistaken vocation has no measure; it is absolutely infinite and irreparable.  And among the arguments in favour of the interference of the State in education, none seems to be stronger than this—­that it is the interest of every one that ability should be neither wasted, nor misapplied, by any one; and, therefore, that every one’s representative, the State, is necessarily fulfilling the wishes of its constituents when it is helping the capacities to reach their proper places.

It may be said that the scheme of education here sketched is too large to be effected in the time during which the children will remain at school; and, secondly, that even if this objection did not exist, it would cost too much.

I attach no importance whatever to the first objection until the experiment has been fairly tried.  Considering how much catechism, lists of the kings of Israel, geography of Palestine, and the like, children are made to swallow now, I cannot believe there will be any difficulty in inducing them to go through the physical training, which is more than half play; or the instruction in household work, or in those duties to one another and to themselves, which have a daily and hourly practical interest.  That children take kindly to elementary science and art no one can doubt who has tried the experiment properly.  And if Bible-reading is not accompanied by constraint and solemnity, as if it were a sacramental operation, I do not believe there is anything in which children take more pleasure.  At least I know that some of the pleasantest recollections of my childhood are