“171. Education is, indeed, of all differences not divinely appointed, an instant effacer and reconciler. Whatever is undivinely poor, it will make rich; whatever is undivinely maimed, and halt, and blind, it will make whole, and equal, and seeing. The blind and the lame are to it as to David at the siege of the Tower of the Kings, ‘hated of David's soul.’ But there are other divinely-appointed differences, eternal as the ranks of the everlasting hills, and as the strength of their ceaseless waters. And these, education does not do away with; but measures, manifests, and employs.
“In the handful of shingle which you gather from the sea-beach, which the indiscriminate sea, with equality of fraternal foam, has only educated to be, every one, round, you will see little difference between the noble and the mean stones. But the jeweller's trenchant education of them will tell you another story. Even the meanest will be the better for it, but the noblest so much better that you can class the two together no more. The fair veins and colours are all clear now, and so stern is nature's intent regarding this, that not only will the polish show which is best, but the best will take most polish. You shall not merely see they have more virtue than the others, but see that more of virtue more clearly; and the less virtue there is, the more dimly you shall see what there is of it.
“172. And the law about education, which is sorrowfullest to vulgar pride, is this—that all its gains are at compound interest; so that, as our work proceeds, every hour throws us farther behind the greater men with whom we began on equal terms. Two children go to school hand in hand, and spell for half an hour over the same page. Through all their lives, never shall they spell from the same page more. One is presently a page a-head, two pages, ten pages—and evermore, though each toils equally, the interval enlarges—at birth nothing, at death infinite.”
So much for one relation of this question to Socialism. Quite lately (The New Age, April 11th, 1908) Mr. Havelock Ellis has summed the matter up as follows:—
“Education has been put at the beginning, when it ought to have been put at the end. It matters comparatively little what sort of education we give children; the primary matter is what sort of children we have got to educate. That is the most fundamental of questions. It lies deeper even than the great question of Socialism versus Individualism, and indeed touches a foundation that is common to both. The best organised social system is only a house of cards if it cannot be constructed with sound individuals; and no individualism worth the name is possible, unless a sound social organisation permits the breeding of individuals who count. On this plane Socialism and Individualism move in the same circle.”
We cannot agree with Socialism when, as we think, it assumes that all evil is of economic or of educational origin. The student of heredity finds elements of evil abundant in poisoned germ-plasm and not absent from the best. Surely, surely, the products of progress are not mechanisms but men; and surely no economic system as such can be the only mechanism worth naming—which would be one that made men. The germ-plasm is such a mechanism, indeed; and hence its quality is all important.
But if Socialism, sooner than any other party, is going to identify itself with the economic principle of Ruskin that “there is no wealth but life”; and if in its discussion of the conditions of industry it will concern itself primarily with the culture of the racial life, which is the vital industry of any people (and basis enough for a New Imperialism, or at least a New Patriotism, that might be quite decent); if so, then it seems to me that we must look to the socialists for salvation. But books which describe future externals, books which assume that education is a panacea, forgetting that education can educate only what heredity gives, turn us away again when we are almost persuaded. The economic panacea must fail (at least as a panacea); the educational panacea must fail; the eugenic panacea may not fail.
Education, then, cannot achieve our ideal of race-culture. No matter how good our polishing, we must have silver and diamonds to work upon, not pewter and pebbles. When we have the right material to work upon, our labour will not be wasted, or far worse than wasted, as it now too often is.
Education a Sisyphean task.—But the belief in education as in itself an adequate instrument of race-culture chiefly depends upon the popular doctrine as to its influence upon the race. It is supposed, in a word, that if we educate the parents, the child will begin where the parents left off. This is the doctrine of Lamarck, who said that if the necks of the parent giraffe were educated or drawn out, the baby giraffe would have this anatomical acquirement transmitted to it, and, so to speak, when it grew up, would be able to begin feeding on the leaves of trees at the level where its parents had to leave off. In the course of its life its own neck would become elongated or educated, and its children would outstretch both itself and their grand-parents. This doctrine of the transmission of acquired characters by heredity, as we have seen, is, at the present day, repudiated by biologists. It is generally believed by the medical profession and by the public, notwithstanding the fact that, for instance, the skin of the heel of every new baby is almost as thin and delicate as it is anywhere else, though for unthinkable generations all the ancestors of that baby on both sides have greatly thickened the skin of both heels by the act of walking.