[41] See evidence before the Physical Deterioration Committee.
[42] Cd. 2175, p. 117.
[43] In this connexion it should be observed that there are 28,000 surgeons, physicians and medical practitioners in the United Kingdom. The number (one to about 300 families) is probably larger than the nation needs, but even to organize the whole of them as public servants, and to make the medical service entirely free, would cost only about £10,000,000 per annum, allowing for salaries ranging from £250 to £1,000.
CHAPTER XV
THE SCHOOL
IN a commonwealth a man would need a healthy mind in a healthy body to be true to himself, and to every man. In an unorganized community, in which each man must needs struggle with his fellow for the right to live, and in which to be unselfish is to be weak, and to be weak is to go to the wall, a man needs a healthy mind in a healthy body in order to set up himself and those dear to him in a fortress impregnable, with ramparts against competitors, secret stores against time of siege, and insurance policies against the horrors that threaten weak women and young children whose champion has departed.
As things are now, we have then, not merely to train the boy to be a man for manhood's sake, but to fit him to fight what has been pleasantly called "the battle of life." He must be not only strong but artful, not only intelligent but cunning, not only brave but aggressive, not only fit to work but fit to bargain, not only an artist but a shopkeeper.
Knowing what we do of the hardness of the competitive system, how unfair we are to these children whom we affect to "educate." We dose them with a little book-learning and pass them on to seek employers. Nothing has been taught them by way of preparation for the real education upon which they are about to enter. They are wholly ignorant of the nature of the machine of which they are about to become an insignificant part. They plunge into the hard work which henceforth is to be their portion and little that has been taught them is of value in connexion with it. The boy is compelled to play a game for wages without knowledge of the rules. Business presents itself to him as an impenetrable mystery, the secrets of which are known but to a few. He becomes a producer of things which in some way, he knows not how, are sold and bought and come to yield him a certain or uncertain wage. He does not see, nor, if he saw, would he understand, the balance sheet which sums up the processes which yield him a part only of his production. He is not competent to measure the extent of the injustice which he suffers. It is a game played between a few who know and many who do not know.
From the beginning of the child's life, the Error of Distribution plays its part. The opportunity offered the child varies directly with the income of its parent. The frontispiece of this volume measures not income alone; it measures also the degree of opportunity which is offered to the children respectively of the rich, the comfortable and the poor. Since the bulk of the people are poor, the greater number of the nation's children are handicapped at the start. Individually they are deprived of their birthright. Collectively the community is deprived of the proper value of their strength, their intelligence, their genius.
The last point is rarely discussed. Intellect and genius are the possessions of no single class. Year by year we kill off units of our population who might live to work good for their kind. Year by year we brutalize men who, given opportunity, might enrich our literature or ennoble our art. Year by year we waste the greater part of the gifts of our people. Here and there some rare combination of muscle and brain rises superior to circumstance and lives to command the class which would have repressed him. These exceptional cases serve to remind us of the ability which is lost. We know only of the soldiers who live to be commanders. Probably greater generals than Napoleon have perished as privates in their first battle. That is unavoidable, for in battle some must die. But in the arts of peace the sacrifice of potential commanders need not go on. Given equality of opportunity, the marshal's baton in each private's knapsack, and the nation need not waste one of its great men.