"O, we all have to travel," said George, "if we mean to go into the administration. And I liked administration. I observe that you appoint a foreign ambassador because he can make a good stump speech in Kentucky. But since Charondas's time, training has been at the bottom of our system. And no man could offer himself here to serve on the school committee, unless he knew how other nations managed their schools."
"Not if he had himself made school-books?" said I.
"No!" laughed George, "for he might introduce them. With us no professor may teach from a text-book he has made himself, unless the highest council of education order it; and on the same principle we should never choose a bookseller on the school committee. And so, to go back," he said, "when my father found that administration was my passion, he sent me the grand tour. I learned a great deal in America, and am very fond of the Americans. But I never saw one here before."
I did not ask what he learned in America, for I was more anxious to learn myself how they administered government in Sybaris.
The inns at Sybaris are not very large, not extending much beyond the compass of a large private house. Mine was kept by a woman. As we sat there, smoking on the piazza, the first evening I was there, I asked George about this horse-railroad management, and the methods they took to secure such personal comfort.
He said that my question cut pretty low down, for that the answer really involved the study of their whole system. "I have thought of it a good deal," said he, "when I have been in St. Petersburg, and in England and America; and as far as I can find out, our peculiarity in everything is, that we respect—I have sometimes thought we almost worshipped—the rights, even the notions or whims, of the individual citizen. With us the first object of the state, as an organization, is to care for the individual citizen, be he man, woman, or child. We consider the state to be made for the better and higher training of men, much as your divines say that the Church is. Instead of our lumping our citizens, therefore, and treating Jenny Lind and Tom Heenan to the same dose of public schooling,—instead of saying that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,—we try to see that each individual is protected in the enjoyment, not of what the majority likes, but of what he chooses, so long as his choice injures no other man."
I thought, in one whiff, of Stuart Mill, and of the coppersmiths.
"Our horse-railroad system grew out of this theory," continued he. "As long ago as Herodotus, people lived here in houses one story high, with these gardens between. But some generations ago, a young fellow named Apollidorus, who had been to Edinburgh, pulled down his father's house and built a block of what you call houses on the site of it. They were five stories high, had basements, and so on, with windows fore and aft, and, of course, none on the sides. The old fogies looked aghast. But he found plenty of fools to hire them. But the tenants had not been in a week, when the Kategoros, district attorney, had him up 'for taking away from a citizen what he could not restore.' This, you must know, is one of the severest charges in our criminal code.
"Of course, it was easy enough to show that the tenants went willingly; he showed dumb-waiters, and I know not what infernal contrivances of convenience within. But he could not show that the tenants had north windows and south windows, because they did not. The government, on their side, showed that men were made to breathe fresh air, and that he could not ventilate his houses as if they were open on all sides; they showed that women were not made to climb up and down ladders, and to live on stages at the tops of them; and he tried in vain to persuade the jury that this climbing was good for little children. He had lured these citizens into places dangerous for health, growth, strength, and comfort. And so he was compelled to erect a statue typical of strength, and a small hospital for infants, as his penalty. That spirited Hercules, which stands in front of the market, was a part of his fine.