they had been under Richard's direction, they would have been his friends; but Richard being under their direction, they became his enemies.

Any educational system that "addresses hundreds of boys exactly in the same manner "must destroy their individuality.

In Hard Times Tom Gradgrind became a low, degraded, sensual, dissipated criminal, and Dickens accounts for his failure by the unnatural restraint, constant oversight, and the strangling of his imagination in his cradle and afterward. In other words, the boy's selfhood never, had a chance to develop, and every power he had naturally to make him strong, true, and independent had helped to work his ruin.

In Little Dorrit Mrs. General is herself a model to be avoided, and her system of training is ridiculed because she paid no attention whatever to the selfhood of her pupils except to conceal it artfully and prevent the recognition of any of the evils by which it was surrounded and which it should help to overcome.

Mrs. General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails, on which she started little trains of other people's opinions, which never overtook one another and never got anywhere. Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the world; but Mrs. General's way of getting rid of it was to put it out of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. This was another of her ways of forming a mind-to cram all articles of difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no existence. It was the easiest way and, beyond all comparison, the properest.

Mrs. General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents, miseries, and offences were never to be mentioned before her. Passion was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs. General, and blood was to change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world, when all these deductions were made, it was Mrs. General's province to varnish. In that formation process of hers, she dipped the smallest of brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every object that came under con

sideration. The more cracked it was, the more Mrs. General varnished it.

There was varnish in Mrs. General's voice, varnish in Mrs. General's touch, an atmosphere of varnish round Mrs. General's figure.

Dickens wished the training of the real inner selfhood, not the varnishing of the surface merely. Not what George Macdonald describes as "sandpapering a boy into a saint," but genuine character development by the working out of the selfhood in the improvement of its environment, physically, intellectually, and spiritually.

Briggs's education, in Dombey and Son, had been of such a character that "his intellectual fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining." The character of his real selfhood had been destroyed, not developed, by his "education."

In Our Mutual Friend Mr. Podsnap is used as a type of the men who not only see no need for any person else forming opinions, but who take pains to prevent others forming opinions, so far as possible.

As Mr. Podsnap stood with his back to the drawingroom fire, pulling up his shirt collar, like a veritable cock of the walk literally pluming himself in the midst of his possessions, nothing would have astonished him more than an intimation that Miss Podsnap, or any young person properly born and bred, could not be exactly put away like the plate, brought out like the plate, polished like the plate, counted, weighed, and valued like the plate. That such a young person could possibly have a morbid vacancy in the heart for anything younger than the plate, or less monotonous than the plate, or that such a young person's thoughts could try to scale the region bounded on the north, south, east, and west by the plate, was a monstrous imagination which he would on the spot have flourished into space.

Eugene Wrayburn's criticism of his father's habit of choosing professions for his sons almost as soon as they were born, or even before, without the slightest possible consideration for their natural aptitudes for the work to which they were assigned, is a severe attack on a condi

tion which exists even yet through the failure of the schools or the homes to discover and reveal to boys and girls their highest powers, so that they may reach their best growth in school or college and choose the profession in which they can do most good and attain their most complete evolution. There is no better field for co-ordinate work by the home and the school than the joint study of the children to find their sphere of greatest power. Every child should be helped to find the sphere in which he can most successfully achieve the highest destiny for himself and for humanity.

Eugene Wrayburn's father extended his paternal care and forethought for his children not only by choosing their professions without regard for their selfhood, but by considerately selecting partners for his sons without regard for their individual tastes.

Eugene, speaking to Mortimer Lightwood, said:

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'My respected father has found, down in the parental neighbourhood, a wife for his not-generally-respected son." "With some money, of course?"

"With some money, of course, or he would not have found her. My respected father-let me shorten the dutiful tautology by substituting in future M. R. F., which sounds military, and rather like the Duke of Wellington." "What an absurd fellow you are, Eugene!

"Not at all, I assure you. M. R. F. having always in the clearest manner provided (as he calls it) for his children by prearranging from the hour of the birth of each, and sometimes from an earlier period, what the devoted little victim's calling and course in life should be, M. R. F. prearranged for myself that I was to be the barrister I am (with the slight addition of an enormous practice, which has not accrued), and also the married man I am not." "The first you have often told me."

"The first I have often told you. Considering myself sufficiently incongruous on my legal eminence, I have until now suppressed my domestic destiny. You know M. R. F., but not as well as I do. If you knew him as well as I do, he would amuse you."

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Perfectly so, believe me; and with every sentiment of affectionate deference toward M. R. F. But if he amuses

me, I can't help it. When my eldest brother was born, of course the rest of us knew (I mean the rest of us would have known, if we had been in existence) that he was heir to the family embarrassments-we call it before company the family estate. But when my second brother was going to be born by and by, 'This,' says M. R. F., 'is a little pillar of the church.' Was born, and became a pillar of the church-a very shaky one. My third brother appeared considerably in advance of his engagement to my mother; but M. R. F., not at all put out by surprise, instantly declared him a circumnavigator. Was pitchforked into the navy, but has not circumnavigated. I announced myself, and was disposed of with the highly satisfactory results embodied before you. When my younger brother was half an hour old, it was settled by M. R. F. that he should have a mechanical genius, and so on. Therefore I say M. R. F. amuses me."

In the same book Bradley Headstone's school is described as one of a system of schools in which "school buildings, school-teachers, and school pupils are all according to pattern, and all engendered in the light of the latest Gospel according to Monotony."

Bradley Headstone himself was a mechanical product of a mechanical system of uniformity that destroyed independence and individuality of character.

Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-andtwenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher's knowledge.. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers-history here, geography there,

astronomy to the right, political economy to the left— natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in their several places-this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care.

Suppression of so much to make room for so much had given him a constrained manner over and above.

The most remarkable description of a system of training that totally ignored individuality and chipped and battered and moulded and squeezed all students into the same pattern or mould is the description of the normal school in which Mr. Gradgrind's teacher, Mr. M'Choakumchild, was trained. "Mr. M'Choakumchild and one hundred and forty other schoolmasters had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many piano legs."

Volumes could not make the sacrifice of individuality clearer than this sentence does.

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rots are."

the grinders' school boys were taught as par

Doctor Blimber was condemned because in his system "Nature was of no consequence at all; no matter what a boy was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern somehow or other."

In Doctor Strong's school " we had plenty of liberty." The boys had also "noble games out of doors in this model school of Dickens. Liberty and noble outdoor sports are the best agencies yet revealed to man for the development of full selfhood in harmony with the fundamental law of education, self-activity.