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parents would put their children in the way of earning a
competence earlier than they do, the children would soon
become self- supporting and independent. As it is, under
the present system, the young ones get old enough to have
all manner of legitimate wants (that is, if they have any ‘go’
about them) before they have learnt the means of earning
money to pay for them; hence they must either do without
them, or take more money than the parents can be expect-
ed to spare. This is due chiefly to the schools of Unreason,
where a boy is taught upon hypothetical principles, as I will
explain hereafter; spending years in being incapacitated for
doing this, that, or the other (he hardly knows what), dur-
ing all which time he ought to have been actually doing the
thing itself, beginning at the lowest grades, picking it up
through actual practice, and rising according to the energy
which is in him.
These schools of Unreason surprised me much. It would
be easy to fall into pseudo-utilitarianism, and I would fain
believe that the system may be good for the children of very
rich parents, or for those who show a natural instinct to
acquire hypothetical lore; but the misery was that their
Ydgrun-worship required all people with any pretence to
respectability to send their children to some one or other
of these schools, mulcting them of years of money. It aston-
ished me to see what sacrifices the parents would make in
order to render their children as nearly useless as possible;
and it was hard to say whether the old suffered most from
the expense which they were thus put to, or the young from
being deliberately swindled in some of the most important

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