Take Parliament at the
crown of the social structure, and the School--the elementary school--at
the foundation, and we cannot feel reassured. All between the highest
and the lowest is moderately sound; the best of the middle-classes are
decent, law-abiding, and steady; the young men are good fellows in a
way; the girls and young women are charming and virtuous. But the
extremities are rotten, and sentiment has rotted them both. Parliament
has become a hissing and a scorn. No man of any party in all broad
England could be found to deny this, and many would say more. The
sentimentalist has said that loutishness shall not be curbed, that a
bawling ruffian who is silenced is martyred, that every man shall talk
as he likes, and the veto of the Polish Assembly which enabled any one
man to ruin the work of a session is revived in sober, solid England. So
it is that all has gone to wreck; and an assembly once the noblest on
earth is treated with unhidden contempt by the labourer in his field and
the mechanic at his bench. And all this has arisen from lack of
discipline.
In the School--the lower-class school--things are much worse. The lowest
of the low--the beings who should be kept in order by sharp, firm
kindness and justice--have been taught to mock at order and justice and
to treat kindness as a sign of weakness.
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