We find an almost equally ludicrous tyranny of tradition or fashion in almost every part of the ritual of social life. Twenty years ago I issued from a rite-bound monastery into the free life of the world, to find it similarly swathed in ritual bonds. I purchased, and stealthily mastered, the "ceremonial" (as we used to call our rite-book) of this new world--a book on "etiquette"--and led for some months a strenuous and exacting life. I entered drawing-rooms with a nervous recollection of about a score of rules that had to be observed in the first five minutes, while the ritual of the mundane table entailed for a long time a good deal of furtive observation of my fellows and trembling under the butler's eye. To this day I am not quite clear at what precise angle the elbow must stand in shaking hands. Social life is overspread by a network of these prescriptions of the unwritten law or the judicial decisions of the aristocracy which we call "manners." There is, as a rule, so little discrimination between the formal rules of an artificial code and the real impulses of a gentlemanly nature that one has often to listen gravely and silently while ladies commend the "perfect manners" of a man whom one knows to be an adventurous ninny or a beast.
We need a new conception of civilisation, a sustained stimulation of the intelligence throughout life, a strong infusion of the Nietzschean gospel of personality and self-assertion. Some day we shall regard education as half of the nation's serious business, and will devote half our national revenue to it. Let it not be imagined that this suggests a generation of dour and frightfully serious people who never smoke or play bridge. I omit the function of entertainment only because it has never been neglected. The supreme business of a State is to make its people happy, strong, and prosperous. We shall approach the ideal when we abolish war and reduce pauperism and crime by registering all workers, organising all industry, reforming justice and the penal system, and removing the morally diseased.
In those days education will be a vast, humane, scientific scheme for guiding the growth of human embryos into industrious and orderly citizens, and enabling the adult citizen pleasurably to cultivate his mind and taste. The development of each child will be followed as the development of a pupil is followed in the Jesuit Society, but with a care to develop its individuality fully, in harmony with the individualities of others. The child will not pass from the sphere of the educator at puberty, with unformed mind and character, to swell the great army of the intellectually listless. Ruskin's noble ideal of "as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures" will replace the narrow standards of our Education Department, with which the child can have no sympathy. From the first dawn of intelligence it will feel that a well-wishing parent, the community, is training it to derive all the joy it can from life, consistently with the joy of others and the day's duties, when its turn comes to don the _toga virilis_. It will have learned by that time that a development of its characteristic human powers is the richest possession it can have, and, coming to adolescence, will not at once cast aside the work of the teacher and dissipate its energy in the crude indulgence of elementary passions and futile imaginings. Neither child nor adult will shrink from work which stimulates the intelligence or refines the taste, and a fine alert race, impatient of untruth, injustice, and suffering, will set itself to develop fully the resources of this planet.