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VALUE OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL FOR THE SOCIAL VIRTUES. 219 
called the three H's—the head, the heart, and the hand. For if our 
children study history, whether that of their own country or that of other 
countries, without admiring what is noble and generous and courageous 
and patriotic, and hating oppression and cruelty and deceit and cowardly 
selfishness and greed, they will make none the better citizens though 
they have the names and the dates of all the battles that ever were fought, 
at their finger ends, and could tell the succession of all the presidents of 
the United States and of all the sovereigns of Europe. 
If military glory is made paramount in the teaching, children imbibe 
she militant spirit. If material prosperity is held forth as the great 
object of life, the ideal which is in every child is starved ; and in both of 
-hese misdirections the social instincts have not got fair play. 
We must bear in mind that the common school is often the only civil- 
izing agency with which children from poor, rough homes in the cities 
and the country are brought into contact. The regularity of school 
hours, the serviceable pressure of school discipline, the requirement for 
personal cleanliness and civil and decent language while in the school- 
room and on the playground, the punishment of cruelty and rudeness 
among our younger citizens, are mighty forces whose value is apt to be 
anderrated. The higher the attaicments of our teachers, the more gentle 
and dignified are their manners ; the more these necessary rules are rein- 
forced by the respect and the appreciation which the individuals who 
sarry them out win from their pupils, the lessons of courtesy, of mutual 
respect and mutual forbearance sink in the more deeply, and the tone of 
the school is elevated and swectened all round. 
In spite of Herbert Spencer and his school, the trend of thought in our 
era is unmistakably social. And unless our future citizens—our future 
masters—are prepared for wisely handling the gieat problems of our dav, 
their education is one-sided and defective. 
Jeremy Bentham made a great stride in ethics when he declared that 
the object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness of the great- 
ast number ; but we have got beyond this. The greatest happiness, even 
of the greatest number, should not be pursued at the sacrifice of the hap- 
siness of the smaller number. 
How can these higher ethics be taught in the common schools? Di- 
-ectly, in the wise choice of the lessons which children read, and in the 
moral lessons which I believe are given in America and in Australia ; and 
ndirectly by the influence of the teacher over the tone of the school. 
And the lessons need not be namby-pamby, for the social virtues are not 
built on the foundation of charity and almsgiving, but on justice. It is 
because ambition and competition are so apt to be unjust, to take advan- 
sage of the weakness of others, to deal with others as they would resent 
being dealt with themselves, to climb on the fallen, to squeeze the hardest 
terms when the other party is at a disadvantage, that they are to be dis-