280 ~ INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
couraged. Many successful men are liberal in benefactions to hospitals, 
Magdalen asylums, and colleges, and I do not quarrel with them for that ; 
but these things do not right the wrong they may have done by hard deal- 
ing with their employees, or by what is called rigging the market, so ag 
to make timid people sell too cheaply to them, and sanguine people buy 
too dearly from them. 
The social virtues are not effeminate or weak virtues ; they are built on 
the strong foundations of justice. They carry out the highest and the 
best rule of life—the Golden Rule—to do to others as we would that they 
should do to us. And in every relation of life the broad principles of 
aquity would prove sufficient for the individual as for the social organism. 
How are we to teach our future rulers, in the common schools which 
all of them attend, such principles as will make them prefer a good news- 
paper to a bad one, and will make them use their voting power intelli- 
gently and honestly ? A citizen in a free state ought to be educated to a 
feeling of public spirit. I believe that the children in the United States 
wre educated to loyalty to the flag much more than children in England or 
Australia. All sing patriotic songs, and it thrilled me much at San Fran- 
cisco to find that a national song of America, “God Bless our Native 
Land,” is sung to the same tune as our *“ God Save our Gracious Queen,” 
[t appears as if the tune were going round the globe, symbolizing loyalty 
10 country. 
It surely is quite possible to teach children before they are fourteen 
years old the difference between public spirit and party spirit, and the 
relations which citizens in a free country hold with the government— 
municipal, state, and federal. Government in all these three forms is at 
once the master and the servant of the people. As our master, it must be 
obeyed, even although we may not believe all the laws of the land to be 
wise or just; so long as they are the laws, we must respect and obey them. 
But as our servant, the municipal, the state, and the federal govern- 
ment must be watched and checked ; unjust laws must be opposed by all 
legitimate means, by free speech and a free press ; unworthy members of 
the city council, of the state legislature, or of the federal congress should 
be exposed, and, by the exercise of the suffrage, be replaced by better 
men. Boys and girls much younger than fourteen can be taught that it 
is wrong and contemptible to sell one’s vote, and the collective conscience 
of the class educated toward purity of election. It is the duty of citizens 
of a free country to use the machinery of representation honestly, and if 
that machinery is defective, to work for its improvement. 
The first lesson I learned in politics was from the lips of my mother, 
when I was six years old, on the question of the English Reform Bill of 
[832. She said she did not think anything was so good but that it might 
be made better ; nothing devised by man that man could not improve. 
That lesson was given at a very early age, and it was followed up by