all that quantity of sack."

Let us consider what a child thus "educated" knows, and what it does not
know. Begin with the most important topic of all--morality, as the guide
of conduct. The child knows well enough that some acts meet with
approbation and some with disapprobation. But it has never heard that
there lies in the nature of things a reason for every moral law, as
cogent and as well defined as that which underlies every physical law;
that stealing and lying are just as certain to be followed by evil
consequences, as putting your hand in the fire, or jumping out of a
garret window. Again, though the scholar may have been made acquainted,
in dogmatic fashion, with the broad laws of morality, he has had no
training in the application of those laws to the difficult problems
which result from the complex conditions of modern civilization. Would
it not be very hard to expect anyone to solve a problem in conic
sections who had merely been taught the axioms and definitions of
mathematical science?

A workman has to bear hard labour, and perhaps privation, while he sees
others rolling in wealth, and feeding their dogs with what would keep
his children from starvation. Would it not be well to have helped that
man to calm the natural promptings of discontent by showing him, in his
youth, the necessary connexion of the moral law which prohibits stealing
with the stability of society--by proving to him, once for all, that it
is better for his own people, better for himself, better for future
generations, that he should starve than steal? If you have no foundation
of knowledge, or habit of thought, to work upon, what chance have you of
persuading a hungry man that a capitalist is not a thief "with a
circumbendibus?" And if he honestly believes that, of what avail is it
to quote the commandment against stealing, when he proposes to make the