even intelligence enough for the purposes of warfare, are devoted
by the States to the service of education. Fettered immovably
so as to remove all possibility of danger, they are placed
in the classrooms of our Infant Schools, and there they are utilized
by the Board of Education for the purpose of imparting to the offspring
of the Middle Classes the tact and intelligence which these wretched
creatures themselves are utterly devoid.

In some States the Specimens are occasionally fed and suffered
to exist for several years; but in the more temperate and better
regulated regions, it is found in the long run more advantageous
for the educational interests of the young, to dispense with food,
and to renew the Specimens every month--which is about the average
duration of the foodless existence of the Criminal class.
In the cheaper schools, what is gained by the longer existence
of the Specimen is lost, partly in the expenditure for food,
and partly in the diminished accuracy of the angles, which
are impaired after a few weeks of constant "feeling."
Nor must we forget to add, in enumerating the advantages
of the more expensive system, that it tends, though slightly
yet perceptibly, to the diminution of the redundant Isosceles population--
an object which every statesman in Flatland constantly keeps in view.
On the whole therefore--although I am not ignorant that,
in many popularly elected School Boards, there is a reaction
in favour of "the cheap system" as it is called--
I am myself disposed to think that this is one
of the many cases in which expense is the truest economy.

But I must not allow questions of School Board politics to divert
me from my subject. Enough has been said, I trust, to shew that