of thing a child is.

Modern pedagogy, based on modern psychology, is already influencing the
schools whose teachers are trained for their profession. Its body of
facts is being yearly added to; it has already caused the abandonment of
much dreary waste of time; has given many thousands of teachers a new
outlook on their work, and has increased the learning and happiness of
many tens of thousands of children.

This essay of mine is offered as a plea that a corresponding change in
the conditions of political science is possible. In the great University
whose constituent colleges are the universities of the world, there is a
steadily growing body of professors and students of politics who give
the whole day to their work. I cannot but think that as years go on,
more of them will call to their aid that study of mankind which is the
ancient ally of the moral sciences. Within every great city there are
groups of men and women who are brought together in the evenings by the
desire to find something more satisfying than current political
controversy. They have their own unofficial leaders and teachers, and
among these one can already detect an impatience with the alternative
offered, either of working by the bare comparison of existing
institutions, or of discussing the fitness of socialism or
individualism, of democracy or aristocracy for human beings whose
nature is taken for granted.

If my book is read by any of those official or unofficial thinkers, I
would urge that the study of human nature in politics, if ever it comes
to be undertaken by the united and organised efforts of hundreds of
learned men, may not only deepen and widen our knowledge of political
institutions, but open an unworked mine of political invention.