caste argument. In the first place, it is not true that education,
as such, unfits men for rough and laborious, or even disgusting,
occupations. The life of a sailor is rougher and harder than that of
nine landsmen out of ten, and yet, as every ship's captain knows, no
sailor was ever the worse for possessing a trained intelligence. The
life of a medical practitioner, especially in the country, is harder
and more laborious than that of most artisans, and he is constantly
obliged to do things which, in point of pleasantness, cannot be ranked
above scavengering--yet he always ought to be, and he frequently is,
a highly educated man. In the second place, though it may be granted
that the words of the catechism, which require a man to do his duty in
the station to which it has pleased God to call him, give an admirable
definition of our obligation to ourselves and to society; yet the
question remains, how is any given person to find out what is the
particular station to which it has pleased God to call him? A new-born
infant does not come into the world labelled scavenger, shopkeeper,
bishop, or duke. One mass of red pulp is just like another to all
outward appearance. And it is only by finding out what his faculties
are good for, and seeking, not for the sake of gratifying a paltry
vanity, but as the highest duty to himself and to his fellow-men,
to put himself into the position in which they can attain their full
development, that the man discovers his true station. That which is to
be lamented, I fancy, is not that society should do its utmost to help
capacity to ascend from the lower strata to the higher, but that it
has no machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from
the higher strata to the lower. In that noble romance, the "Republic"
(which is now, thanks to the Master of Balliol, as intelligible to
us all, as if it had been written in our mother tongue), Plato makes
Socrates say that he should like to inculcate upon the citizens of his
ideal state just one "royal lie."