necessarily unadaptable and unable to deal with any new situation.
Consecrated custom may keep Chinese civilisation safe in a state of
torpid immobility for five thousand years; but fifty years of Europe
will achieve more, and will at last present Cathay with the
alternative of moving on or moving off. Instinct might lead us on if
progress were an automatic law of nature, but this belief, though
widely held, is sheer superstition.

We have to convert the public mind in this country to faith in trained
and disciplined reason. We have to convince our fellow-citizens not
only that the duty of self-preservation requires us to be mentally as
well equipped as the French, Germans and Americans, but that a trained
intelligence is in itself "more precious than rubies." Blake said that
"a fool shall never get to Heaven, be he never so holy." It is at any
rate true that ignorance misses the best things in this life If
Englishmen would only believe this, the whole spirit of our education
would be changed, which is much more important than to change the
subjects taught. It does not matter very much what is taught; the
important question to ask is what is learnt. This is why the
controversy about religious education was mainly fatuous. The
"religious lesson" can hardly ever make a child religious; religion,
in point of fact, is seldom taught at all; it is caught, by contact
with someone who has it. Other subjects can be taught and can be
learnt; but the teaching will be stiff collar-work, and the learning
evanescent, if the pupil is not interested in the subject. And how
little encouragement the average boy gets at home to train his reason
and form intellectual tastes! He may probably be exhorted to "do well
in his examination," which means that he is to swallow carefully
prepared gobbets of crude information, to be presently disgorged in
the same state. The examination system flourishes best where there is