of the mill-hand is an anomaly--is a life not in the order of nature,
and which requires to be justified by manifest necessity and by
continuous care. The question to what extent we may acquiesce in the
continuance of a low order of human beings, existing for our
enjoyment rather than for their own, may be answered with
plausibility in very different tones; from the Communist who cannot
rest content in the inferiority of any one man's position to any
other's, to the philosopher who holds that mankind has made the most
eminent progress when a few chosen individuals have been supported
in easy brilliancy by a population of serfs or slaves. Wordsworth's
answer to this question is at once conservative and philanthropic.
He holds to the distinction of classes, and thus admits a difference
in the fulness and value of human lots. But he will not consent to
any social arrangement which implies a necessary _moral_ inferiority
in any section of the body politic; and he esteems it the
statesman's first duty to provide that all citizens shall be placed
under conditions of life which, however humble, shall not be
unfavourable to virtue.

His views on national education, which at first sight appear so
inconsistent, depend on the same conception of national welfare.
Wordsworth was one of the earliest and most emphatic proclaimers of
the duty of the State in this respect. The lines in which he insists
that every child ought to be taught to read are, indeed, often quoted
as an example of the moralizing baldness of much of his blank verse.
But, on the other hand, when a great impulse was given to education
(1820-30) by Bell and Lancaster, by the introduction of what was
called the "Madras system" of tuition by pupil-teachers, and the
spread of infant schools, Wordsworth was found unexpectedly in the
opposite camp. Considering as he did all mental requirements as