discourage them, while
for those who had no special capacity, the loss of time was of comparatively
little moment; but in spite of these alleviations of the mischief, I am sure
that much harm was done to the children of the sub-wealthy classes, by the
system which passes current among the Erewhonians as education. The poorest
children suffered least - if destruction and death have heard the sound of
wisdom, to a certain extent poverty has done so also.
    And yet perhaps, after all, it is better for a country that its seats of
learning should do more to suppress mental growth than to encourage it. Were it
not for a certain priggishness which these places infuse into so great a number
of their alumni, genuine work would become dangerously common. It is essential
that by far the greater part of what is said or done in the world should be so
ephemeral as to take itself away quickly; it should keep good for twenty-four
hours, or even twice as long, but it should not be good enough a week hence to
prevent people from going on to something else. No doubt the marvellous
development of journalism in England, as also the fact that our seats of
learning aim rather at fostering mediocrity than anything higher, is due to our
subconscious recognition of the fact that it is even more necessary to check
exuberance of mental development than to encourage it. There can be no doubt
that this is what our academic bodies do, and they do it the more effectually
because they do it only subconsciously. They think they are advancing healthy
mental assimilation and digestion, whereas in reality they are little better
than cancer in the stomach.
    Let me return, however, to the Erewhonians. Nothing surprised me more than
to see the occasional flashes of common sense with which one branch of study or
another was lit up, while not a single ray fell upon so many others. I was
particularly struck with this on strolling into the Art School of the
University. Here I found that the course of study was divided into two branches
- the practical and the commercial - no student being permitted to continue his
studies in the actual practice of the art he had taken up, unless he made equal
progress in its commercial history.
    Thus those who were studying painting were examined at frequent intervals in
the prices which all the leading pictures of the last fifty or a hundred years
had realized, and in the fluctuations in their values when (as often happened)
they had been sold and resold three or four times. The artist, they contend, is
a dealer in pictures, and it is as important