interest our manner as we deal with these topics, than the course of our arguments or the conclusions which we reach. They overhear. It may be, with a subtler sense they also overhear a different and a finer conversation. They may remark a silence which overtakes speech when it attempts a theme too lofty for words. They may detect us in certain acts of reverence; they may be aware that behind our irritation we preserve some kindness; behind our follies, some wisdom; behind our conventions and artifices, some sincerity. They may perhaps discover that though most of our conversation ranges upon the level of the streets, some of it may be said, in language not less true than poetic, to be in heaven. If that were so, they would be getting religious instruction.

CHAPTER II

COMMERCIAL EDUCATION

Man cannot live by bread alone. But some bread he must have; more than a certain amount he cannot eat; with none he dies.

Bread, then, he must get: the question is how? This appears at first to be the only question; yet when he attempts to answer it, certain other questions arise, and will not be silenced: they claim their answers before they will suffer the first-what seemed to be the only-question to be answered. One of these important questions is "Bread-for what purpose?" and another is "Bread-of what kind?" We may find that these two are but different forms of the same problem.

For what purpose do we seek bread? What is food for? It is to restore spent energies, to repair wasted tissues, to maintain life. The answer is correct, yet unsatisfactory. No healthy person eats his food for these reasons: he eats his food because he likes it, because he enjoys the process of eating it. And the more completely unconscious he is of everything except his liking and enjoyment, the

more keenly he likes and enjoys, and the more perfectly the ignored purpose is fulfilled.

Bread of what kind? Food of what quality? Simple text-books of hygiene tell us what chemical or other properties it should combine. But no healthy man ordering a meal, no wholesome housewife providing for her family, dreams of consulting the books. We choose what we have a taste for at the time. Experience has indeed taught us to forecast our tastes with tolerable accuracy. A sugared cake offered at breakfast would be a cruel jest; soup would be an insult at the hour when we expect tea; the matutinal rasher an affront to the dinner table. We pleasantly contrive to gratify the tastes we know and can anticipate; we stoutly refuse to provide for a self-conscious digestive system.

The problem grows in complexity and fascination. It is clear we eat because we like food and enjoy eating clear, no less, that we eat what we like; but we do not always like food of the same sort. True, the variations fall into a certain routine; the changes mark the progress of a changeless ritual; one dinner is much like another; the breakfast of to-day asserts an undisputed kindred with the breakfast of yesterday, and sends a silent, prophetic greeting to the morrow's breakfast, which will not repudiate the alliance nor fail the tradition. But breakfast is never dinner; luncheon will not be mistaken for tea. We cling to change with the loyal and tenacious grasp with which we hold custom itself.

It is not hard to find or to state the principle which governs these changes. The kind of food is determined by the state of the man just before he takes it. It were not more inept to offer a man a stone when he has asked for an egg, than to give him hot cocoa when he desires iced lemonade. The man has been hurrying along a dusty road on an August afternoon: iced lemonade is determined by that fact; he has had a long journey in February over branch lines of several ill-adjusted, rival railway companies: iced lemonade, though an excellent beverage on other occasions, is not for him to drink; the conditions prescribe cocoa. Beefsteak may in general be called food; and so may calves-foot jelly-indeed the two have a special intimacy of kinship: but neither is food for a particular man upon the particular occasion when he wants the other; and what he wants is decided by his condition at that time.

A man may be hungry, and food, we know, satisfies hunger. But unless a man is starving he will not take any food without considering its nature. Normal hunger allows discrimination; the normally hungry man satisfies his hunger with the foods which are appropriate to the special kind of hunger which he feels. When we say that a man has earned his dinner, we mean that he is—as the result of certain abstinences and activities-in a condition to eat it. If breakfast had never ceased, he would not be in that condition; if he had slept soundly and without interruption since breakfast, he would not be in that condition.

We have used the word "earn": we were led to it in our discussion of food, of hunger and its satisfaction. But we have used it in a sense, familiar indeed, and yet not the most usual. We give rein to a modest fancy when we say that a man earns his dinner we seem to be unvisited by fancy, if we say that he earns his wages: even if we say he earns his salary, we have used a word which has unhappily lost its savour. Had it kept its savour, we should have saved our wit, and the problem of Commercial Education might have solved itself.

For what, after all, is Education? In its widest sense, it is the sum of all the activities by which a community seeks to express, to attain, and to enrich its ideal of life. It is unfortunate that a general statement such as this provokes almost universal ridicule for a general statement, if it is true, is the form in which a general idea takes shape, and a general is a governing idea. It is reasonable to test the truth of a general idea, to reject it if it fails under examination: it is not reasonable to despise it because it claims to be general. Let this statement serve as a general statement-or let those who will provide another. Accepting this statement, we may then more narrowly, but in the light of our general definition further define Education as certain special activities or experiences which the Community selects and arranges for its younger members. Whatever else they miss, in whatever accidental order they may acquire other experiences, there are certain experiences and activities which the