IN these days when the popular mind has been perfected by a quarter of a century’s course of School Board training, one result naturally to be looked for is an improved style of everyday speech. It should be pleasant in trains and steamboats, to overhear the ready flow of rational discourse, and to note how the well-furnished minds and sharpened wits of a polished generation instinctively shunned the trivial and the hackneyed, and passed with ease to themes new, interesting, and solid. But the truth is, never probably was the subject matter of popular remark so trivial, empty, and illiterate as it is in this age of abounding books and schools. Passing by the whole multitude of the depraved devotees of sport, who can frame their speech to nothing else but football and horse racing, let the conversational manners of ordinary middle class men and women of to-day be marked, and a humiliating display of mental poverty will, we think, be seen to be the chief feature of the whole process. Of the elaborate educational course they underwent at the public expense, the literary, historical, and scientific lore they imbibed in their school days, the average man and woman of to-day retain hardly a trace. Of the main facts of the history of their country they are densely ignorant, Church history they never knew, and even a competent knowledge of Bible history is a rare accomplishment. We are not complaining that the common man is not able to talk like a printed book, or demanding that every social group shall constitute itself a philosophical society, but we are recording our contempt and disgust for the stupid, trivial, illiterate conversation of the well-dressed, gad-about modern world. Sample anywhere a knot of talkers at this travelling season, and almost without fail you find them drivelling about railway tickets, complaining about the weather which they will call “beastly,” announcing their important Saturday to Monday arrangements, or malevolently sizing up the character of absent acquaintances. This inability to rescue the mind from the dominion of the present, this incessant gloating on small selfish interests, this oblivion of everything deep, grand, and solemn, is a thing that moves the indignation of rational men, much more of God, the Creator and Judge of all. “It is a people of no understanding, therefore he that made them shall not have mercy on them, and he that formed them shall shew them no favour.”
The degeneration of the public mind is reflected in the changed character of the daily press. The jocular, the gossipy, the sensational are more and more prevailing to the exclusion of better elements. A generation feeding itself on novels and penny papers is not aware how absurdly childish it is growing, but the destitution of ideas exhibited by the average man, his utter incapacity to realise either the past or the future, betoken to the intelligent observer a permanent state of mental infancy.