I fixed myself to work to-day. After all, I am not an idler. I
earn my right to live. When I publish my History the world will
be the richer by _something_, poor though it may be. I vow I
have been more greatly, more nobly employed of late years, than I
was when I earned my living at school-slavery teaching to
children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-
cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their
insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of
thousands of their fellow-creatures--elementary mathematics.
There is no more reason for any human being on God's earth to be
acquainted with the Binomial Theorem or the Solution of
Triangles--unless he is a professional scientist, when he can
begin to specialise in mathematics at the same age as the lawyer
begins to specialise in law or the surgeon in anatomy--than for
him to be an expert in Choctaw, the Cabala or the Book of Mormon.
I look back with feelings of shame and degradation to the days
when, for the sake of a crust of bread, I prostituted my
intelligence to wasting the precious hours of impressionable
childhood, which could have been filled with so many beautiful
and meaningful things, over this utterly futile and inhuman
subject.
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