ENDS AND MEANS
judge in a certain way. The training might begin with a
consideration of popular advertising. Children could be
shown that there is no necessity and organic connection
between the pretty girl in her expensive dressing-gown
and the merits of the tooth-paste she is intended to
advertise. This lesson might be brought home by practical
demonstrations. Chocolates could be wrapped in a paper
adorned with realistic pictures of scorpions, and castor-oil
and quinine distributed from containers in the form of
Sealyham terriers or Shirley Temple. Having mastered
the art of dissociation in the field of commercial advertising,
our young people could be trained to apply the same
critical methods to the equally arbitrary and even more
dangerously misleading associations which exist in the
fields of politics and religion. They would be shown that
it is possible for a man to get the fullest aesthetic enjoyment
out of a military or religious pageant without allowing
that enjoyment in any way to influence his judgment
regarding the value of war as a political instrument or the
truth and moral usefulness of the religion in question.
They would be taught to, consider monarchy and
dictatorship on their own political and ethical merits, not
on the choreographical merits of processions and court
ceremonials, not on the architectural merits of palaces,
not on the rhetorical merits of speeches, not on the
organizational merits of a certain kind of technical
efficiency. And so on.
That the art of dissociation will ever be taught in schools
under direct state control is, of course, almost infinitely
improbable. Those who use the power of the state always
desire to preserve a certain given order of things. They
therefore always try to persuade or compel their subjects
to accept, as right and reasonable, certain solutions (hardly
ever the best) of the outstanding problems of politics and
economics. Hence the insistence, on the part of govern-
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