The one most necessary thing in education, according to Mr. Gradgrind, a retired hardware merchant of Coketown, was facts. In his harsh and somewhat closed view, all human events were susceptible of measurement; they could be reduced to balances with so many facts on one side and so many facts on the other side. According to him, admirations, imagination and even sentiment were useless and disturbing factors that had a tendency to destroy the balance, and should therefore, be eliminated by every possible means. The chief means for such elimination he believed, was education. On these principles, Mr. Gradgrind set up a school wher