But while one agrees with “Kappa” and shares his alarm, one must confess the remedies he considers indicated do not seem quite so satisfactory as his diagnosis of the disease.  He attacks the curriculum and tells us we must reduce or revolutionise instruction and exercise in the dead languages, introduce a broader handling of history, a more inspiring arrangement of scientific courses, and so forth.  I wish, indeed, it were possible to believe that substituting biology for Greek prose composition or history with models and photographs and diagrams for Latin versification, would make any considerable difference in this matter.  For so one might discuss this question and still give no offence to a most amiable and influential class of men.  But the roots of the evil, the ultimate cause of that typical young man’s deadness, lie not at all in that direction.  To indicate the direction in which it does lie is quite unavoidably to give offence to an indiscriminatingly sensitive class.  Yet there is need to speak plainly.  This deadening of soul comes not from the omission or inclusion of this specific subject or that; it is the effect of the general scholastic atmosphere.  It is an atmosphere that admits of no inspiration at all.  It is an atmosphere from which living stimulating influences have been excluded from which stimulating and vigorous personalities are now being carefully eliminated, and in which dull, prosaic men prevail invincibly.  The explanation of the inert commonness of “Kappa’s” schoolboy lies not in his having learnt this or not learnt that, but in the fact that from seven to twenty he has been in the intellectual shadow of a number of good-hearted, sedulously respectable conscientiously manly, conforming, well-behaved men, who never, to the knowledge of their pupils and the public, at any rate, think strange thoughts do imaginative or romantic things, pay tribute to beauty, laugh carelessly, or countenance any irregularity in the world.  All erratic and enterprising tendencies in him have been checked by them and brought at last to nothing; and so he emerges a mere residuum of decent minor dispositions.  The dullness of the scholastic atmosphere the grey, intolerant mediocrity that is the natural or assumed quality of every upper-class schoolmaster, is the true cause of the spiritual etiolation of “Kappa’s” young friend.

Now, it is a very grave thing, I know, to bring this charge against a great profession—­to say, as I do say, that it is collectively and individually dull.  But someone has to do this sooner or later; we have restrained ourselves and argued away from the question too long.  There is, I allege, a great lack of vigorous and inspiring minds in our schools.  Our upper-class schools are out of touch with the thought of the time, in a backwater of intellectual apathy.  We have no original or heroic school-teachers.  Let me ask the reader frankly what part our leading headmasters play in his intellectual world; if when