some prominent one among them speaks or writes or talks, he expects anything more than platitudes and little things?  Has he ever turned aside to learn what this headmaster or that thought of any question that interested him?  Has he ever found freshness or power in a schoolmaster’s discourse; or found a schoolmaster caring keenly for fine and beautiful things?  Who does not know the schoolmaster’s trite, safe admirations, his thin, evasive discussion, his sham enthusiasms for cricket, for fly-fishing, for perpendicular architecture, for boyish traits; his timid refuge in “good form,” his deadly silences?

And if we do not find him a refreshing and inspiring person, and his mind a fountain of thought in which we bathe and are restored, is it likely our sons will?  If the schoolmaster at large is grey and dull, shirking interesting topics and emphatic speech, what must he be like in the monotonous class-room?  These may seem wanton charges to some, but I am not speaking without my book.  Monthly I am brought into close contact with the pedagogic intelligence through the medium of three educational magazines.  A certain morbid habit against which I struggle in vain makes me read everything I catch a schoolmaster writing.  I am, indeed, one of the faithful band who read the Educational Supplement of the Times.  In these papers schoolmasters write about their business, lectures upon the questions of their calling are reported at length, and a sort of invalid discussion moves with painful decorum through the correspondence column.  The scholastic mind so displayed in action fascinates me.  It is like watching a game of billiards with wooden cushes and beechwood balls.

Sec. 2

But let me take one special instance.  In a periodical, now no longer living, called the Independent Review, there appeared some years ago a very curious and typical contribution by the Headmaster of Dulwich, which I may perhaps use as an illustration of the mental habits which seem inseparably associated with modern scholastic work.  It is called “English Ideas on Education,” and it begins—­trite, imitative, undistinguished—­thus: 

“The most important question in a country is that of education, and the most important people in a country are those who educate its inhabitants.  Others have most of the present in their hands:  those who educate have all the future.  With the present is bound up all the happiness only of the utterly selfish and the thoughtless among mankind; on the future rest all the thoughts of every parent and every wise man and patriot.”