idea of a poor English schoolmaster.  All over the country other poor schoolmasters have been spending their lives teaching in just the same way their notion of England—­what she is, has been, ought to be.  Similarly, no doubt, teachers all over France and Germany have been teaching—­under the guise of grammar, arithmetic, what not—­their ideas of what France or Germany has been, is, ought to be.  These nations are opposed and at length they come to a direct conflict, in this War.  Mark you what happens!  At once we patient teachers in England are brushed all aside.  You call a chance Committee of amateurs, and the man who has taught the boys whom, within a fortnight, you will be clamouring to fight for you, has not even the honour to be consulted. . . .  Yes, I think well enough of Great Britain to be pretty confident that she will win, letting us slip; that is, she will win though fighting with a hand tied.  But Germany is no such fool. She won’t, in her hour of need, despise the help of her teachers.  They teach what is almost diametrically opposed to our teaching:  they teach it thoroughly, and on my soul I believe it to be as nearly opposed as wrong can be to right.  But they have the honour to be trusted; therefore they will succeed in making this war a long one. . . .  Yes, I have a wall-map, sir, of the human body.  It does not belong to the school:  I bought it on my own account seven years ago, but the then Managers considered it too naked to hang on the walls of a mixed school, and disallowed the expense.  You are very welcome to use it, and I am only glad that at length it will serve a purpose.”

“Touchy lot, these school-teachers!” mused Dr Mant on his way back to the town.  “I never can like ’em, somehow. . . .  Maybe I ought to have used a little tact and told him that, as I understood it, Mrs Steele called the meeting; and it was for women-workers only.  That wouldn’t quite account for Farmer Best though,” he chuckled.  “And I suppose Best and the Vicar, as Managers—­yes, and Mrs Pamphlett’s another—­just put their heads together on the spot and gave leave to use the schoolroom, without consulting the Head Teacher at all.  I don’t suppose it ever crossed their minds. . . .  No:  on the whole that poor little man is right.  Nobody in England ever does take any truck in schoolmasters.  They’re just left out of account.  And I dare say—­yes:  I dare say—­that means we don’t, as a people, take any real truck in Education.  Well, and who’s the worse for it?—­barring the teachers themselves, poor devils!  Germany has taken the other line, put herself in the hands of pedagogues, from the Professors down:  and a nice result it’s going to be for her, and for the rest of the world in the meantime!  On the whole—­”

On the whole, the Doctor decided—­faithful to his habit of looking questions in the face and so passing on—­that these things worked out pretty well as they were.