inaccuracies.  But the thing we never teach at all is the general duty of telling the truth, of giving a complete and fair picture of anything we are talking about, of not misrepresenting, not evading, not suppressing, not using plausible arguments that we know to be unfair, not selecting unscrupulously to prove an ex parte case, not telling all the nice stories about the Scotch, and all the nasty stories about the Irish, not pretending to be disinterested when you are really angry, not pretending to be angry when you are really only avaricious.  The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is exactly that—­that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.

If any one has the smallest doubt of this neglect of truth in public schools he can kill his doubt with one plain question.  Can any one on earth believe that if the seeing and telling of the whole truth were really one of the ideals of the English governing class, there could conceivably exist such a thing as the English party system?  Why, the English party system is founded upon the principle that telling the whole truth does not matter.  It is founded upon the principle that half a truth is better than no politics.  Our system deliberately turns a crowd of men who might be impartial into irrational partisans.  It teaches some of them to tell lies and all of them to believe lies.  It gives every man an arbitrary brief that he has to work up as best he may and defend as best he can.  It turns a room full of citizens into a room full of barristers.  I know that it has many charms and virtues, fighting and good-fellowship; it has all the charms and virtues of a game.  I only say that it would be a stark impossibility in a nation which believed in telling the truth.

LIMERICKS AND COUNSELS OF PERFECTION

It is customary to remark that modern problems cannot easily be attacked because they are so complex.  In many cases I believe it is really because they are so simple.  Nobody would believe in such simplicity of scoundrelism even if it were pointed out.  People would say that the truth was a charge of mere melodramatic villainy; forgetting that nearly all villains really are melodramatic.  Thus, for instance, we say that some good measures are frustrated or some bad officials kept in power by the press and confusion of public business; whereas very often the reason is simple healthy human bribery.  And thus especially we say that the Yellow Press is exaggerative, over-emotional, illiterate, and anarchical, and a hundred other long words; whereas the only objection to it is that it tells lies.  We waste our fine intellects in finding exquisite phraseology to fit a man, when in a well-ordered society we ought to be finding handcuffs to fit him.