for example, God, Socialism, the Mosaic account of the Creation, social procedure, Republicanism, beauty, love, or, indeed, about anything likely to interest an intelligent adolescent.  At the approach of all such things he must have acquired the habit of the modest cough, the infectious trick of the nice evasion.  How can “Kappa” expect inspiration from the decorous resultants who satisfy these conditions?  What brand can ever be lit at altars that have borne no fire?  And you find the secondary schoolmaster who complies with these restrictions becoming the zealous and grateful agent of the tendencies that have made him what he is, converting into a practice those vague dreads of idiosyncrasy, of positive acts and new ideas, that dictated the choice of him and his rule of life.  His moral teaching amounts to this:  to inculcate truth-telling about small matters and evasion about large, and to cultivate a morbid obsession in the necessary dawn of sexual consciousness.  So far from wanting to stimulate the imagination, he hates and dreads it.  I find him perpetually haunted by a ridiculous fear that boys will “do something,” and in his terror seeking whatever is dull and unstimulating and tiring in intellectual work, clipping their reading, censoring their periodicals, expurgating their classics, substituting the stupid grind of organised “games” for natural, imaginative play, persecuting loafers—­and so achieving his end and turning out at last, clean-looking, passively well-behaved, apathetic, obliterated young men, with the nicest manners and no spark of initiative at all, quite safe not to “do anything” for ever.

I submit this may be a very good training for polite servants, but it is not the way to make masters in the world.  If we English believe we are indeed a masterful people, we must be prepared to expose our children to more and more various stimulations than we do; they must grow up free, bold, adventurous, initiated, even if they have to take more risks in the doing of that.  An able and stimulating teacher is as rare as a fine artist, and is a thing worth having for your son, even at the price of shocking your wife by his lack of respect for that magnificent compromise, the Establishment, or you by his Socialism or by his Catholicism or Darwinism, or even by his erroneous choice of ties and collars.  Boys who are to be free, masterly men must hear free men talking freely of religion, of philosophy, of conduct.  They must have heard men of this opinion and that, putting what they believe before them with all the courage of conviction.  They must have an idea of will prevailing over form.  It is far more important that boys should learn from original, intellectually keen men than they should learn from perfectly respectable men, or perfectly orthodox men, or perfectly nice men.  The vital thing to consider about your son’s schoolmaster is whether he talked lifeless twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and not whether he loved