Of course the difficulty of proving my case is great.  You can’t, in education, get two exactly parallel boys and try the effect of different types of education on the two.  A chemist can put exactly the same quantity of some salt in two vessels, and, by treating them in different ways, produce a demonstration which is irrefragable.  But no two boys are exactly alike, and, while classics are demanded at the university, boys of ability will tend to keep on the classical side; so that the admitted failure of modern sides in many places to produce boys of high intellectual ability results from the fact that boys of ability do not tend to join the modern sides.

So one hammers on, and, as it is always easier to leave an object at rest than to set it moving, we remain very much where we were.

The cynical solution is to say, let us have peace at any cost; let the thing alone; let us teach what we have to teach, and not bother about results.  But that appears to me to be a cowardly attitude.  If one expresses dissatisfaction to one of the cheerful stationary party, they reply, “Oh, take our word for it, it is all right; do your best; you don’t teach at all badly, though you lack conviction; leave it to us, and never mind the discontent expressed by parents, and the cynical contempt felt by boys for intellectual things.”

    “Meanwhile, regardless of their doom,
       The little victims play.”

They do indeed! they find work so dispiriting a business that they put it out of their thoughts as much as they can.  And when they grow up, conscious of intellectual feebleness, they have no idea of expressing their resentment at the way they have been used—­if they are modest, they think that it is their own fault; if they are complacent, they think that intellectual things don’t matter.

While I write there comes in one of my cheerful opponents to discuss the situation.  We plunge into the subject of classics.  I say that, to boys without aptitude, they are dreary and hopelessly difficult.  “There you go again,” he says, “always wanting to make things easier:  the thing to do is to keep boys at hard, solid work; it is an advantage that they can’t understand what they are working at; it is a better gymnastic.”  The subject of mathematics is mentioned, and my friend incidentally confesses that he never had the least idea what higher Algebra was all about.

I refrain from saying what comes into my mind.  Supposing that he, without any taste for Mathematics, had been kept year after year at them, surely that would have been acting on his principle, viz. to find out what boys can’t do and make them do it.  No doubt he would say that his mind had been fortified, as it was, by classics.  But, if a rigid mathematical training had been employed, his mind might have been fortified into an enviable condition of inaccessibility.  But I don’t say this; he would only think I was making fun of the whole thing.