selves, but what we have chosen to allow
others to make us. Whatever may once have been the nursery of the human
race, it is now to a great extent the school. Some part--it generally is
the best part--of education takes place outside the class-room; but it
must be remembered that the atmosphere of home is generally impregnated
with the conventional traditions of the school and of the university.

The evil influence that is so obviously undermining social and national
life must, therefore, first be sought in the principles upon which
education systems have been founded.

Nothing is more astonishing than to reflect upon the unintelligent
grounds on which people base their adherence to the principles of modern
education. They are unable, in the first place, to get over the fact
that their forefathers were brought up in the same fashion before them.
It is a sheer impossibility for most people to question anything that
has been going on for any length of time unchecked.

The undisputed possession of a custom for so many years converts it into
the legal property of the nation, whence it derives a sacred character,
and nobody dreams of meddling with it. Any abuses it may bring in its
train are then conveniently ascribed to the perversity of Providence.
The cherished convention is never questioned. That is the remarkable
thing about it. People can be brought to understand, by means of a
flourish of dazzling prospectuses and newspaper advertisements, that a
bicycle is an improvement on a bone-shaker, or that pneumatic tyres are
more comfortable on rough roads than iron-rimmed wheels. But that
appears to be the set limit of their comprehension.

They are capable of being made to grasp, after nearly exhausting the
resources of a wealthy syndicate, something that obviously affects their
material comfort. But progress in ideas, or anything in the shape of
moral revolution, has to undergo a thousand-fold more tortuous process
before it can be made to filter through a convention. The academic
product is, it must be remembered, a bundle of conventions. If the
article has been properly manufactured, and bears the hall-mark of the
maker and the stamp of the country of its origin, there is nothing else
there for the truth to filter into. It simply drops through and
vapourizes without disturbing anything.

Conventionality is therefore an insuperable obstacle, as far as the
majority of minds are concerned, to the discovery that the esta