oys can ever take away from them. The sillier or
idler don't take away even that. As to the "mental training" argument,
so often trotted out, it is childish enough not to be worth answering.
Which is most practically useful to us in life--knowledge of Latin
grammar or knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in, physical,
social, moral? That is the question.

The truth is, schoolmastering in Britain has become a vast vested
interest in the hands of men who have nothing to teach us. They try to
bolster up their vicious system by such artificial arguments as the
"mental training" fallacy. Forced to admit the utter uselessness of the
pretended knowledge they impart, they fall back upon the plea of its
supposed occult value as intellectual discipline. They say in
effect:--"This sawdust we offer you contains no food, we know: but then
see how it strengthens the jaws to chew it!" Besides, look at our
results! The typical John Bull! pig-headed, ignorant, brutal. Are we
really such immense successes ourselves that we must needs perpetuate
the mould that warped us?

The one fatal charge brought against the public school system is that
"after all, it turns out English gentlemen!"

IV.

_THE THEORY OF SCAPEGOATS._

"Alas, how easily things go wrong!" says Dr. George MacDonald. And all
the world over, when things do go wrong, the natural and instinctive
desire of the human animal is--to find a scapegoat. When the great
French nation in the lump embarks its capital in a hopeless scheme for
cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, and then finds out too
late that Nature has imposed insuperable barriers to its completion on
the projected scale--what does the great French nation do, in its
collective wisdom, but turn round at once to rend the directors? It
cries, "A Mazas!" just as in '71 it cried "Bazaine a la lanterne!" I
don't mean to say the directors don't deserve all they have got or ever
will get, and perhaps more also; I don't mean to deny corruption
extraordinary in many high places; as a rule the worst that anybody
alleges about anything is only a part of what might easily be alleged if
we were all in the secret. Which of us, indeed, would 'scape whipping?
But what I do mean is, that we should never have heard of Reinach or
Herz, of the corruption and peculation, at all if things had gone well.
It is the crash that brought them out. The nation wants a scapegoat.
"Ain't nobody to be whopped for this 'er