hool system may not work
satisfactorily, but it works; the public schools may not achieve what we
want, but they achieve what they want. The popular elementary schools do
not in that sense achieve anything at all. It is very difficult to point
to any guttersnipe in the street and say that he embodies the ideal
for which popular education has been working, in the sense that the
fresh-faced, foolish boy in "Etons" does embody the ideal for which the
headmasters of Harrow and Winchester have been working. The aristocratic
educationists have the positive purpose of turning out gentlemen, and
they do turn out gentlemen, even when they expel them. The popular
educationists would say that they had the far nobler idea of turning
out citizens. I concede that it is a much nobler idea, but where are the
citizens? I know that the boy in "Etons" is stiff with a rather silly
and sentimental stoicism, called being a man of the world. I do not
fancy that the errand-boy is rigid with that republican stoicism that
is called being a citizen. The schoolboy will really say with fresh
and innocent hauteur, "I am an English gentleman." I cannot so easily
picture the errand-boy drawing up his head to the stars and answering,
"Romanus civis sum." Let it be granted that our elementary teachers are
teaching the very broadest code of morals, while our great headmasters
are teaching only the narrowest code of manners. Let it be granted
that both these things are being taught. But only one of them is being
learned.

It is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manage
to bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they never
fulfill their visions or satisfy their souls. I believe there is a real
sense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a strange
inversion the political idealist often does not get what he asks for,
but does get what he wants. The silent pressure of his ideal lasts much
longer and reshapes the world much more than the actualities by which he
attempted to suggest it. What perishes is the letter, which he
thought so practical. What endures is the spirit, which he felt to be
unattainable and even unutterable. It is exactly his schemes that are
not fulfilled; it is exactly his vision that is fulfilled. Thus the ten
or twelve paper constitutions of the French Revolution, which seemed so
business-like to the framers of them, seem to us to have flown away
on the wind as the wildest fancies. W