ugh in dealing with the rich who, if they did
not romp and race, would eat and drink unwholesomely, by any means so
much to the point when applied to people, most of whom will take a great
deal of exercise anyhow, with spade or hammer, pickax or saw. And for
the third case, of washing, it is obvious that the same sort of rhetoric
about corporeal daintiness which is proper to an ornamental class
cannot, merely as it stands, be applicable to a dustman. A gentleman is
expected to be substantially spotless all the time. But it is no more
discreditable for a scavenger to be dirty than for a deep-sea diver to
be wet. A sweep is no more disgraced when he is covered with soot
than Michael Angelo when he is covered with clay, or Bayard when he
is covered with blood. Nor have these extenders of the public-school
tradition done or suggested anything by way of a substitute for the
present snobbish system which makes cleanliness almost impossible to the
poor; I mean the general ritual of linen and the wearing of the cast-off
clothes of the rich. One man moves into another man's clothes as he
moves into another man's house. No wonder that our educationists are
not horrified at a man picking up the aristocrat's second-hand trousers,
when they themselves have only taken up the aristocrat's second-hand
ideas.

*****

XIII. THE OUTLAWED PARENT

There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper
inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The
only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of
the children are the parents. Yet the English poor have very definite
traditions in many ways. They are hidden under embarrassment and irony;
and those psychologists who have disentangled them talk of them as very
strange, barbaric and secretive things. But, as a matter of fact, the
traditions of the poor are mostly simply the traditions of humanity,
a thing which many of us have not seen for some time. For instance,
workingmen have a tradition that if one is talking about a vile thing it
is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is the less likely to be
seduced into excusing it. But mankind had this tradition also, until the
Puritans and their children, the Ibsenites, started the opposite idea,
that it does not matter what you say so long as you say it with long
words and a long face. Or again, the educated classes have tabooed most
jesting about personal appearance; but in d