eople
jolly well right. I cannot see by what right educators force what they
consider good taste down the children's throats. That is a return to the
old way of authority, of treating the child's mind as a blank slate. If
the Crank Schools are to improve, they must drop their high moral purpose
tone and come down to earth. They must realise that Charlie Chaplin and
_John Bull_ have their place in education just as Shakespeare and
Beethoven have their place. We do not want to turn out cranks who will
form a new superior crowd; we want to turn out men and women who will
readily join the conventional crowd and help it to reach better ideals.

This question of good taste is a sore one with me. I think it fatal to
impose good taste on any child; the child must form his own taste. I
know that it is possible to cultivate good taste and to become a very
superior cultivated person, but I know that the human, erring, vulgar,
music-hall, Charlie Chaplin part of such a person's make-up is not
annihilated; it is merely repressed into the unconscious.

I have a theory that each of us has a definite amount of human nature,
some of it high, some of it low, or, to phrase it differently, some of it
animal, some of it spiritual. We can repress one part, and then we
become either a saint or a sinner; the better way is to be both saint and
sinner, to look life straight in the face, condemning no one, judging no
one.

* * * * *

Macdonald was re-reading _A Dominie Dismissed_ to-night, and he looked up
and said: "Look here, you've got an awful lot of swear-words in this
book!"

"That," I said, "has a cause, Mac. They aren't really swear-words; the
world has grown out of being shocked at a 'damn,' but I am willing to
admit that there are more damns and hells than is usual. They are
symptomatic; they date back to my early days when swearing was a crime
punishable with the strap. They are simply symbols of my freedom. Most
bad language is from a like cause. When you foozle on the first tee
there is no earthy reason why you should say 'Hell' rather than 'Onions'!
But if onions had been taboo when you were a child you would find
yourself using the word as a swear. The curse word is the link that
joins your foozle with the nursery; whenever you curse you regress, that
is, you go back to the infantile."

"But," said Mac, "you don't mean to say that if swearing were permitted
to children that they wouldn