friendship
appear a thing to be ashamed rather than proud of, and often in the end
actually render it shameful. Given a clean atmosphere, an absence of
suspicion on the part of masters and of morbidity on that of boys, and
we believe that very rarely would physical acts result from schoolboy
love.

But the reader will be asking, for the second time, "What is all this
to do with political education?" And again we answer--everything. For
we believe that the joy in life, and the intellectual interest of which
we have spoken can be awakened from where they lie dormant in a boy's
nature by political education. The subject is the boy's own destiny as
a member of human society and a part of the universe (for it will be
remembered that we include ethics and philosophy with history and
politics under the one broad heading); and there is hardly a boy who
does not find, at best in all these subjects, at worst in one of them,
the inspiration to vital work and the sense of living well, which goes
with it. The boys start reading, widely; a thousand topics occupy
their attention; poetry, plays, novels--all these are reached from the
one starting point. Then clubs and groups of various kinds are started
in their houses; and the sex problem has become as much as it ever can
become, a thing of the past.

Nor, we may add, are we merely theorising, and talking of hypothetical
goods which might conceivably follow from the adoption of our plan.
All that we have written of is within our own experience. Time after
time while we were making our experiments did we come across cases of
boys whose moral health had been saved by their new-found interest.
One had turned to physical excitement as the only possible relief from
the tedium of Latin grammar; after a year under the altered
circumstances he turned to it no longer. The parents of another (a boy
of about sixteen) had attempted to base his morality solely on
Christian dogma, which meant nothing to him; and the result was
disastrous. But a course of lectures on Plato's philosophy gave him
what religion had previously failed to give him--a belief in an ideal
and the distinction between right and wrong, and a determination to do
always what seemed to him the absolute best.[1] But by far the most
remarkable results were achieved in the house of which we have already
spoken in Chapter I. During his first fortnight of office, the new
head boy followed the old method; he examined all su