l the diverse lines of thought along which each can be
approached. Here the fundamental "text-book" is the newspaper.
Growing up in such a world as this of 1918, how can it be anything but
sheer monasticism to divert the main part of a boy's intellectual
energies away from this subject to anything else? Our educational
"America is here or nowhere."

With this principle in view, and after various tentative experiments,
we obtained permission to found the _Politics Class_ described in our
previous book. Suffice it to say here that the class was a voluntary
body of some thirty or forty senior boys, that met once a week on a
half-holiday evening to hear informal lectures from one or other of us,
and occasionally from one or other of our colleagues, on questions of
the day. Sometimes the topic was purely general--"Competition and
Co-operation," "The Spirit of the Reformer," or the like. Sometimes a
historical topic was traced rapidly from its beginnings down to a
crisis of last week's newspaper, the discourse ending on the brink of
the future with a note of interrogation; such were brief courses of
lectures on "The Irish Question," and "The Russian Revolution." A
third type were those that confined themselves to an analysis of a
strictly contemporary situation, such as the lectures on the various
"peace terms" speeches that led up to the Versailles declaration of
February, 1918. No attempt was made to create any artificial
popularity for the class. The scene was the ordinary bleak class-room
with all its sad suggestiveness. Ordinary notes were taken in ordinary
note-books. No one, in fact, can have come from any motive but a
genuine desire to know what was deemed worth knowing.

Parallel with the foundation of the _Politics Class_ had come a
remodelling of the sixth form time-table. Indeed, not modern politics
but Greek philosophy had been the first subject to stir that almost
religious passion for a real understanding of things, without which
knowledge is in the old man mere pedantry and in the young man mere
grist for the examination mill. In the present educational chaos,
school sixth forms are quite bewilderingly fissiparous. Every one is a
"specialist" of some sort or other; specialism means "private work,"
and if private work enables the gifted few to escape into
self-education from the hampering attentions of the form master, it
gives the rest a terrible training in the habits of time-wasting and
evasio