the hearts of
some of the more tractable masters--had we done all these things, could
we have postponed or even permanently escaped the collapse? On the
whole, we come to the conclusion that, much as we regret many plain
mistakes of detail, in the main it is best that the bold course was
taken, We rode boldly, and, in the last months, we had to ride for a
fall. An experiment has been made by frontal attack, and with the
slenderest of resources. Now that all that is over, the time has come to
begin the slow and circuitous approach toward political education as a
normal institution.

The material of our experiment was boys and boys alone. Now, at first
sight, a school might seem to consist of boys, but in point of fact boys
are only one element in a complex organisation embracing boys, masters,
head master, bursar, governors, and parents. The boys are only there to
be educated, and education is a matter about which very few people have
any strongly cherished ideas. For very many, public school education is
a species of "doing time," whereby a child of fourteen is taken and
simply kept out of mischief (or, at any rate, kept away from home, where
he would be a nuisance), until at eighteen he is become a man. But the
other constituent parts of the school have serious commercial interests
at stake. For the masters the school is the means of livelihood, and the
livelihood afforded them is in many cases so niggardly that they very
rightly consider that the smallest financial mishap to the school might
plunge them below the line of bare subsistence. From a slightly
different angle, the eyes of the higher officials and the governors are
fixed upon the same point. A head master once remarked to me of one of
his governors, "Old X.'s only idea is that the school should pay five per
cent."

And the parents. It is an article of faith with the present writers that
parents are wiser, more tolerant and more open to ideas on educational
matters, than schoolmasters generally suppose. But parents live at a
distance, and only make themselves felt at moments of crisis, and then
the crisis is one which they probably only very imperfectly understand.
That is all the fault of the schools, for the schools have never made a
serious attempt to take the parents into partnership in the matter of
their sons' education. And here we are back against the root of all
evil, for the reason why this has not been done is that the schools have