hip in the running of the _Politics Class_ a strongly
Conservative master. Such an arrangement would have been admirable had
the genuine educational spirit been there. It was not. The overture was
a failure and only added to our difficulties. To some men it seemed
better to root out the Liberal masters as "traitors" than to co-operate
with them as teachers.

On the eve of the final collapse, a similar experiment was tried with
_The School Observer_. The last number bears the names of two "editors,"
and contains both a Liberal and a Conservative "leader" written on the
same topic. The innovation was made at the last minute, and the
Conservative "leader" is not a genuine schoolboy production, but the
model may be a useful one for future work on the same lines.

But there was another influence making for the collapse. We quoted in
our previous book a head master who remarked at a school prize-giving
that the only questions worth asking are those that cannot get a definite
answer. Political education consists almost entirely of such questions.
Its sheet anchor is freedom of thought; its method is controversy; its
end is not in complete mastery of a box of intellectual tricks such as
will win full marks in an examination, but in the modesty of realised
ignorance and the enthusiastic search for fresh lights in the darkness.
Socrates was put to death by the Athenians because he would not desist
from asking them questions, and it is to be feared that some of our
pupils would have incurred the same fate had the customs of the time
permitted it. The taste for controversy on the fundamental subjects will
grip a youth like the taste for drink, as many who have passed through
undergraduate days at Oxford or Cambridge can remember. Suppose a boy
enters into political controversy with his form master, over the| giving
back of an essay, or with his house master at the luncheon table....

Now, there is a Divinity that doth hedge a schoolmaster, and the hedge
must be kept in somewhat careful repair. So long as we are concerned
with subjects like elementary Latin and Greek or Mathematics, we are
dealing with a body of knowledge in which, to take the examinations
standard, all the masters get full marks. All knowledge is contained in
a set of small school books which the masters, for their sins, know more
or less by heart backwards. Even history, if it is sufficiently badly
taught, may be grouped among such subjects, for, str