enthusiasm is a form of self-forgetfulness as priggery
is a form of self-consciousness. Still priggery was the word. The
charge of "priggery" was added to the charge of "pacifism."

On these two lines the opposition developed and ultimately triumphed. It
was suggested that "the school would be empty in a couple of years," if
political education continued. Here, it would seem, our critics were
trading on their false idea of the parent, and believing what they wished
to believe. Take the statistics of entries, which is the only tangible
evidence on the subject, and the only conclusion you can draw is that
political education either had no effect at all, or that it slightly
increased the commercial well-being of the school. It was not on such
ground as this that political education was doomed. As we said at the
beginning of the chapter, the material of our experiments was the boys
and them alone. We had made a short cut. We had made no effort to
convert our colleague. We trusted to results for their conversion. But,
as the preceding narrative will have shown, the greater our success, the
greater became their irritation, when success was labelled "pacifism" and
"priggery." Without intending it, we had played "Pied Piper" upon some
of the best of the house masters' foster children. We had envisaged a
school as a single corporate society, boys and masters working together
with the maximum of frankness and equality for the common end, education.
We had not allowed for the fact that a school cannot become such a
corporate society, unless the staff has become such at the same time.
Like three-quarters of the reformers of history, we had, in our own
despite, become rebels. And so all was over. There is now no _Politics
Class_, no _School Observer_ in the school of their foundation, though
two other schools of fame have started papers on similar lines, with
handsome acknowledgments to our example. There are no political
societies in the Houses. Two or three of our pupils have left before
their time, and we, the authors, are no longer schoolmasters, only
"educationists,"--it is a change for the worse.

[1] Generally speaking, the liberalism of _The Manchester Guardian_ or of
President Wilson's speeches.

CHAPTER III

PROPAGANDA

"A point hardly touched on in the book is the difficulty of teaching
politics without the disadvantages of partisanship. It is worth
discussion."--_Manchester Guardian_.