and methods, enlarge their intellectual sympathies and understand their
differences. Thus a real corporate intellectual life of the staff might
begin. Often at present this does not exist, and its absence is fatal to
the school as a seriously intellectual institution.

And surely the need for the tolerant staff can hardly be exaggerated.
And here we are thinking not so much of the war and its controversies as
of the days that will follow. After the war a baser motive than even the
crudest jingo patriotism will claim a monopoly over the political thought
of public schoolboys for the defence not of "country," but of property.
The unorthodox will be denounced not as "pacifists," but as "socialists,"
and the enemy will be not the Kaiser, but perhaps the Prime Minister of a
Labour Government. But just as the only hope for the world after the war
seems to lie in a League of Nations, so the only hope for England lies in
the co-operation of all classes in a common search for industrial
justice. The public schools are "class preserves" of the rich, and their
opportunity for good, as for harm, will be almost boundless. "To turn
out the young of the capitalist class with all their capitalist
prejudices intact will be sheer dereliction of duty on the part of public
schoolmasters." So wrote a great teacher of the older generation. The
obvious way of destroying those prejudices as prejudices is by an
enthusiastic and capable exposition of various forms of socialism. This
can best be done by socialist masters. But, supposing the socialist
teaching is false, why should those who are not Socialists fear for the
result? It is a necessary part of the scheme that they on their side
should make a reasoned defence of a reformed capitalism. If this is done
"the young of the capitalist class" may be turned out Socialists or
anti-Socialists, but at least they will go out into the world men of some
economic understanding, with views based on reasoning, and by further
reasoning or experience liable to be changed, not men with inherited
prejudice intact.

If we assume in our staff a general inclination towards freedom of
opinion, everything becomes possible. A hundred questions of
organisation arise, essentially practical questions, and more easily
solved by concrete experiment than by literary methods. It may, however,
be worthy while to glance at a few of these.

Masters will always be human; and political education must be so
or