ided to exclude reporters. But the compensations are enormous. He
will live all his life close to boys whom, when he once gets to know
them, he will find to have a freshness and high-heartedness which will
be a constant source of hope and inspiration; he will have the joy of
watching their minds develop, and of feeling that it is due in some
measure to him that they are growing into makers of happiness for
themselves and the world. And when in his work he is met by the
opposition of those who misinterpret or misunderstand, he will have an
almost fierce satisfaction in the faith that the future may be all on
his side, and that many years hence a little of him will live in men
who have realised not his, but their, individuality, and that
potentiality for goodness which, as well as he was able, he fostered
and brought to the light.

We have both been schoolmasters; at the moment we are neither of us
anything so useful; and we feel that we can say quite dogmatically that
there is no happiness equal to that of the profession that was ours.
And both of us fell into it accidently, as so many others have done.
Yet the appeal for schoolmasters should surely not be based entirely or
even mainly on the idyllic picture of the happy schoolmaster. John
Stuart Mill reduced hedonism to its fundamental paradox when he
declared that the way to find happiness was to turn your back on it.
If there is one lesson which political education rightly conducted
cannot fail to impress upon its best boys, it is the crying need of the
schools for their services. From Plato and Aristotle down to the
latest treatises on Reconstruction, be it the "Principles of
Reconstruction," as laid down by Mr. Bertrand Russell, or the "Elements
of Reconstruction," as reprinted from _The Times_ with an introduction
by Lord Milner, all alike come round to education as the keystone of
the arch of politics. The final appeal is always to the schoolmaster,
and it is perhaps less hopeful to appeal to the actual schoolmaster of
to-day than to the possible schoolmaster of to-morrow. As are our
schools, so will be our Parliaments and our Civil Service, and some at
any rate who have mapped out for themselves a career of political
usefulness and honour in Westminster, Whitehall, or abroad, might
bethink themselves first of Banquo.

"Lesser than Macbeth and greater:
Not so happy yet much happier;
Thou shalt get kings though thou be none."

CHAPTER VI

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