consummation, and it would be nearly as righteous to subject young
couples about to marry to a blustering cross-examination by some
underbred bully of a barrister upon their motives, and then to publish
whatever chance phrases in their answers appeared to be amusing in the
press, as it is to publish contemporary divorce proceedings. The thing
is a nastiness, a stream of social contagion and an extreme cruelty, and
there can be no doubt that whatever other result this British Royal
Commission may have, there at least will be many sweeping alterations.

THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE EMPIRE

Sec. 1

"If Youth but Knew" is the title of a book published some years ago, but
still with a quite living interest, by "Kappa"; it is the bitter
complaint of a distressed senior against our educational system. He is
hugely disappointed in the public-school boy, and more particularly in
one typical specimen. He is--if one might hazard a guess--an uncle
bereft of great expectations. He finds an echo in thousands of other
distressed uncles and parents. They use the most divergent and
inadequate forms of expression for this vague sense that the result has
not come out good enough; they put it contradictorily and often wrongly,
but the sense is widespread and real and justifiable and we owe a great
debt to "Kappa" for an accurate diagnosis of what in the aggregate
amounts to a grave national and social evil.

The trouble with "Kappa's" particular public-school boy is his unlit
imagination, the apathetic commonness of his attitude to life at large.
He is almost stupidly not interested in the mysteries of material fact,
nor in the riddles and great dramatic movements of history, indifferent
to any form of beauty, and pedantically devoted to the pettiness of
games and clothing and social conduct. It is, in fact, chiefly by his
style in these latter things, his extensive unilluminated knowledge of
Greek and Latin, and his greater costliness, that he differs from a
young carpenter or clerk. A young carpenter or clerk of the same
temperament would have no narrower prejudices nor outlook, no less
capacity for the discussion of broad questions and for imaginative
thinking. And it has come to the mind of "Kappa" as a discovery, as an
exceedingly remarkable and moving thing, a thing to cry aloud about,
that this should be so, that this is all that the best possible modern
education has achieved. He makes it more than a personal issue. He has