le of clear, strong expression in
English at all. Yet Mr. Gilkes can permit this old assertion, so dear
to country rectors and the classical scholar, to appear within a
column's distance of such style as this:

"It is now understood that every subject is valuable, if it is properly
taught; it will perform that which, as follows from the accounts given
above of the aim of education, is the work most important in the case of
boys--that is, it will draw out their faculties and make them useful in
the world, alert, trained in industry, and able to understand, so far as
their school lessons educated them, and make themselves master of any
subject set before them."

This quotation is conclusive.

Sec. 3

I am haunted by a fear that the careless reader will think I am writing
against upper-class schoolmasters. I am, it is undeniable, writing
against their dullness, but it is, I hold, a dullness that is imposed
upon them by the conditions under which they live. Indeed, I believe,
could I put the thing directly to the profession--"Do you not yourselves
feel needlessly limited and dull?"--should receive a majority of
affirmative responses. We have, as a nation, a certain ideal of what a
schoolmaster must be; to that he must by art or nature approximate, and
there is no help for it but to alter our ideal. Nothing else of any wide
value can be done until that is done.

In the first place, the received ideal omits a most necessary condition.
We do not insist upon a headmaster or indeed any of our academic leaders
and dignitaries, being a man of marked intellectual character, a man of
intellectual distinction. It is assumed, rather lightly in many cases,
that he has done "good work," as they say--the sort of good work that is
usually no good at all, that increases nothing, changes nothing,
stimulates no one, leads no whither. That, surely, must be altered. We
must see to it that our leading schoolmasters at any rate must be men of
insight and creative intelligence, men who could at a pinch write a good
novel or produce illuminating criticism or take an original part in
theological or philosophical discussion, or do any of these minor
things. They must be authentic men, taking a line of their own and
capable of intellectual passion. They should be able to make their mark
outside the school, if only to show they carry a living soul into it. As
things are, nothing is so fatal to a schoolmaster's career as to do
that.

And clos