No institution is so perfect but that it can wisely profit by healthy and vigorous criticism. And the public schools themselves make no pretension to any measure of perfection. They are very conscious of the many defects they have, and reiteration almost persuades them of the existence of many others that they have not. It is the recognised privilege of the Englishman to grumble at what he loves, and in the public schools, with which he readily finds fault, he yet feels an affectionate pride. This sentiment perhaps cannot, certainly need not, give an account of itself; for the dissatisfaction reasoned and often reasonable grounds can be alleged. The public schools are not in the forefront of any educational or intellectual movement. It is not in them that educational experiment finds a warm welcome or a congenial atmosphere. The few bold spirits who, from time to time, make ventures in untrodden paths are generally left to languish through the opposition or the neglect sometimes of colleagues, sometimes of parents, not often of the boys themselves, seldom, it is only fair to add, of headmasters. Not that the public school by any means shuts its ears or its doors to new ideas, new methods, or the admission of new subjects, as I hope to show presently; but it cautiously waits, as a rule, until the necessary experiment and verification have been made elsewhere. Future historians will hardly take note of any pioneer work within the public schools since Arnold's day. The main contributions to the science of education have come from outsidefrom the psychologists, with their increasing and perhaps sometimes precipitate activities, from the students of the wide and comprehensive sciences of sociology and economics, from the lecture halls of scientific historians, from the world of art and music, from the medical profession, and from the publications of the educational philosopher. Certainly the last 70 years have not been devoid of great schoolmasters, some few of whom I venture to think will be entitled to rank also as great men. But their greatness has lain rather in their administrative powers, or in their force of character and personality, or in their scholarship, than in any originality of educational idea. Moreover, if in the list of eminent and honourable names associated with the invention or development of a new educational system there is no name of a public school master, there are understandable reasons for the omission. The headmaster of a public school is not the irresponsible owner of his domain. He is the trustee of an inheritance and its traditions, hereditas non sine sacris.

Further, in a staff numbering anything from 20 to 50 masters, by whom the actual work is carried on, he has with him a proportion and often a majority of senior men. Men who have worked on certain lines for 20, 30 and even 40 years-capital teachers as many of them are, wise counsellors, devoted to the interests of their boys-nevertheless have neither inclination nor ability to change their method or their outlook. These form the senate of the scholastic State. And in educational politics as in other spheres it is the habit if not the function of a senate to modify the enthusiasms of a fresher blood. A third explanation of the staidness of our educational gait lies in this : a public school deals with pupils for some four or five years only at a critical age, thirteen to eighteen, when the great majority of parents are unwilling to submit their children to the hazard of experiment. With young children novel methods are freely tried; young men of eighteen and upwards have freedom of choice largely in their own hands. It is at these two periods that new movements can more readily be attempted, as the history of education in the last two decades shows; the public school must deal more gently and more cautiously with the more awkward age. A parent is at least as potent as a headmaster in determining the nature of a boy's education. And a parent's choice, in which the mother's influence is rightly predominant, is guided by a caution which may perhaps be not far removed from the virtue of prudence.

From what has been said let us recognise and admit the truth.. The public schools are not the growth of to-day or yesterday. Like States and individuals they have their history; their present and their future are conditioned by their past. You cannot exhibit the full-blown blossom of modernised ideas unless you start and man a completely new school. There was once a parable of new wine and old bottles; it is only if you pour slowly and pour wine from which the youthful exuberance is refined away, and do not try to fill too full, that the skins will hold. A public school may be progressive, it may grow in grace, it cannot be as though it had never been. Thus also it comes about that we are blamed by one set of people on the ground that we perpetuate class distinctions which are no longer desired, and there are others by whom this same characteristic, perhaps more fancied than real, is accounted one of our scanty merits, and for whom it provides a sufficient motive, whether implicit or avowed, for submitting their sons to the mercy of an institution

in which on other grounds they secretly cherish but little faith. But why, in the face of so much demerit, are the public schools more overcrowded than they have been at any time in their history? If the verdict against them on so many charges be one of at any rate limited condemnation, the sentence seems to have been pronounced by a strangely Gilbertian court. Several contributory causes are at work, some of them of a temporary character due to the unusual conditions of the last six years. What the increase in population has been since 1911 we must await the census returns next month to know. But whereas there will doubtless prove to have been at least a normal decennial growth, in spite of certain obvious counter-conditions, the normal provision of school accommodation throughout the country for public elementary and public secondary education, which was required in order to keep pace with a growing population, has not been made. Hence the overflow from public elementary schools has swelled the numbers of the public secondary schools. These in turn have passed on their surplus to the grammar schools and smaller public schools, and by a continuation of the process of pressure as it were from below the great public schools have expanded to their utmost limits. Together with this movement, which is a merely arithmetical one, there has developed in the country a real interest and belief in education. This is a happy awakening in our national life. The experiences of the war have brought home the reflection that education is power-power to live a fuller and nobler life—to thousands who in former days were indifferent or sceptical. Nor, I think, should we overlook the influence in the last few years exercised upon the popular imagination and understanding by the fact that for the first time in our annals the administration of public education is in the hands not of a politician, but of a practised educationist. At the same time many of those who valued scholastic training and wished to provide it for their sons in the best form that lay open to them have had unprecedented financial opportunity to gratify their wish. But this is not all. Public school education has been throughout the war, and still is, one of the few commodities that can be purchased at a cost considerably below the current standard of prices, in some cases indeed at a figure below its cost price. We are officially informed that prices a few weeks ago were 176 per cent. above the pre-war rate-a computation which perhaps included the cost of many things that nobody

buys! If public schools had yielded to the desire to raise their fees to meet this figure in any great degree, it would now be costing you about £500 a year to send your son to Eton, and over £300 to send him to Westminster. Unanimously the schools have refused to take that view of their duty in a time of national strain. School fees have been raised only to a degree that would enable schools to live. The average increase, as far as I have been able to gauge it, is not more than from 30 to 40 per cent. Schoolmasters have not sought to shift the rest of the burden on to other people's shoulders, but to bear it themselves. Schoolmastering is essentially a pastoral office, the obligations of which are understood and for the most part cheerfully accepted by those who enter upon it. But the labourer is not unworthy of his hire; and in spite of the cynic's remark in Mr. Mallock's New Republic that £60 a year is too much to give to your Curate and too little to give to your cook, there is another point of view. School fees as they stand are a large sum for parents to pay; they are a small sum for schools to receive. And what is the result? In mercantile terms the parents have been able to purchase education, since the price has not been allowed extravagantly to soar above their means, and in the educational labour market there are no unemployed.

But all these considerations are secondary. There is a profounder and more permanent cause of the continued existence and stability of the public schools. They would not be sought after unless they met, I will not dare to say satisfied, a real demand. There must be something in their educational and social system--for under these two heads the criticisms of them may most conveniently be discussed-which is worth having and which a modern democracy desires to have. What is this elusive something? To take these two things in the reverse order, ὕστερον πρότερον Ομηρικώς :

Consider first the position of the public schools as a social institution. Human beings associated in a State develop their institutions to give effect to their aspirations and ideas, some good, some bad; the institutions of any period are an index and an expression of the national character which has given them birth; and in turn they react upon the national character. Hence in the history of education one sees, for example, in ancient Athens the establishment and the reaction of an elaborate system of private day-schools aiming at a high degree of culture, quick wits, wide knowledge and critical taste, with

fees varying according to the social and pecuniary position of the parents and the caprice or necessity of the teacher. At Sparta, on the other hand, the aim was not the cultivation of the intellect, but of the physical courage and the moral character of a citizen soldier. Here was established the public boarding school, supported by the State, with prefects or monitors, housemasters, and a headmaster who was attended by a body of floggers. In this Spartan system the mind was neglected in favour of the body and of a modicum of specially selected moral qualities, among which the qualities of responsibility and honesty found no place. Here, in these two city States of antiquity we see contrasted the germs of two groups of features which, in our own system, are reproduced no longer in isolation or in antagonism, but in harmonious combination.

But not to pursue further this fascinating theme, which would take us too far afield, let us ask what, in England, is a public school. Strictly speaking, of course, it is not a public school at all, but just the opposite. It is an institution controlled not by any public authority but by a body of trustees or governors privately appointed under its particular deed or charter or other instrument. Hence in America its counterpart-Grotton, or St. Paul's-is more properly called a private school; the public school is the State school. Historically, however, the public school in England took its title, in days before the establishment of national education by law, from its distinction from the old local or grammar school. A public school drew its clientele from any part of the country far or near, and it took resident pupils either as scholars on its foundation or as commoners boarding under supervision authorised by itself. It served the locality, but was not merely a local school; it served the public at large, but was not limited by any public control. The system has grown apace in the course of five centuries, and particularly in the nineteenth century ancient foundations have been confirmed and enlarged, old local or grammar schools have been extended, refounded, re-endowed, new foundations have been established by royal benefactors, by the generosity of individuals and guilds, by the enterprise of masters and the public spirit of friends, until in 1920 on the roll of the Headmasters' Conference, which in a sense represents the public schools to-day, there stand the names of no less than 125 schools.

In these schools there are being educated some 43,000 boys. In the face of these figures, is that really a tenable view which