ucational methods pursued, their aimless disconnectedness from the
constructive forces in the community. I suppose if we are to view the
public school as anything more than an institution that has just chanced
to happen, we must treat it as having a definite function towards the
general scheme of the nation, as being in a sense designed to take the
crude young male of the more or less responsible class, to correct
his harsh egotisms, broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the
contemporary developments he will presently be called upon to influence
and control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and
ruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and set up
for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is impossible not
to feel how infinitely more effectually--given certain impossibilities
perhaps--the job might be done.

My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of
elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about me
was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic forces, that
filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that stirred my imagination
to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school not only offered no key
to it, but had practically no comment to make upon it at all. We were
within three miles of Westminster and Charing Cross, the government
offices of a fifth of mankind were all within an hour's stroll, great
economic changes were going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamed
with election placards, now the Salvation Army and now the unemployed
came trailing in procession through the winter-grey streets, now the
newspaper placards outside news-shops told of battles in strange places,
now of amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and
poverty, imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row,
Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling
costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was the
background of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and through
the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all these things.
We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was necessary for Greek
epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest played games. We dipped down
into something clear and elegantly proportioned and time-worn and for
all its high resolve of stalwart virility a little feeble, like our
blackened and decayed portals by Inigo Jones