ne of youth, may be encouraged by this putting down of
milestones, and may almost believe that we have moved in the right
direction. Whereas, to those optimists who are cheerfully and
unhesitatingly educating their allotted prey of children, it may be as
salutary, as a cautionary story, to realise that the same optimism ruled
one hundred years ago, when the Eton latin grammar was a symbol to
innumerable complacent schoolmasters of what was best in the best of all
possible worlds. But the chief part of what I have to say is
autobiographical, and I have only an occasional remark to make on the
progress and improvement that have occurred in education.

My ignorance of educational methods may probably lead me to repeat what
is well known; because what seems to me bad in my training has doubtless
been recognised as such by modern teachers, nor can I hope to have
anything very new to say about what seems to me to have been good.

As children, we, my brothers and sisters, were treated by our parents in
a way the very reverse of the pitiless 18th and early 19th century
manner--the spirit of those surprising stories such as the _Purple Jar_,
where the child is deceived by her abominable parent. In fact, a chief
characteristic of our parents' treatment of us was their respect for our
liberty and our personality. We were made to feel that we were
"creatures whose opinions and thoughts were valuable to them."

The happy relations with our elders which we enjoyed in the holidays to
some extent counteracted the evil effects of going to school. The worst
of a boarding-school is that it is a republic of children, where the
citizens are saturated in the traditions and conventions peculiar to
themselves, and are, for more than half their lives, deprived of the
saner ideals of grown-up people. Before we went to school we were taught
by governesses. I cannot help wishing that we had had foreign teachers
who would have taught us to speak their language--a thing that can be
done so easily in childhood. I have never got over the want of fluent
French and German, and I resent the fact that I should be condemned to
feel like a child or a boor in the presence of foreigners. We are taught
Latin and Greek because, as we are assured, they introduce us to the
finest literature in the world. To most boys they do nothing of the
kind, and are an intolerable burden. French and German taught by the
oral methods really do introduce us to whole