has been,
ought to be. Similarly, no doubt, teachers all over France and
Germany have been teaching--under the guise of grammar, arithmetic,
what not--_their_ ideas of what France or Germany has been, is, ought
to be. These nations are opposed and at length they come to a direct
conflict, in this War. Mark you what happens! At once we patient
teachers in England are brushed all aside. You call a chance
Committee of amateurs, and the man who has taught the boys whom,
within a fortnight, you will be clamouring to fight for you, has not
even the honour to be consulted. . . . Yes, I think well enough of
Great Britain to be pretty confident that she will win, letting us
slip; that is, she will win though fighting with a hand tied.
But Germany is no such fool. _She_ won't, in her hour of need,
despise the help of her teachers. They teach what is almost
diametrically opposed to our teaching: they teach it thoroughly, and
on my soul I believe it to be as nearly opposed as wrong can be to
right. But they have the honour to be trusted; therefore they will
succeed in making this war a long one. . . . Yes, I have a wall-map,
sir, of the human body. It does not belong to the school: I bought
it on my own account seven years ago, but the then Managers
considered it too naked to hang on the walls of a mixed school, and
disallowed the expense. You are very welcome to use it, and I am
only glad that at length it will serve a purpose."

"Touchy lot, these school-teachers!" mused Dr Mant on his way back
to the town. "I never can like 'em, somehow. . . . Maybe I ought to
have used a little tact and told him that, as I understood it, Mrs
Steele called the meeting; and it was for women-workers only.
That wouldn't quite account for Farmer Best though," he chuckled.
"And I suppose Best and the Vicar, as Managers--yes, and Mrs
Pamphlett's another--just put their heads together on the spot and
gave leave to use the schoolroom, without consulting the Head Teacher
at all. I don't suppose it ever crossed their minds. . . . No: on
the whole that poor little man is right. Nobody in England ever
_does_ take any truck in schoolmasters. They're just left out of
account. And I dare say--yes: I dare say--that means we don't, as a
people, take any real truck in Education. Well, and who's the worse
for it?--barring the teachers themselves, poor devils! Germany has
taken the other line, put herself in the hands of pedagogues, from
the