ards the
white houses of Frascati, to learn a vast deal more about the Alban
hills and the site of Tusculum than ever you could mug up from all the
geography books in the British Museum. The way to learn every subject on
earth, even book-lore included, is not out of books alone, but by actual
observation.

And yet it is impossible for any one among us to do otherwise than
acquiesce in this vicious circle. Why? Just because no man can
dissociate himself outright from the social organism of which he forms a
component member. He can no more do so than the eye can dissociate
itself from the heart and lungs, or than the legs can shake themselves
free from the head and stomach. We have all to learn, and to let our
boys learn, what authority decides for us. We can't give them a better
education than the average, even if we know what it is and desire to
impart it, because the better education, though abstractly more
valuable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barred
with examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Not
what is of most real use and importance in life, but what "pays best" in
examination, is the test of desirability. We are the victims of a
system; and our only hope of redress is not by sporadic individual
action but by concerted rebellion. We must cry out against the abuse
till at last we are heard by dint of our much speaking. In a world so
complex and so highly organised as ours, the individual can only do
anything in the long run by influencing the mass--by securing the
co-operation of many among his fellows.

Meanwhile, I believe it is gradually becoming the fact that our girls,
who till lately were so very ill-taught, are beginning to know more of
what is really worth knowing than their public-school-bred brothers. For
the public school still goes on with the system of teaching it has
derived direct from the thirteenth century; while the girls' schools,
having started fair and fresh, are beginning to assimilate certain newer
ideas belonging to the seventeenth and even the eighteenth. In time they
may conceivably come down to the more elementary notions of the present
generation. Less hampered by professions and examinations than the boys,
the girls are beginning to know something now, not indeed of the
universe in which they live, its laws and its properties, but of
literature and history, and the principal facts about human development.
Yet all the time, the boys go on