be flogged, and
unjustly flogged, than have his adventure story taken away.

*****

VII. THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

In short, the new education is as harsh as the old, whether or no it is
as high. The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff with
authority. It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that
they are forbidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, that
the boy would think so. The average boy's impression certainly would
be simply this: "If your father is a Methodist you must not play with
soldiers on Sunday. If your father is a Socialist you must not play
with them even on week days." All educationists are utterly dogmatic and
authoritarian. You cannot have free education; for if you left a child
free you would not educate him at all. Is there, then, no distinction
or difference between the most hide-bound conventionalists and the most
brilliant and bizarre innovators? Is there no difference between the
heaviest heavy father and the most reckless and speculative maiden aunt?
Yes; there is. The difference is that the heavy father, in his heavy
way, is a democrat. He does not urge a thing merely because to his
fancy it should be done; but, because (in his own admirable republican
formula) "Everybody does it." The conventional authority does claim some
popular mandate; the unconventional authority does not. The Puritan who
forbids soldiers on Sunday is at least expressing Puritan opinion;
not merely his own opinion. He is not a despot; he is a democracy, a
tyrannical democracy, a dingy and local democracy perhaps; but one that
could do and has done the two ultimate virile things--fight and appeal
to God. But the veto of the new educationist is like the veto of
the House of Lords; it does not pretend to be representative. These
innovators are always talking about the blushing modesty of Mrs. Grundy.
I do not know whether Mrs. Grundy is more modest than they are; but I am
sure she is more humble.

But there is a further complication. The more anarchic modern may again
attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education should only be
an enlargement of the mind, an opening of all the organs of receptivity.
Light (he says) should be brought into darkness; blinded and thwarted
existences in all our ugly corners should merely be permitted to
perceive and expand; in short, enlightenment should be shed over
darkest London. Now here is just the trouble; that, in so fa