at once rich and somber, does suggest a
triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy. But the factory girl does not
intend her hat to express a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy;
far from it. White ermine was meant to express moral purity; white
waistcoats were not. Gold lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity; gold
watch chains do not. The point is not that we have lost the material
hues, but that we have lost the trick of turning them to the best
advantage. We are not like children who have lost their paint box and
are left alone with a gray lead-pencil. We are like children who have
mixed all the colors in the paint-box together and lost the paper of
instructions. Even then (I do not deny) one has some fun.

Now this abundance of colors and loss of a color scheme is a pretty
perfect parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals and
especially with our modern education. It is the same with ethical
education, economic education, every sort of education. The growing
London child will find no lack of highly controversial teachers who
will teach him that geography means painting the map red; that economics
means taxing the foreigner, that patriotism means the peculiarly
un-English habit of flying a flag on Empire Day. In mentioning these
examples specially I do not mean to imply that there are no similar
crudities and popular fallacies upon the other political side. I mention
them because they constitute a very special and arresting feature of the
situation. I mean this, that there were always Radical revolutionists;
but now there are Tory revolutionists also. The modern Conservative
no longer conserves. He is avowedly an innovator. Thus all the current
defenses of the House of Lords which describe it as a bulwark against
the mob, are intellectually done for; the bottom has fallen out of them;
because on five or six of the most turbulent topics of the day, the
House of Lords is a mob itself; and exceedingly likely to behave like
one.

*****

IX. THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS

Through all this chaos, then we come back once more to our main
conclusion. The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expansion,
but very decidedly of selection--and rejection. The educationist must
find a creed and teach it. Even if it be not a theological creed, it
must still be as fastidious and as firm as theology. In short, it must
be orthodox. The teacher may think it antiquated to have to decide
precisely between the fait