hat has not flown away, what is a
fixed fact in Europe, is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the idea
of a land full of mere citizens all with some minimum of manners and
minimum of wealth, the vision of the eighteenth century, the reality
of the twentieth. So I think it will generally be with the creator of
social things, desirable or undesirable. All his schemes will fail,
all his tools break in his hands. His compromises will collapse, his
concessions will be useless. He must brace himself to bear his fate; he
shall have nothing but his heart's desire.

Now if one may compare very small things with very great, one may say
that the English aristocratic schools can claim something of the same
sort of success and solid splendor as the French democratic politics.
At least they can claim the same sort of superiority over the distracted
and fumbling attempts of modern England to establish democratic
education. Such success as has attended the public schoolboy throughout
the Empire, a success exaggerated indeed by himself, but still positive
and a fact of a certain indisputable shape and size, has been due to the
central and supreme circumstance that the managers of our public schools
did know what sort of boy they liked. They wanted something and they
got something; instead of going to work in the broad-minded manner and
wanting everything and getting nothing.

The only thing in question is the quality of the thing they got. There
is something highly maddening in the circumstance that when modern
people attack an institution that really does demand reform, they always
attack it for the wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of our public
schools, imagining themselves to be very democratic, have exhausted
themselves in an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek. I can
understand how Greek may be regarded as useless, especially by those
thirsting to throw themselves into the cut throat commerce which is
the negation of citizenship; but I do not understand how it can be
considered undemocratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie has
a hatred of Greek. It is obscurely founded on the firm and sound
impression that in any self-governing Greek city he would have been
killed. But I cannot comprehend why any chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch,
or Mr. Will Crooks, I or Mr. John M. Robertson, should be opposed to
people learning the Greek alphabet, which was the alphabet of liberty.
Why should Radicals dislike Greek? In that language i