s written all
the earliest and, Heaven knows, the most heroic history of the Radical
party. Why should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very word democrat
is Greek?

A similar mistake, though a less serious one, is merely attacking
the athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism and
brutality. Now brutality, in the only immoral sense, is not a vice of
the English public schools. There is much moral bullying, owing to the
general lack of moral courage in the public-school atmosphere. These
schools do, upon the whole, encourage physical courage; but they do not
merely discourage moral courage, they forbid it. The ultimate result
of the thing is seen in the egregious English officer who cannot even
endure to wear a bright uniform except when it is blurred and hidden
in the smoke of battle. This, like all the affectations of our present
plutocracy, is an entirely modern thing. It was unknown to the old
aristocrats. The Black Prince would certainly have asked that any knight
who had the courage to lift his crest among his enemies, should also
have the courage to lift it among his friends. As regards moral courage,
then it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as
that they suppress it firmly. But physical courage they do, on the
whole, support; and physical courage is a magnificent fundamental. The
one great, wise Englishman of the eighteenth century said truly that if
a man lost that virtue he could never be sure of keeping any other. Now
it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage is
connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and Kiplingite are nowhere more at
one than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some small sectarian
quarrel with each other, the one saying that courage must be abandoned
because it is connected with cruelty, and the other maintaining that
cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage. But it is all,
thank God, a lie. An energy and boldness of body may make a man stupid
or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does not make him
spiteful. And we may admit heartily (without joining in that perpetual
praise which public-school men are always pouring upon themselves) that
this does operate to the removal of mere evil cruelty in the public
schools. English public school life is extremely like English public
life, for which it is the preparatory school. It is like it specially in
this, that things are either very open, common and co