erfection of pedigree. English public-school boys are not pedants,
they are not torturers; and they are not, in the vast majority of
cases, people fiercely proud of their ancestry, or even people with any
ancestry to be proud of. They are taught to be courteous, to be good
tempered, to be brave in a bodily sense, to be clean in a bodily sense;
they are generally kind to animals, generally civil to servants, and to
anyone in any sense their equal, the jolliest companions on earth. Is
there then anything wrong in the public-school ideal? I think we all
feel there is something very wrong in it, but a blinding network of
newspaper phraseology obscures and entangles us; so that it is hard to
trace to its beginning, beyond all words and phrases, the faults in this
great English achievement.

Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English public
school is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of
telling the truth. I know there does still linger among maiden ladies
in remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to
tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment.
Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell
lies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the
obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a
lie. I may wear another man's coat, steal another man's wit, apostatize
to another man's creed, or poison another man's coffee, all without
ever telling a lie. But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the
truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the
truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about
whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can
be used on his "side" when he is engaged in "playing the game." He takes
sides in his Union debating society to settle whether Charles I ought to
have been killed, with the same solemn and pompous frivolity with
which he takes sides in the cricket field to decide whether Rugby or
Westminster shall win. He is never allowed to admit the abstract notion
of the truth, that the match is a matter of what may happen, but that
Charles I is a matter of what did happen--or did not. He is Liberal or
Tory at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the
boat race. He knows that sport deals with the unknown; he has not even a
notion that politics should deal w