ith the known. If anyone really
doubts this self-evident proposition, that the public schools definitely
discourage the love of truth, there is one fact which I should think
would settle him. England is the country of the Party System, and it
has always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone out
of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its
conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by people
particularly fond of truth?

The very English happiness on this point is itself a hypocrisy. When a
man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself
is a liar. David said in his haste, that is, in his honesty, that
all men are liars. It was afterwards, in some leisurely official
explanation, that he said the Kings of Israel at least told the truth.
When Lord Curzon was Viceroy he delivered a moral lecture to the Indians
on their reputed indifference to veracity, to actuality and intellectual
honor. A great many people indignantly discussed whether orientals
deserved to receive this rebuke; whether Indians were indeed in a
position to receive such severe admonition. No one seemed to ask, as I
should venture to ask, whether Lord Curzon was in a position to give
it. He is an ordinary party politician; a party politician means a
politician who might have belonged to either party. Being such a person,
he must again and again, at every twist and turn of party strategy,
either have deceived others or grossly deceived himself. I do not know
the East; nor do I like what I know. I am quite ready to believe that
when Lord Curzon went out he found a very false atmosphere. I only say
it must have been something startlingly and chokingly false if it was
falser than that English atmosphere from which he came. The English
Parliament actually cares for everything except veracity. The
public-school man is kind, courageous, polite, clean, companionable;
but, in the most awful sense of the words, the truth is not in him.

This weakness of untruthfulness in the English public schools, in the
English political system, and to some extent in the English
character, is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop of
superstitions, of lying legends, of evident delusions clung to through
low spiritual self-indulgence. There are so many of these public-school
superstitions that I have here only space for one of them, which may be
called the superstition of soap. It appears to have