ospital.

*****

XII. THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS

For this deep and disabling reason therefore, its cynical and abandoned
indifference to the truth, the English public school does not provide
us with the ideal that we require. We can only ask its modern critics
to remember that right or wrong the thing can be done; the factory is
working, the wheels are going around, the gentlemen are being produced,
with their soap, cricket and organized charity all complete. And in
this, as we have said before, the public school really has an advantage
over all the other educational schemes of our time. You can pick out a
public-school man in any of the many companies into which they stray,
from a Chinese opium den to a German Jewish dinner-party. But I doubt
if you could tell which little match girl had been brought up by
undenominational religion and which by secular education. The great
English aristocracy which has ruled us since the Reformation is really,
in this sense, a model to the moderns. It did have an ideal, and
therefore it has produced a reality.

We may repeat here that these pages propose mainly to show one thing:
that progress ought to be based on principle, while our modern progress
is mostly based on precedent. We go, not by what may be affirmed in
theory, but by what has been already admitted in practice. That is why
the Jacobites are the last Tories in history with whom a high-spirited
person can have much sympathy. They wanted a specific thing; they were
ready to go forward for it, and so they were also ready to go back for
it. But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations
that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a
reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform
the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry of
armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties
is only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men have votes, so women must soon
have votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed
by force; the police shut public houses by twelve o'clock, so soon they
must shut them by eleven o'clock; children stop at school till they
are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of
reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of
any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of
mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prev