slowly and
painfully no doubt, but none the less inevitably, will war, poverty,
and materialism vanish altogether from a world not meant for them.
That is why we have ventured to urge all those who both are idealists
and love the public schools--but those alone--to break in on them and
help to awaken the great sleeping instrument of salvation.

And they will find good material awaiting them. The English public
school boy shares with all the youth of all the nations an immense
store of latent idealism, which can be brought to a splendid fruition
if atrophy and decay are not allowed to overtake it. But he possesses
other things also, over and above this common heritage. The
intellectualist has often got beyond the big ideas, if such a paradox
may be allowed; they have been for so long the platitudes of his caste,
and he has grown so hopeless of their general acceptance, that he has
turned to a search after subtle refinements and intellectual novelties,
in the course of which much generous breadth of vision has been lost.
Again, many working-class reformers--can it be wondered?--not only
bring to their task a bitterness against the world which has so misused
them and their fellows, but also have inevitably been cut off from
those gentle manners of life which have been gradually evolved by the
more fortunate to express, however imperfectly, the feeling for grace
and beauty which it should be our aim, not to crush, but to extend to
all. But with the public school boy all is different. Once he has
begun to think in any real sense of the word, his intellectual life
develops as joyfully and naturally as does the physical life of the
beasts of the field. Freshly and spontaneously, and with no trace of
self-consciousness or affectation, he leaps to greet ideas and
principles, between which and his own true nature there is a glorious
bond of kinship. We have seen boy after boy, as he realises, for
instance, the meaning of Liberty, and gets his first glimpse of the
wide country which such a realisation opens up, experiencing an emotion
of happiness which we can only compare to the catch of breath with
which men see great scenes of beauty, or hear of lovely deeds of
generosity and heroism. Given their chance, public school boys (not
one or two, but great masses of average humanity) will rediscover for
themselves the simple things which Christ and Plato taught; and once
that is achieved a general advance all along the line to