y.

Touching the morality of the public schools, I will take one point only,
which is enough to prove the case. People have got into their heads an
extraordinary idea that English public-school boys and English youth
generally are taught to tell the truth. They are taught absolutely
nothing of the kind. At no English public school is it even suggested,
except by accident, that it is a man's duty to tell the truth. What is
suggested is something entirely different: that it is a man's duty not
to tell lies. So completely does this mistake soak through all
civilisation that we hardly ever think even of the difference between
the two things. When we say to a child, "You must tell the truth," we do
merely mean that he must refrain from verbal inaccuracies. But the thing
we never teach at all is the general duty of telling the truth, of
giving a complete and fair picture of anything we are talking about, of
not misrepresenting, not evading, not suppressing, not using plausible
arguments that we know to be unfair, not selecting unscrupulously to
prove an _ex parte_ case, not telling all the nice stories about the
Scotch, and all the nasty stories about the Irish, not pretending to be
disinterested when you are really angry, not pretending to be angry when
you are really only avaricious. The one thing that is never taught by
any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is exactly that--that
there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it
we are happy.

If any one has the smallest doubt of this neglect of truth in public
schools he can kill his doubt with one plain question. Can any one on
earth believe that if the seeing and telling of the whole truth were
really one of the ideals of the English governing class, there could
conceivably exist such a thing as the English party system? Why, the
English party system is founded upon the principle that telling the
whole truth does not matter. It is founded upon the principle that half
a truth is better than no politics. Our system deliberately turns a
crowd of men who might be impartial into irrational partisans. It
teaches some of them to tell lies and all of them to believe lies. It
gives every man an arbitrary brief that he has to work up as best he may
and defend as best he can. It turns a room full of citizens into a room
full of barristers. I know that it has many charms and virtues, fighting
and good-fellowship; it has all the charms and virtues of