at the true sportsman is never a snob, a coward,
a duffer, a cheat, a thief, or a liar. Curious, is it not, that he has
not the same confidence in other sorts of man?

And even sport is losing its freedom. Soon everybody will be schooled,
mentally and physically, from the cradle to the end of the term of adult
compulsory military service, and finally of compulsory civil service
lasting until the age of superannuation. Always more schooling, more
compulsion. We are to be cured by an excess of the dose that has
poisoned us. Satan is to cast out Satan.

Under the Whip

Clearly this will not do. We must reconcile education with liberty.
We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need be,
warriors, without making them slaves. We must cultivate the noble
virtues that have their root in pride. Now no schoolmaster will teach
these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how to
mutiny and escape. Self-preservation forces him to break the spirit
that revolts against him, and to inculcate submission, even to obscene
assault, as a duty. A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he would
rather see England free than England sober. Nobody has yet dared to say
that he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than an England of
cowards and slaves. And if anyone did, it would be necessary to point
out that the antithesis is not a practical one, as we have got at
present an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves, and
extremely proud of it at that, because in school they are taught to
submit, with what they ridiculously call Oriental fatalism (as if any
Oriental has ever submitted more helplessly and sheepishly to robbery
and oppression than we Occidentals do), to be driven day after day into
compounds and set to the tasks they loathe by the men they hate and
fear, as if this were the inevitable destiny of mankind. And naturally,
when they grow up, they helplessly exchange the prison of the school for
the prison of the mine or the workshop or the office, and drudge along
stupidly and miserably, with just enough gregarious instinct to turn
furiously on any intelligent person who proposes a change. It would be
quite easy to make England a paradise, according to our present ideas,
in a few years. There is no mystery about it: the way has been pointed
out over and over again. The difficulty is not the way but the will. And
we have no will because the first thing done with us in child