mazing revelation and a dangerous shock, ending possibly in the
discovery that the marriage has been an irreparable mistake. Nothing can
justify such a risk. There may be people incapable of understanding that
the right to know all there is to know about oneself is a natural human
right that sweeps away all the pretences of others to tamper with one's
consciousness in order to produce what they choose to consider a good
character. But they must here bow to the plain mischievousness of
entrapping people into contracts on which the happiness of their whole
lives depends without letting them know what they are undertaking.

Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools

There is just one more nuisance to be disposed of before I come to
the positive side of my case. I mean the person who tells me that
my schooldays belong to a bygone order of educational ideas and
institutions, and that schools are not now a bit like my old school.
I reply, with Sir Walter Raleigh, by calling on my soul to give this
statement the lie. Some years ago I lectured in Oxford on the subject
of Education. A friend to whom I mentioned my intention said, "You know
nothing of modern education: schools are not now what they were when
you were a boy." I immediately procured the time sheets of half a dozen
modern schools, and found, as I expected, that they might all have been
my old school: there was no real difference. I may mention, too, that
I have visited modern schools, and observed that there is a tendency to
hang printed pictures in an untidy and soulless manner on the walls,
and occasionally to display on the mantel-shelf a deplorable glass case
containing certain objects which might possibly, if placed in the hands
of the pupils, give them some practical experience of the weight of
a pound and the length of an inch. And sometimes a scoundrel who has
rifled a bird's nest or killed a harmless snake encourages the children
to go and do likewise by putting his victims into an imitation nest and
bottle and exhibiting them as aids to "Nature study." A suggestion that
Nature is worth study would certainly have staggered my schoolmasters;
so perhaps I may admit a gleam of progress here. But as any child who
attempted to handle these dusty objects would probably be caned, I do
not attach any importance to such modernities in school furniture.
The school remains what it was in my boyhood, because its real object
remains what it was. And that object, I repea