differences of opinion as there were concerned only questions of method and expediency, not questions of principle. The "gospel" of August, 1914, had not yet become a battle-ground disputed by fiercely earnest rival sects. We were Liberals in a general sense, but we differed on a great many topics, and we were genuinely anxious, in the words of one of our pupils in the school magazine, "not so much to advocate any one particular remedy of any given problem as to lay before the class the problems themselves and the principal reforms which have been or are being suggested, so that thought and criticism may have full scope for exercise." It would be unfair to ourselves to admit that we abandoned that ideal, but the events of 1917 brought a new spirit into the world. On the one hand, the early days of the Russian Revolution and the demand for a peace "without annexations or indemnities," coupled with the entry of America and the war speeches of President Wilson, seemed to revive the flagging idealism of the Allies and lift it to a more universal and exalted level than ever before. On the other hand, the publication of the Secret Treaties and the many incomplete revelations that followed thereon, laid bare the fact that quite another act of motives were also at work among our leaders; that territorial greed and diplomatic hypocrisy were enemies to be fought in our own midst as well as on the battlefield. The issues of the war assumed a grander and a more terrible aspect. More than ever before perhaps in the history of the world—and we do not overlook the period of the so-called religious wars—religion and politics fused. To us, at any rate, the calm aloofness suggested by the quotation above became impossible. A cry seemed to have gone forth, "Who is on the Lord's side? Who?" A great gulf opened up between those who only a year before had believed themselves to be for the time at any rate in one political camp. On one side of that gulf we found ourselves, and on the other most of our colleagues. It was not that we differed from them as to the necessity of winning the war, and of putting forward every possible military effort for that end. But everything depends on the uses to which the victory is put, and the spirit in which it is approached, and there the differences were profound.

And thus the Politics Class became a school of liberalism.[1] It was no intolerant liberalism, for intolerant liberalism is not liberalism at all. From first to last we stood for the examination of all points of view. We were for reading the views of those we disagreed with, not for abusing them unheard or burning their books unread. In so far as some of our pupils carried liberalism to the point of intolerance, they lost the spirit of the movement they professed to support. There were not many against whom this charge could be brought. One of our most ardent democrats, I remember, sent me during the time of his military training a careful and painstaking examination of Mr. Mallock's latest big book. The excuse of those that fell into intolerance must be, I suppose, that they were young, and that they found themselves confronted by an astonishing spectacle of intolerance in some of their "conservative" masters.

When this change was taking place, we sought to redress the balance by taking into partnership in the running of the Politics Class a strongly Conservative master. Such an arrangement would have been admirable had the genuine educational spirit been there. It was not. The overture was a failure and only added to our difficulties. To some men it seemed better to root out the Liberal masters as "traitors" than to co-operate with them as teachers.

On the eve of the final collapse, a similar experiment was tried with The School Observer. The last number bears the names of two "editors," and contains both a Liberal and a Conservative "leader" written on the same topic. The innovation was made at the last minute, and the Conservative "leader" is not a genuine schoolboy production, but the model may be a useful one for future work on the same lines.

But there was another influence making for the collapse. We quoted in our previous book a head master who remarked at a school prize-giving that the only questions worth asking are those that cannot get a definite answer. Political education consists almost entirely of such questions. Its sheet anchor is freedom of thought; its method is controversy; its end is not in complete mastery of a box of intellectual tricks such as will win full marks in an examination, but in the modesty of realised ignorance and the enthusiastic search for fresh lights in the darkness. Socrates was put to death by the Athenians because he would not desist from asking them questions, and it is to be feared that some of our pupils would have incurred the same fate had the customs of the time permitted it. The taste for controversy on the fundamental subjects will grip a youth like the taste for drink, as many who have passed through undergraduate days at Oxford or Cambridge can remember. Suppose a boy enters into political controversy with his form master, over the| giving back of an essay, or with his house master at the luncheon table….

Now, there is a Divinity that doth hedge a schoolmaster, and the hedge must be kept in somewhat careful repair. So long as we are concerned with subjects like elementary Latin and Greek or Mathematics, we are dealing with a body of knowledge in which, to take the examinations standard, all the masters get full marks. All knowledge is contained in a set of small school books which the masters, for their sins, know more or less by heart backwards. Even history, if it is sufficiently badly taught, may be grouped among such subjects, for, strange as it may seem, it is quite possible to teach it in such a way that no boy feels impelled to ask questions either insoluble in themselves or beyond the scope of the master's immediate memory. There are schoolmasters who definitely discourage or even forbid the asking of questions by the class. "Little boys should be seen and not heard"—that worst of all educational maxims—makes a larger contribution to the buttressing up of the present system than is usually supposed. A lowering diet of irregular verbs keeps the boy mind "docile," to use a word of ironically perverted meaning, and prevents it from impinging embarrassingly upon the lightly guarded regions of the master's intellectual entrenchments. In fact, political education set up a new intellectual standard. It was a subject in which no one, boy or master, got "full marks,"—scarcely even President Wilson, perhaps, if you took his "work" as a whole! All were learners, all were fellow workers together, and before the vast scope of the task, differences of proficiency between the various workers seemed hardly to matter.

Here, then, rises a difficult question. Ought the schoolmaster to possess, or appear to possess, complete knowledge of the subject he teaches? The present writer has taught a good variety of subjects during nine years, and on the whole he has found his ignorance, not only of politics, but of far more finite matters, a very helpful educational instrument. As an emergency teacher of Latin on the modern side, for instance, he found it a positive advantage that he had forgotten more of the language than his pupils had ever learnt. His occasional quaint errors did not always pass undetected, and their detection had probably an educational stimulus for the form which outweighed the loss incurred when his mistakes passed without notice. Nor did he feel greatly the loss of intellectual stature. It was partly made good by the ingenuity with which he explained how he had come to make the mistake. And if there was loss in intellectual prestige, there was an increased sense of intellectual comradeship. But this is a trifling and not wholly serious digression.

Some masters stand for