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But a broken spirit drieth the bones.”

Proverbs xvii., 22.

The Professors of dry bones have broken so many spirits in their machine that they will not grudge me a laugh at their little failings. A mere “man in the street” like myself can do little more than call attention to some of the weaknesses of our educational system, well understanding that the earnest Schoolmaster knows far more about the disadvantages of education than anything he can learn from his surviving pupils. For my part I have never made any secret of the fact that from my earliest days I disliked education, and had a natural, and I hope not unhealthy, distrust of schoolmasters. Let it here be understood with the greatest respect to the sex that “schoolmaster” embraces “schoolmistress.” Most school-boys that I remember have had that attitude of mind, but many remained so long in scholastic cloisters that the sane belief of their youth, that the schoolmaster was their natural enemy, became diminished and was ultimately lost altogether. Indeed, there are few minds that undergo the strain of years of toil among scholastic persons without becoming dulled into the respectable belief that schoolmasters are in themselves desirable social assets, like priests and policemen and judges. Now no small boy with a healthy mind believes this. He knows that the schoolmaster and the policeman are merely evidences of an imperfect social system, that no progress is likely to be made until society is able to dispense with their services, and though he cannot put these ideas into words he can and does act upon that assumption, and continues to do so until his natural alertness is destroyed and he is dragooned into at all events an outward observance of the official belief in the sanctity of schoolmasters.