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If you go into an English village you find three great public institutions, the Church, the Inn, and the School. Each is licensed to some extent by the State and each is burdened by the connection. You find as a rule that the Church has voluntarily locked its doors and put up a notice that the key may be found at some old lady’s cottage half a mile away. You go into the Inn and find it struggling to make itself hospitable in spite of the mismanagement of brewers and the unsympathetic bigotry of magistrates. But from the door of the School troop out merry children, who some day will look back to that time of their life as the happiest of all, and who will recognise the debt of gratitude they are under to the schoolmaster, who in spite of the limitations of his system and himself encourages his pupils to effort and self-reliance and teaches them lessons of duty, reverence, and love.

I am not greatly interested in the Church or the Inn, both of which institutions seem well able to guard themselves from the disestablishment they are said to deserve. But I am interested in the School—and I wish to see it housed in fairer and more ample buildings with larger playing fields around them. And I want to see a race of schoolmasters not only better paid—but worth more. Men and women to whom the State can fairly give a free hand, knowing that their object in education would be to mould their pupils into self-reliant citizens rather than to teach them scholastic tricks. “The schoolmaster is abroad,” said Lord Brougham, “and I trust to him armed with his primer.” For my part, a schoolmaster armed with a primer is an abomination of desolation standing in a holy place. I differ from a Lord Chancellor with a very natural diffidence but his Lordship was wrong. The schoolmaster of 1828 was not abroad, he was in the same predicament as the schoolmaster of 1911—at sea.