Twenty years ago a father said to his son, who had just come down from Oxford with a batting average of 35.7: 'For ten years, my boy, you have been playing cricket all through the summer at my expense. You can now either come into my business and play first-class cricket during your month's holiday in August, or, if you want to continue to play cricket all through the season, you can go down to the Oval and apply to be taken on as a professional.' The moral, the obvious moral, that is to say, is admirable. And the elderly gentleman whom I overheard repeating this story in the pavilion, leant back in his seat and affirmed proudly, though with a deep sense of the passage of good things, that it was in such a spirit that the game had been played when he was young. 'That's what cricket meant to the Studds, the Lyttletons, the Fosters. We didn't have any of these amateur professionals, none of these fine fellows who get found soft jobs by their county committees. What's the difference, I should like to know, between the fellow who gets paid five pounds a match and the fellow who is presented with the directorship of a ladies' corset factory at a comfortable salary, and who has only to go to the office once a week to sign his name in the directors' attendance book?' The elderly gentleman shrugged his shoulders with disgust.
He was quite right, of course. There are too many cricketers who make as much money out of the game as any professional, yet are entitled to put initials before their name upon the score card. And the father was quite right when he insisted on the industry of his son. He was none the less right because things probably failed to turn out as they had been planned. They rarely do. We can guess what happened.
For a year the son worked hard. During his month's holiday he made a couple of centuries in first-class cricket, and various papers commenting on this achievement expressed their regret that so promising a cricketer should only be available in August. It is needless to add that the other members of the family saw to it that these references did not escape the attention of their father. Next season the county started so well, that by the end of May it stood at the head of the championship, and the young financier was entreated to turn out for the Yorkshire match in the middle of June. On such an occasion parental discipline was naturally relaxed. And an innings of 87 on a tricky wicket was followed by an invitation to play for the Gentlemen at Lords. Parental pride was flattered. Next season the same thing happened, only more frequently. There was, in fact, an understanding that he was available for all the important matches, and very soon not only the fixtures with Middlesex, Kent, and Surrey, came to be regarded as important, but also those with Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Worcester. Indeed, in five years' time the son found himself playing county cricket steadily from May to August and as an amateur. Things happen like that. Still the pact, as the elderly gentleman in the pavilion asserted, had been made in the right spirit. And it was, after all, a family affair.
But the fine distinction between the amateur and the amateur professional is defined only by the obvious moral to this story, and the subtler moral had passed unnoticed by the elderly reactionary in the pavilion. A young man, twenty-three years of age, has been expensively educated for some ten to twelve years. And he is faced at the end of his education, when it is assumed, that is to say, that he is equipped with the knowledge and trained ability that will enable him to take up that portion of the world's work for which he is best fitted, with two alternatives. Either he can go into his father's business, or else he can lose his caste and sign on as a professional cricketer. It occurred neither to the father nor to the son nor to the elderly gentleman who repeated the story in the pavilion that any other alternative was possible, or, indeed, desirable. The son was not in a position to say to his father: 'Of course I wouldn't become a pro. But I'm really not keen on your business. I shouldn't be a success at it. I'd rather do something else.' He could not say that, because there was nothing else for him to do. Six years earlier he could have gone to Sandhurst. If he had worked harder at school he might possibly have passed into the Egyptian civil service. It is possible that his blue would have obtained for him a schoolmastership, but his gulf in mods, would have limited his choice of schools. And the prospects of a junior master at a second-rate Public School are not inviting. So, whatever his own inclinations might have been, he had to accept his father's offer. It is here that we find the true moral of the story; and we ask ourselves whether this young man was, in spite of his ten years at Oxford and at a Public School, really educated. He had learnt how to make centuries in county cricket, and he had acquired a certain quantity of uncorrelated information. But he had not developed the ability to perform properly the type of work for which he was best fitted, nor, indeed, had he discovered what that type of work might be. As likely as not his father's business was the last that he should have chosen. We all react from our surroundings, and he had probably become heartily sick of his father's particular form of 'shop.' He had so often sat wearily at the dinner table, fingering his bread, piling the salt into pyramids on the edge of the cruet, while his father had explained to his mother the minute details of his latest deal. 'You see, my dear, I bought in at twenty-six....' Of all hideous employments the buying and selling of shares had seemed to him the weariest. And yet there was nothing for him but to accept a desk beside a telephone with the files of the Financial News spread out before him.
He can have brought no enthusiasm to his work. Out of a sense of duty, and in order to improve his own position, he may have worked hard during the winter months, but he must have worked without pleasure, with his work not as an end but as a means.
Yet nothing in a man's life is of more importance than his profession. If he does not enjoy his work he values too highly the privileges that success in it will bring to him. He asks too much of his private life, and if he is disappointed, he embarks on a desperate search for pleasure. Half of the discontent of modern life, the discontent that expresses itself in endless parties, dances, and entertainments, can be traced to the reactions of men and women engaged in uncongenial employment. And so we return again to that first question. Can we call a man educated who has not discovered in what capacity he is most likely to be of service to society, or who, having discovered it, has not taken steps to qualify himself for that profession. That, in a sentence, is the case against the English Public School. A system stands or falls by its products.
And it is only natural that parents who are not particularly well off, and who have no private business into which they can draft their children, should ask themselves whether or not a public school education is worth the considerable personal sacrifice that will be entailed if their sons are to be sent to Wellington, Clifton, or Uppingham. 'We want to do the best for Tommy,' they say. 'But after spending £250 a year on him for five years what do we get in return? Tommy is not clever enough to pass into the civil service; he may get a mastership on a salary only slightly better than that of a Metropolitan policeman. Is it worth it?' When the head master to whom these doubts are carried, commences to enlarge on the moral qualities that are revealed and strengthened by 'the honest give and take of public school life,' the parent is still unsatisfied. 'Are you quite sure?' they say. 'Of course we know it's all exaggerated, but where there's smoke, you know, and one has heard....' Is it surprising that under such circumstances the mandarins of the public school profession should have erected a barricade of prejudice between themselves and criticism. Their maintenance is at stake. They have to persuade the parent that he is getting his money's worth. Otherwise he will send his son to a day school, or, worse still, to some pension in Rome or Brussels.
And so it has happened that any critic of the Public Schools is immediately driven into a false position. For so long the Public Schools have been accepted with an unquestioning reverence—for so long, that is to say, the authorities have been able to persuade the world that the goods they are selling are the best, in fact the only goods upon the market—that if any one breathes a word against them now he is labelled a revolutionary; it is assumed that politically he is a Socialist, that he wishes to substitute co-operation for competition, that he is a harbinger of red ruin, concealing a bomb intended for William of Wykeham's Tower or the green sward of Agar's plough; that his programme involves the complete destruction of the existing fabric, and that he proposes to erect about its ruins some bizarre construction of eugenics and modernity. Nothing, as a matter of fact, is further from the truth.
The majority of assailants are anything but socialists. They consider an enlightened oligarchy the ideal form of government, and their chief quarrel with the Public Schools is the absence of that enlightened oligarchy. No one wants to destroy the Public Schools. No one would be so foolish. But we do maintain that the public school system—a very old, a very magnificent, a very venerable mansion—stands in drastic need of repair. It is some years since the drains were attended to; electric light is more serviceable than gas; the tapestries are a little moth-eaten; the books in the library are dusty. The house wants to be spring cleaned.
It is easy, of course, to say that, but it is very difficult to know how to set about it. Our institutions are mirrors in which are reflected our personal imperfections. They can be no better than ourselves; and the merchants of panaceas take for granted a world which has left behind it envy, greed, malice, and desire. To that degree of perfection we shall never attain, but we can at any rate be honest with one another. And there is no side of English life about which rulers and ruled, fathers and sons, old and young have been so consistently dishonest with one another in the past as they have been about the standards and ideals of the English Public Schools.