A Dominie's Log

by Alexander Sutherland Neill

Then I rambled on to Kings and Kingship. It is a difficult subject to tackle even with children, but I tried to walk warily. I said that the notion of a king was for people in an elementary stage of development. Intellectual folk have no use for all the pomp and pageantry of kingship. Royalty as it exists to-day is bad for us and for the royal family. The poor princes and princesses are reared in an atmosphere of make-believe. Their individuality and their loves are crushed by a system. And it is really a system of lies. "In the King's name!" Why make all this pretence when everyone knows that it is "In the Cabinet's name"? It is not fair to the king.

I am no republican; I do not want to see monarchy abolished in this land. I recognise that monarchy is necessary to the masses. But I want to bring my bairns to see monarchy stripped of its robes, its pageantry, its remoteness, its circumstance. Loyalty is a name to most of us. People sing the National Anthem in very much the same way as they say Grace before Meat. The Grace-sayer is thinking of his dinner; the singer is wondering if he'll manage to get out in time to collar a taxi.

I do not blame the kings; I blame their advisers. We are kept in the dark by them. We hear of a monarch's good deeds, but we never hear the truth about him. The unwritten law demands that the truth shall be kept secret until a few generations have passed. I know nothing about the king. I don't know what he thinks of Republicanism (in his shoes I should be a red-hot Republican), Socialism, Religion, Morals; and I want to know whether he likes Locke's novels or Galsworthy's drama. In short, I want to know the man that must of necessity be greater than the king. I am tired of processions and functions.

I became a loyalist when first I went to Windsor Castle. Three massed bands were playing in the quadrangle; thousands of visitors wandered around. The King came to the window and bowed. I wanted to go up and take him by the arm and say: "Poor King, you are not allowed to enjoy the sensation of being in a crowd, you are an abstraction, you are behind a barrier of nobility through which no commoner can pass. Come down and have a smoke with me amongst all these typists and clerks." And I expect that every man and woman in that crowd was thinking: "How nice it must be to be a king!"

Yet if a king were to come down from the pedestal on which the courtiers have placed him, I fear that the people would scorn him. They would cry: "He is only a man!" I am forced to the conclusion that pomp and circumstance are necessary after all. The people are to blame. The King is all right; he looks a decent, kindly soul with a good heart. But the people are not interested in good hearts; the fools want gilt coaches and crimson carpets and all the rubbish of show.

* * *

A lady asked me to-day whether I taught my children manners. I told her that I did not. She asked why. I replied that manners were sham, and my chief duty was to get rid of sham. Then she asked me why I lifted my hat to her ... and naturally I collapsed incontinently. Once again I write the words, "It is a difficult thing to be a theorist ... and an honest man at the same time."

On reflection I think that it is a case of personality versus the whole community. No man can be consistent. Were I to carry my convictions to their natural conclusion I should be an outcast ... and an outcast is of no value to the community. I lift my hat to a lady not because I respect her (I occasionally do. I always doff my hat to the school charwoman, but I am rather afraid of her), but because it is not worth while to protest against the little things of life. Incidentally, the whole case against hat-lifting is this:—In the lower and lower middle classes the son does not lift his hat to his mother though he does to the minister's wife.

No, I do not teach manners. If a boy "Sirs" me, he does it of his own free will. I believe that you cannot teach manners; taught manners are always forced, always overdone. My model of a true gentleman is a man with an innate good taste and artistry. My idea of a lady ... well, one of the truest ladies I have yet known kept a dairy in the Canongate of Edinburgh.

I try to get my bairns to do to others as they would like others to do to them. Shaw says "No: their tastes may not be the same as yours." Good old G. B. S.!