"The cumbrous and inadequate preparation which is now in vogue can scarcely be spoken of by a person of understanding without the use of language unbefitting one who is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed Church and the highest order of the vertebrates.
"If one walks into any school in this kingdom one is certain to meet a tall, thin, anaemic youth with a draggled moustache and a worried eye who is endeavouring to coerce a mass of indigestible, inelastic and unimportant facts into the heads of divers sleepy and disgusted children. If a small boy, on being asked where Labrador is, replies that it is the most northerly point of the Berlin Archipelago, he may be wrong in quite a variety of ways, but even if he answered correctly he would still know just as little about the matter, while if he were to give the only proper reply to so ridiculous a conundrum, he would tell his tormentor that he did not care a rap where it was, that he had not put it there, and that he would tell his mother if the man did not leave him alone. What has he got to do with Labrador, Terra del Fuego, or the Isles of Greece? Give him a fistful of facts about Donnybrook, and send him away to hunt out the truth of it, with a sandwich in his pocket and the promise of a lump of toffee when he came back with his cargo of truths—that would interest him, the toffee would make the information stick, while the verification of his facts would make his head fat and fertile.
"When we ceased to be natural creatures and put on the oppressive shrouds, wraps and disguises which we label in the villainous aggregate civilisation, we ceased to know either how to teach or how to learn. We exchanged the freedom and spaciousness of life for a cramped existence compounded of spectacles and bad grammar, this complicated still further by the multiplication tables, the dead languages and indigestion tabloids. During his school-days many a healthy boy had to parse ten square miles of dead language. Why? he does not know and he will never be told, for no one else knows any more than he. The only thing of which he is certain is, that he did not do anything to deserve it.
"Civilisation, which is responsible for all the woes of life, such as washing, shaving and buying boots, is responsible for this also. Potatoes are more productive than Latin roots, are twice as nourishing and cannot be parsed. Teach a girl how to recognise an egg by the naked eye, and then teach her how to cook it. Teach a boy how to discover the kind of trees eggs grow on and what is the best kind of soil to plant them in. Teach a girl how to keep her hands from scratching, her tongue from telling lies, and her teeth from dropping out prematurely, and she will, maybe, turn out a healthy kind of mammal having a house filled with brightness and laughter. Teach a boy how to prevent another boy from mashing the head off him, teach him how to be good to his mother when she is old, teach him how to give two-pence to a beggar without imagining that he is investing his savings in Paradise at fifty per cent and a bonus; and then, having eliminated civilisation, education, clothes, tin whistles and soap this earth will not be such a bad old ball-alley for a man to smoke a pipe in.
"Everything is wrong. People should rise to their feet and salute when a farmer or a teacher comes into a room. No man should be allowed into Parliament who has not engaged in one or other of these professions, but because they are the two most important professions in the world their exponents are robbed and harried into slaves and fools."
Having said this with great earnestness the old gentleman absent-mindedly impounded my drink, absorbed it, and strode away wrapped in thought. The gentleman-in-waiting sympathetically asked me if I would have another one, but on learning that I had no more money he said good-night.
V
The old gentleman was in a state of most unusual content. It might have been because the sun was shining, or it might have been because he had just finished his third glass: whatever it was, the smile upon his face was of a depth and a radiance impossible to describe. He spoke for a while upon the pleasant smell of hay passing through a city, and, remarking upon the enviable thirst of hay-makers, he swept gradually to the following weighty monologue—
"From the earliest times," said he, "drinking has been regarded not alone as a necessary lubricant, but also as a pastime, and the ingenuity of every race under the sun has been exercised in the attempt to give variety and distinction to its beverages.
"We may take it that the earliest race of men drank nothing but water, and hot water to boot, for at that era the earth must have been, if not hot, at least tepid. One can easily imagine that the contemporaries of the five-toed horse might have welcomed death as a happy release from their too sultry existence.