'But surely you aren't going to embarrass him by asking?' said King.
'Your boy won,' said Hartopp.
'To go back to what we were discussing,' said King quickly, 'do you pretend that your modern system of inculcating unrelated facts about chlorine, for instance, all of which may be proved fallacies by the time the boys grow up, can have any real bearing on education--even the low type of it that examiners expect?'
'I maintain nothing. But is it any worse than your Chinese reiteration of uncomprehended syllables in a dead tongue?'
'Dead, forsooth!' King fairly danced. 'The only living tongue on earth! Chinese! On my word, Hartopp!'
'And at the end of seven years--how often have I said it?' Hartopp went on,--'seven years of two hundred and twenty days of six hours each, your victims go away with nothing, absolutely nothing, except, perhaps, if they've been very attentive, a dozen--no, I'll grant you twenty--one score of totally unrelated Latin tags which any child of twelve could have absorbed in two terms.'
'But--but can't you realise that if our system brings later--at any rate--at a pinch--a simple understanding--grammar and Latinity apart--a mere glimpse of the significance (foul word!) of, we'll say, one Ode of Horace, one twenty lines of Virgil, we've got what we poor devils of ushers are striving after?'
'And what might that be?' said Hartopp.
'Balance, proportion, perspective--life. Your scientific man is the unrelated animal--the beast without background. Haven't you ever realised that in your atmosphere of stinks?'
'Meantime you make them lose life for the sake of living, eh?'