But the reader will be asking, for the second time, "What is all this to do with political education?" And again we answer—everything. For we believe that the joy in life, and the intellectual interest of which we have spoken can be awakened from where they lie dormant in a boy's nature by political education. The subject is the boy's own destiny as a member of human society and a part of the universe (for it will be remembered that we include ethics and philosophy with history and politics under the one broad heading); and there is hardly a boy who does not find, at best in all these subjects, at worst in one of them, the inspiration to vital work and the sense of living well, which goes with it. The boys start reading, widely; a thousand topics occupy their attention; poetry, plays, novels—all these are reached from the one starting point. Then clubs and groups of various kinds are started in their houses; and the sex problem has become as much as it ever can become, a thing of the past.
Nor, we may add, are we merely theorising, and talking of hypothetical goods which might conceivably follow from the adoption of our plan. All that we have written of is within our own experience. Time after time while we were making our experiments did we come across cases of boys whose moral health had been saved by their new-found interest. One had turned to physical excitement as the only possible relief from the tedium of Latin grammar; after a year under the altered circumstances he turned to it no longer. The parents of another (a boy of about sixteen) had attempted to base his morality solely on Christian dogma, which meant nothing to him; and the result was disastrous. But a course of lectures on Plato's philosophy gave him what religion had previously failed to give him—a belief in an ideal and the distinction between right and wrong, and a determination to do always what seemed to him the absolute best.[1] But by far the most remarkable results were achieved in the house of which we have already spoken in Chapter I. During his first fortnight of office, the new head boy followed the old method; he examined all suspicious cases, discovered some that he had not suspected, and dealt out the traditional treatment. Then he followed the old method no longer; nor did he ever return to it from that day till the day when he finally left the school before his time. Instead, he set about interesting the boys in politics. We have already described the course of his experiments; how enthusiasm, kindled over newspapers, spread to plays, to poetry, to pictures, and to music. And the result? The house was transformed: it became such a place as every mother hopes the house where her own son is may be. And yet during the whole time of which we are speaking only one boy was beaten, and he for an act quite unrelated to the seventh or indeed to any other of the Ten Commandments.
NOTE.—A fortnight after the writing of the present book was projected, one of the writers was dispatched on military duty to India, and the above chapter was sent home from "Somewhere" in "Somewhere"—I believe Taranto. Close co-operation in authorship became impossible, and upon his collaborator in England devolved the responsibility of sole editorship. I leave the above chapter almost as it was written, for there is about it, as it seems to me, an indomitable optimism which was a characteristic of the writer's work and a cause of its success.
Still, in so far as it suggests that a complete solution has been found for a problem I believe to be insoluble, I must in honesty add a few words on my own account.
Our direct experience, or the more remarkable part of it, amounts to this: that a certain head of a house achieved during the course of a year, using the methods described, an uplifting of the whole tone of his house that can only be described as marvellous. Other heads elsewhere have no doubt achieved similar results by other means, though we have never come across an example equally remarkable. The goal can be reached, presumably, by the road of saintliness. It might be reached, though it is doubtful, by the road of Puritanism and "efficiency," the appeal to abstinence and "living hard." It cannot be reached, that is certain, by merely disciplinary methods and the appeal to fear, for the commonest form of schoolboy vice is such that, even allowing for the casualness of boys, it will not be detected once in a hundred cases.
Something, however, must be discounted from this result, by reason of the fact that the experiments were new. These boys had an enthusiasm bred of the fact that they rightly felt themselves to be pioneers. They felt themselves to be making history, certainly for the first, possibly for the last, time in their lives, and whether you admire them or whether you laugh at them, making history they were, so far as their own world was concerned. It seems doubtful whether the spiritual force engendered would have lasted at full strength when the thing had become normal, and it was no longer possible to start the hare of some new "stunt" (as they called it, I am sorry to say) once every two or three weeks. The experiment was cut short in its prime, and how it would have developed when the first generation of enthusiasts had passed away, one cannot say.
As for the other houses, something had been begun in two or three, but nothing of much value had been achieved. The minorities hesitated between a desire to imitate and a desire to be quite original, and the majorities looked a trifle askance upon the whole affair. And the masters came in here and put every sort of difficulty in the way, for by this time the collapse was visibly approaching.
None the less, the lines on which this strange and temporary achievement was based are the only lines along which the moral problem can be grappled with. A perfectly "pure" public school is as impossible as a perfectly satisfactory Marriage Law. A few incorrigibly bad boys there will always be—incorrigible, that is, when they have reached public school age. Hopelessly inanimate and feeble boys there will be also, doomed to become the victims of the bad. But the present moral average might be immensely raised, and the plain way to raise it is to provide other adventures for the soul. A boy once said to me, speaking of the matter in hand, "You see, it's the only thing I've ever found to do here really 'on my own.'" It was, in fact, his one adventure. No amount of class-room tasks, however well devised, no amount of organised games, however healthy, no amount of school religion, however sincere, could fill that gap. We must put the boys on the lines to organise their own adventures, and the only adventures that can compete with this absorbing adventure of misapplied sexuality, must be adventures that really lead up to the highest and best things of life. It was only when he found an empire to save that Clive ceased to be a young ruffian. Nothing lower than "politics" will suffice.
[1] Not that we believe that Plato is a greater teacher than Christ. Our opinion is the opposite; but we are also of Shelley's opinion when he said, "I would rather go to hell with Plato than to heaven with Paley." Much that is called Christian is not of Christ. Also there are no doubt minds so constituted that they will get more good in certain circumstances from the lesser teacher.