themselves be taught far better by sight than by hearing. A week at Rome
would give your average boy a much clearer idea of the relations of the
Capitol with the Palatine than all the pretty maps in Dr. William
Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary. It would give him also a sense of
the reality of the Latin language and the Latin literature, which he
could never pick up out of a dog-eared Livy or a thumb-marked Æneid. You
have only to look across from the top of the Janiculum, towards the
white houses of Frascati, to learn a vast deal more about the Alban
hills and the site of Tusculum than ever you could mug up from all the
geography books in the British Museum. The way to learn every subject on
earth, even book-lore included, is not out of books alone, but by actual
observation.

And yet it is impossible for any one among us to do otherwise than
acquiesce in this vicious circle. Why? Just because no man can
dissociate himself outright from the social organism of which he forms a
component member. He can no more do so than the eye can dissociate
itself from the heart and lungs, or than the legs can shake themselves
free from the head and stomach. We have all to learn, and to let our
boys learn, what authority decides for us. We can't give them a better
education than the average, even if we know what it is and desire to
impart it, because the better education, though abstractly more
valuable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barred
with examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Not
what is of most real use and importance in life, but what "pays best" in
examination, is the test of desirability. We are the victims of a
system; and our only hope of redress is not by sporadic individual
action but by concerted rebellion. We must cry out against the abuse
till at last we are heard by dint of our much speaking. In a world so
complex and so highly organised as ours, the individual can only do