"Now we'll go to another little point that the gentleman forgot. He
recommended you to LEARN--to make yourselves better and wiser from
day to day. But he didn't tell you why it is that you won't learn,
in spite of his advice. I suppose that, being a foreigner, he was
afraid of hurting your feelings by talking too freely to you. But
you're not so thin-skinned as to take offence at a little
plain-speaking, I'll be bound; so I tell you straight out that the
reason you won't learn is not that you don't want to be clever, or
that you are lazier than many that have learned a great deal, but
just because you'd like people to think that you know everything
already--because you're ashamed to be seen going to school; and you
calculate that if you only hold your tongue and look wise you'll get
through life without your ignorance being found out. But where's the
good of lies and pretence? What does it matter if you get laughed at
by a cheeky brat or two for your awkward beginnings? What's the use
of always thinking of how you're looking, when your sense might tell
you that other people are thinking about their own looks and not
about yours? A big boy doesn't look well on a lower form, certainly,
but when he works his way up he'll be glad he began. I speak to you
more particularly because you're Londoners; and Londoners beat all
creation for thinking about themselves. However, I don't go with the
gentleman in everything he said. All this struggling and striving to
make the world better is a great mistake; not because it isn't a
good thing to improve the world if you know how to do it, but
because striving and struggling is the worst way you could set about
doing anything. It gives a man a bad style, and weakens him. It
shows that he don't believe in himself much. When I heard the
professor striving and struggling so earnestly to set you to work
reforming this, that, and the other, I said to myself, 'He's got