One might think schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were inaccessible to
general observation in the face of these stupendous demands. If we
exacted such things from our butcher over and above good service in his
trade, if we insisted that his meat should not only build up honest
nerve and muscle, but that it should compensate for all that was
slovenly in our homes, dishonest in our economic conditions, and slack
and vulgar in our public life, he would very probably say that it took
him all his time to supply sound meat, that it was a difficult and
honourable thing to supply sound meat, that the slackness of business-
men and statesmen in the country, the condition of the arts and
sciences, wasn't his business, that however lamentable the disorders of
the state, there was no reasonable prospect of improving it by
upsetting the distribution of meat, and, in short, that he was a
butcher and not a Cosmos-healing quack. "You must have meat," he would
say, "anyhow." But the average schoolmaster and schoolmistress does not
do things in that way.

What a school may do for the developing citizen, the original and the
developed function of the school, and how its true work may best be
accomplished, we shall discuss later. But it may be well to expand a
little more fully here the account of what the school has no business
to attempt, and what the scholastic profession is, as a whole, quite
incapable of doing, and to point to the really responsible agencies in
each case.

Now, firstly, with regard to all that the schoolmaster and
schoolmistress means by the "formation of character." A large
proportion of the scholastic profession will profess, and a still
larger proportion of the public believes, that it is possible by talk