example, one who has recently emerged from one of our public schools,
one of the sort of young Englishmen for whom all commissions in the
Army are practically reserved, who will own some great business,
perhaps, or direct companies, and worm your way through the tough hide
of style and restraint he has acquired, get him to talk about women,
about his prospects, his intimate self, and see for yourself how much
of him, and how little of him, his school has made. Test him on
politics, on the national future, on social relationships, and lead him
if you can to an utterance or so upon art and literature. You will be
astonished how little you can either blame or praise the teaching of
his school for him. He is ignorant, profoundly ignorant, and much of
his style and reserve is draped over that; he does not clearly
understand what he reads, and he can scarcely write a letter; he draws,
calculates and thinks no better than an errand boy, and he has no habit
of work; for that much perhaps the school must answer. And the school,
too, must answer for the fact that although--unless he is one of the
small specialized set who "swat" at games--he plays cricket and
football quite without distinction, he regards these games as much more
important than military training and things of that sort, spends days
watching his school matches, and thumbs and muddles over the records of
county cricket to an amazing extent. But these things are indeed only
symptons, and not essential factors in general inefficiency. There are
much wider things for which his school is only mediately or not at all
to blame. For example, he is not only ignorant and inefficient and
secretly aware of his ignorance and inefficiency, but, what is far more
serious, he does not feel any strong desire to alter the fact; he is
not only without the habit of regular work, but he does not feel the
defect because he has no desire whatever to do anything that requires
work in the doing. And you will find that this is so because there is
woven into the tissue of his being a profound belief that work and