knowledge "do not pay," that they are rather ugly and vulgar
characteristics, and that they make neither for happiness nor success.

He did not learn that at school, nor at school was it possible he
should unlearn it. He acquired that belief from his home, from the
conversation of his equals, from the behaviour of his inferiors; he
found it in the books and newspapers he has read, he breathed it in
with his native air. He regards it as manifest Fact in the life about
him. And he is perfectly right. He lives in a country where stupidity
is, so to speak, crowned and throned, and where honour is a means of
exchange; and he draws his simple, straight conclusions. The much-
castigated gentleman with the ferule is largely innocent in this
account.

If, too, you ransack your young Englishman for religion, you will be
amazed to find scarcely a trace of School. In spite of a ceremonial
adhesion to the religion of his fathers, you will find nothing but a
profound agnosticism. He has not even the faith to disbelieve. It is
not so much that he has not developed religion as that the place has
been seared. In his time his boyish heart has had its stirrings, he has
responded with the others to "Onward, Christian Soldiers," the earnest
moments of the school pulpit, and all those first vague things. But
limited as his reading is, it has not been so limited that he does not
know that very grave things have happened in matters of faith, that the
doctrinal schemes of the conventional faith are riddled targets, that
creed and Bible do not mean what they appear to mean, but something
quite different and indefinable, that the bishops, socially so much in
evidence, are intellectually in hiding.

Here again is something the school did not cause, the school cannot