responsibilities, to find the energy and mental freedom necessary to
make any vital changes in the methods that text-books, traditions, and
examinations force upon them, than it is for a general medical
practitioner to invent and make out of the native ore the steel
implements some operation of frequent occurrence in his practice may
demand. If they are made, and accessible by purchase and not too
expensive, he will get them; if they are not he will have to fumble
along with the next best thing; and if nothing that is any good can be
got, then there is nothing for it, though he be the noblest character,
the finest intelligence that ever lived behind a brass plate, but
either to shirk that operation altogether or to run the chance of
making a disastrous mess of it.

Scolding the schoolmaster, gibing at the schoolmaster, guying,
afflicting and exasperating the schoolmaster in every conceivable way,
is an amusement so entirely congenial to my temperament that I do not
for one moment propose to abandon it. It is a devil I have, and I admit
it. He insults schoolmasters and bishops in particular, and I do not
cast him out, but at the same time I would most earnestly insist that
all that sort of thing does nothing whatever to advance education, that
it is a mere outbreak of personal grace-notes so far as this discussion
goes. The real practical needs in the matter are a properly worked-out
method, a proper set of school books, and then a progressive alteration
of examinations in English, to render that method and that set of
school books imperative. These are needs the schoolmaster and
schoolmistress can do amazingly little to satisfy. Of course, when
these things are ready and the pressure to enforce them begins to tell
on the schools, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, having that almost
instinctive dread of any sort of change that all hard-worked and rather
worried people acquire, will obstruct and have to be reckoned with, but