A Boarding-School Inquiry

I

ARE our boys’ boarding-schools in America fulfilling their mission? They offer advantages which even the best public schools cannot give. They cost beyond all calculation in time, effort, and money. They have enormous prestige. Are they ‘ making good ’ ?

We have a right to ask more from our boarding-schools than repressive discipline and preparation for college. We have a right to judge them, not merely by what goes on within the school itself, where the influences are almost invariably gentle, helpful, and wholesome, but by what they produce. They offer unlimited opportunities for developing the highest type of manhood. They have at their command all the boy’s time. They can mould and develop a boy’s body, his mind, and his soul. They can cultivate his manners, correct his morals, arouse his enthusiasms, and fit him, as no other institution can, for a useful place in life. They are the best organs we have for creating the finest American manhood. Are they functioning as they should? Are they justifying their existence by enriching our national life with the choice young men that we need? Are they sending forth youths ready to take up the complex and exacting duties for which intensive culture alone can equip one, and to give themselves wholeheartedly to the difficult, delicate, often poorly paid tasks which in a highly organized community must be supremely well done: such tasks as research, medicine, teaching, literature, the fine arts, government, public service, religion?

I fear they are not. We have men of prominence who have been sent out by these schools, but there are far too few of them. The overwhelming number of boys who are there educated, after a more or less unsatisfactory record in college, soon sink out of sight in the shallows of mediocrity. After time, thought, and effort, almost without limit, have been spent to make these boys the highest product of our civilization, let us see what are the results.

First of all, we find that these schools rarely produce scholars. It seems not unreasonable to expect them to, but actually they do not. They often so over-prepare a boy for college that he can outstrip those less thoroughly prepared; but while a college record is thus apparently made, it is usually a spurt of brilliancy rather than a solid scholarly feat. Undeniably these schools often develop brains, but these brains are later used chiefly in making money. They are not used in fruitful scholarship, even though it is to these members of the leisure class that we seem justified in looking for such attainments. The boys received in these schools seem not to have scholarly ambitions. They have, on the contrary, debased ideals of education. Instead of scholars, these schools immediately produce too many representatives of that cheap offensive type, the college ‘Rah-rah boy,’ whose chief ambitions extend only to the gayety and frivolity of the most superficial and evanescent college activities. Boys of this type have in most cases bad manners, and in some cases worse morals. They lack all sense of the high obligation of privilege. They are, they shamelessly confess, ‘out for a good time,’ and one who scrutinizes their indulgences with any care must admit that, if money squandered as they squander it will give a ‘good time,’ they should be getting it.

Another point where the schools fail is that they standardize their product. There seems to be, almost inevitably, a certain crushing of individuality. There is apt to come to schoolboys a loss of originality, of taste, and of delicacy of perception. There is in schools so much fear of the scorn of public opinion too often leveled at a non-conformer, that even the occasional talented boy retires within himself and finds it discreet to remain mediocre. Thus there comes about an atrophy of the normal interest in art and beauty. A schoolboy does not dare, in the face of his mocking companions, to manifest any enthusiasm in the best poetry, music, or painting. He wants, not the realities, but the superficialities. He wants to be ‘ in fashion ’ — to value and praise only the things that the debased taste of the group values or praises. Not the best, but the conventional, becomes his standard. I have known a boy to wait until he was alone in his dormitory, in order to play, undisturbed by the taunts of his fellows, a Victor record of a piece of good music which he loved. I have known a boy, both welltaught and talented, to abandon the violin and take up the mandolin, simply that he might succeed in ‘making’ the popular musical club of the college he had chosen.

The results of all this are seen in our colleges, where the preferred pleasures seem to be precisely the pleasures of the average factory town. Do not the ‘Jazz band’ and the ‘movies’ now satisfy completely the æsthetic natures of our college men?

Furthermore, the boys of our preparatory schools show almost no living interest in science or in nature. Science is not ‘the thing.’ Enthusiasm for the natural wonders of God’s world is distinctly bad form. Athletics one may always safely grow enthusiastic over, but never plants, birds, trees — never chemistry, natural history, the stars. A talented lecturer imitated for us, one stormy winter’s night, the songs and calls of our familiar birds. These sweet summer sounds thrilled me. Afterwards I asked one of the older boys if he had not enjoyed them. ‘No,’ he replied; ‘why should I? I have never heard a bird sing in my life.’

Perhaps it is because the case seems hopeless; perhaps it is because they are so engrossed with getting boys into college, that schools of this kind make little provision for studies in nature and science. I once knew a boy in a prominent school who tried to educate himself. He would show his butterflies and explain all about them when, all too rarely, he could find a listener. I have seen him sit for hours, studying the tadpoles and frogs in a pond, so entranced that he did not know I frequently looked out for him when I was on my walks. But school gave him no information and no encouragement. He did not go to college, and he never became the naturalist I had hoped he would.

Another criticism I desire to make brings up a difficult problem — one so difficult that I hesitate to get myself involved in its discussion. It is that these schools fail to impress a vital, appealing religious faith. The private schools alone can do this, for to-day our public schools are gagged. I know that an earnest effort is made in most private schools to give a real religious culture, differing, of course, according to the denomination and proclivities of the school authorities. But for some reason there is not great success. Perhaps the tendency to swing to one of those two dangerous poles, formalism or sentimentalism, has something to do with this failure. Perhaps a greater reason is the absence of any adequate religious nurture in many of the homes from which the boys come and in the colleges to which they go. I fear that they too often look on their religion as just another school-requirement, which it is proper to shake off as quickly as possible after school-days are over. Somehow religion does not mean to the boy what it should — the greatest power for illuminating and energizing his life.

I have said enough to demonstrate my conviction that the schools we are considering are not giving us what, with all their resources, they should give. They might be made to contribute rich forces to our commonwealth. Instead, they contribute too many cheap, shallow, self-seeking, and sometimes dangerous elements. The attack on the students and the buildings of one of the great New England universities last May can perhaps best be laid to the resentment of simple, hard-working, discontented returned soldiers against the flippancy of our gilded youth. It is a manifestation that deserves attention.

Our schools should not be turning out such products. They should be providing leaders — leaders in politics, in social and labor questions, in science, thought, manners, culture. The possibilities of such schools in making workable our democracy are too evident, too precious, for us to allow them to fail without search for a remedy. Unless the remedy be found, and these institutions, so full of potentialities for good, — so full, too, of an eager desire for high service, — are made to contribute as they ought, we must, in a rightly ordered democracy, write ‘ Ichabod’ over their ruins.

What, then, is the matter with them? There are, as I see it, three principal causes of their failure: their commercialism, their autocratic discipline, and the demoralizing influence which the colleges exert on them. These schools, on account of their high tuition fees, have become the exclusive domain of the wealthy; they have, in their zeal for discipline, forgotten that the boy must learn to govern himself; and they have existed to prepare boys for college rather than to prepare them for life.

III

First, as regards their commercialism.

A school of this kind, however high its ideals, is, we must remember, at bottom a business, and in the view of its authorities the first requisite of such business is that it must pay. Under present conditions it can pay only by collecting large fees, and large fees can be paid only by the rich. Such a business standard involves, unfortunately, compromises and concessions, and it is likely that there is not one school of this kind that does not bear on its body the scars of such moral defeats. The argument is, of course, that to have an institution perform its high function, the continued existence of the institution is necessary. There are times when I am inclined to doubt the validity of this argument.

To understand what this class-pressure has accomplished, we must consider the material with which boardingschools have lately been loaded. It is said that, at home, the American boy is rather more feared than loved. This is particularly true of the rich boy. There is usually at hand sufficient of life’s discipline to whip the poor boy into shape. But with the son of rich parents difficulties multiply. What with motor-cars, cigarettes, cabarets, cocktails, and chorus-girls, such a youth, left unrestrained, soon becomes impossible; and once the harm is done, it is hard to make anything serviceable out of him.

About the age when these dangers may be looked for, the puzzled parents, not knowing what to do with the boy, are glad to shift the responsibility. As amateurs they face a problem which they are eager to hand over to professionals who have both the experience and the machinery with which to do a better job. ‘My boy’s life is one long protest,’ declares one anxious mother. ‘How many weeks are there in your school-year?’ Bernard Shaw may be right after all in stating that the chief purpose of schools is to enable parents to get rid of their children so that they can attend to their own affairs.

This is a matter for sympathetic treatment. There are many of us, I am sure, who echo from time to time the words of the Shepherd in A Winter’s Tale: ‘I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting—’ At times I ask myself whether a boarding-school is not merely an attempt to bridge over these difficult years, since they cannot be ‘slept out,’ and whether a school’s success may not consist in landing a boy safely on the other side of them.

There is, I fear, ample reason for the particular distress of wealthy parents at this time. Conditions are changing, standards are lowered, old restraints have been loosed, self-indulgence is the order of the day, moral ideals are unsettled, and boys are in greater peril than they ever were before. Whether owing entirely to the war, as some people say, or to the radical tendencies and the changing religious sanctions of the day, the bringing up of a boy is more anxious work than it once was; and the bringing up of a rich boy is supremely difficult.

The best schools, forced to accept only the sons of the rich, — not merely those sons who were worthy, but too often all who could pay, — have felt the lowering of tone which the unsatisfactory quality of much of this material has brought with it. Background and ideals — both of them impossible matters to supply ready-made — have been lacking. Though many of these boys may prove to be fine, manly chaps, there has come to be too large a proportion of the unfit. Great attention has to be paid to sheltering and controlling the undesirable element. With all that is done, the frivolous wastrel exercises too much influence. He lacks the fibre built by self-denial. There is constantly before him the enticing example of self-indulgent parents. The eye of a needle was once spoken of metaphorically in connection with the entrance of a rich man into the Kingdom of Heaven. Sometimes one feels that metaphor does not adequately describe the minuteness of the aperture through which the son of many a rich man must go.

Our boarding-schools have, no doubt, served a useful purpose in getting many youths of such antecedents over the impossible age. They have furthermore been blessed with a small, but certainly admirable, group of amazingly worth-while boys from rich families. That has been their leaven, but there has not been enough of it. The schools have suffered; and although expulsions may still keep them from catastrophe, it is time that they consider seriously whether such boys as seem predestined not to respond to the right influences had not better be steered toward the reformatories, to end the difficulty.

I am aware that Chesterton’s criticism of some advocate of the superman may be brought against me. Chesterton said, you may remember, that this person was like a nurse who, having tried for a long time to feed a child something out of a bottle which the child resolutely refused to take, would end matters, not by throwing the bottle out of the window, but by throwing the child out of the window. For all that, there are some emergencies, it would seem, where radical action is justified.

A further detriment which schools suffer from the patronage of the rich comes from the tendency of some parents to use the school as an agent of social ambitions. If their sons are gentlemen-born, the parents, quite reasonably, wish them educated with gentlemen. If, on the other hand, parents newly arrived at prosperity are looking about for the best means of launching their sons socially, the right school offers just the opportunity they want. Too frequently the desire is rather for profitable social connections than gentle surroundings and refined friends. The school is eagerly used, and is made to suffer from this wrong motive.

III

But granting that there must be, in any school, a certain proportion of unworkable material, would not better results be obtained by a less autocratic and a more democratic system of government? The immediate results of the present system are, with a few heartbreaking exceptions, superficially good. But the ultimate result, the only one by which the system can fairly be judged, is not satisfactory.

The older schoolboy, on the threshold of the freedoms of college, is not permitted to learn to use for himself the impulses, the enthusiasms, the inhibitions, which spring up naturally in the human male in the critical years just before manhood. Exacting discipline deprives him of a feeling of responsibility for his actions. He is purposely kept childlike and dependent. It is easier to handle him that way. Then he is thrust without preparation into the life at college, which is getting to be almost as free as that of the gods on Olympus. The lessons of his little play-world will not serve him. He lacks in judgment. He lacks in self-control. Give a boy in this unfortunate state plenty of money, and we have a situation most difficult to cope with. Remember, too, that in facing it the boy usually has none of the steadying which a vital interest in academic work would give.

I am aware that the average headmaster will throw up his hands in consternation at any suggestion of student government. ‘Student government is always bad government,’ he will insist. That may be true. It is also true that ’prentice work is bad work, and that all beginners make more mistakes than experts. Nevertheless, each new generation must some time begin to learn. The trouble is that headmasters look upon discipline as devised for the convenience of the authorities, not for the education of the boy. But unless it really educates the boy, trains his will, develops his judgment, and fits him for self-government, it is worse than useless. If it merely represses him, it weakens him; it raises in him a false sense of confidence in his own will, makes him think he is self-directing when he is not, and brings some day a shattering realization that his own will was never developed at all.

If school authorities would see this; if they would, at whatever cost of patience, anxiety, and disappointment, consent to rely more on the self-directing forces that really exist in boys, it is likely that, not only would many school problems grow less troublesome, but that the college history of school graduates would be less disappointing.

IV

The third cause of failure lies in the relation of these schools to the colleges.

It seems to be the fashion for every boy born in prosperous circumstances to count on going to college. He counts as well on attending some preparatory school, but rarely, it often seems, for the helpful influence of the school on his life. He goes chiefly for two reasons: one, that he may be sure of passing the hide-bound entrance examinations to his chosen college; and the other, that he may enter college with a group of ready-made friends.

The demand for getting boys into college has tied the hands of many schools. It has distorted and devitalized their functions. High schools have felt this demand and resisted it; private schools simply cannot shake it off.

The fact that many boys who need school, and who by the right school could be moulded to a fine usefulness, ought never to go to college at all, is lost sight of. The other fact, that school-life and college-life are two perhaps equally important steps in the education by which boys rise to manhood, is forgotten. And the nurture, the culture, the upbuilding which the school might give if it were allowed to, is lost in a sort of mad rush to get boys past the rigid college-entrance examinations, tempered only by such disciplinary measures as are necessary to control their high spirits and keep them in hand while the process of cramming is going on.

Thus our schools are made mere conveniences, stepping-stones to a more attractive life beyond. They are necessary evils — institutions to be used for a brief time and then cast aside.

But this is not all. The college hurts the secondary school even more seriously in its academic demands. As we all know, few public schools have been able to prepare boys for the arbitrary, excessive demands made by our large eastern colleges. None but the most brilliant public-school boy, willing to do considerable self-educating could in recent years pass those entrance examinations. That fact alone has filled many eastern private schools. What effect the easing of those harsh requirements, as recently announced by the colleges, will have on private schools will be an interesting matter to watch. It seems likely that the demands which have throttled our schools in the past will in the course of time become modified. A more enlightened policy may be at hand.

Every schoolmaster is looking to the system of ‘comprehensive examination,’ and the more humane methods which may grow out of it, as an emancipation from the pitiful, sordid school curriculum of grind, grind, drill, drill, review, review — stultifying to mental growth and inhibitive to socializing, humanizing, informative studies and experiences, which the schools long to give and cannot. For example, the time may come when the modern languages will be taught in a rational way, and a youngster, after two years of study, even if ignorant of twenty or thirty exceptions to some rule of French grammar, will not be tongue-tied in a French community, and will read and write the language with pleasure. Or, in the matter of history, even if a little shaky on all the reforms of Solon, the Constitution of Clisthenes, or every provision of the Licinian Laws, an American boy may go up to college so well read in general history, ancient, mediæval, and even modern, that he has a social perspective, a richly furnished mind, and a sense of confidence in himself as a future citizen of the world.

But in some ways the most cruel injury which the colleges inflict upon the schools is due to the cynical fashion in which, for years past, they have debased the prestige of the schools by making examinations, set by the colleges themselves, or their servant, the College Entrance Board, the sole, or at least the preferred condition for admission, when for the good of the schools, the good of the boys, the good even of the colleges themselves, they should have made such entrance requirements primarily the fine school-record of the boy himself and the possession of a regular graduation diploma of a reputable school. I often wonder what would become of the prestige of the colleges themselves if the post-graduate schools refused to accept their degrees, and threw the applicant on the mercies of a written examination on his college work, set by a group of learned lecturers, isolated from all undergraduate conditions.

This, it seems to me, is the crowning sin of the colleges against the schools; and to say in extenuation that the standards of the secondary schools are too unequal to warrant any other course, simply throws us back to wondering what has held down those standards. One must bear in mind, also, that no one has ever forbidden the colleges to make their own list of eligible schools.

V

So much for the failures, and some reasons for them. Can adequate remedies be found? The problem is difficult. But it seems as if something must be done, first of all, to improve the quality of the boys taken into our schools. The schools must be made more independent of wealthy clients. Some sort of endowment would be needed for this. The best form for this endowment to take, perhaps, would be a definite and sufficient number of scholarships, which should be granted only to boys proved to possess the finest qualities of character, earnestness, and mentality. The influence of even a small group of such boys could be made to tell tremendously in the school community. The selection of these boys without regard to their class in society, but only for their exceptional promise, would make for democracy. There are in our land hundreds — yes, thousands — of splendid lads whose parents desire for them just what the boarding-school can supply. But most of them cannot afford to pay the fees. Thus it comes about that the worth-while boy is shut out, forced to an inferior education, or even perhaps spoiled by adolescent idleness, while many a rich boy who can pay gets the advantages, and either will not or cannot use them. At present the schools must take what comes, — do their best for them, — and get criticized for their failures. They find out, as the old saying runs, that you cannot polish a brick.

Would that some American Cecil Rhodes could see the possibilities of these schools, or that some group of rich men of clear vision might be found, willing to devote a few millions thus to the public good. For endowment must, I suppose, be by private capital. There seems to be no inherent objection to handing these private schools over to the state and developing them in the highest interest of the public. Such a solution could be made very satisfactory. But in our present state of advance, it would be politically almost impossible. One could hardly persuade the nation that Annapolis and West Point are really just such schools; and that, though their contribution to the public good may be more easily recognized, it is not more necessary.

Financial independence alone, however, will not accomplish all that we wish. With the possibility of entering better boys must come the certainty of better equipping these boys after they are secured. A more normal and democratic system of government must be devised, which will train a boy’s powers in self-direction and fit him for responsibility. And with this must come a broader, richer, and more stimulating curriculum.

But the colleges must do their part. They must revise their system, making less of arbitrary demands, and more, much more, of fine school-record, character, high motive, and enthusiasm for learning. They never should, I think, admit a boy (and they do admit hundreds of such) whose declared motive in going to college is to have a good time. It seems a case of misappropriation of endowment funds, — those gifts of self-sacrificing men of vision, — to allow them to be spent in the futile effort, to educate boys who do not come to be educated at all, but to have a good time. It is like using the revenues of an orphan asylum for carousing.

VI

There is a question, of course, whether our select boys’ boarding-schools should have any place in a democracy. Mr. Dallas Lore Sharp, whose well-reasoned article in a recent number of the Atlantic¹ has set many of us thinking, would say that they should not. Indeed, judging by their present accomplishment, it might be somewhat difficult to demonstrate their value; for they seem too much concerned with developing the wrong kind of exclusiveness. The exclusiveness which is an end in itself certainly should not feel at home in a democracy.

But there is an exclusiveness, if one may so term it, which results from high purpose and exacting responsibilities — an exclusiveness which is almost a synonym for consecration. Such exclusiveness is, I believe, essential to a democracy.

For true democracy is not a flattening, leveling process. True democracy must build up to the highest powers of serviceability the most promising individuals. It must develop them under the essentially democratic teaching that, however great their powers or their freedom, they cannot live to themselves alone, but must devote all their powers to the good of their fellows.

Unconscious as seems the soul of America even yet regarding the goal of her dreams, she will never accept the uninteresting, inefficient, hopeless state which the extreme advocates of communistic democracy are urging. Such a state would rob life of all that makes it worth while. It would create a society paralyzed by jealousies and fears. It would be a lottery without prizes; a Sahara Desert without mountain of vision or well of refreshment. Flat mediocrity is a bastard democracy. We can never accept it. For the finest flower of democracy is not drab equality, but noblesse oblige. This is a spiritual force for raising men, not for leveling them.

The democracy that is bred in the fibre of my own nature recognizes classes. It must. It recognizes a diversity of gifts, a diversity of opportunities, and a diversity of responsibilities. It recognizes a diversity of social standards, of families, of homes. And until it is granted that all homes must be alike, I will not grant that all schools must be alike. It is evidently impossible, for example, that all homes can be made equally refined, mannerly, inspiring. But we cannot, therefore, lose the blessed influence of the best of those we already have. There must remain something above us to live up to.

Your true democracy must have leaders; and the better the leaders, the better the democracy. These leaders must be men of the most gracious and sincere manners, the most cultivated imagination, the finest selfsacrifice, the highest ideals. Wherever we need leaders, we need such men. And such men do not just grow. They must be developed and inspired somewhere. Where can we do it if not in our regenerated select schools? The public schools cannot do this work as it should be done, for the same reason that the private schools as at present conducted cannot do it. They are too mixed, too inclusive, too much cluttered with inferior material. More than this, they are apparently unable to command the services of the right sort of educators. The low salaries paid to teachers in public schools do not attract first-class men and women. It is an admitted fact that the schoolbook-publishing firms are striving more and more to produce ‘textbooks that presuppose a minimum of intelligence on the part of the teacher — books that will teach themselves.’ (I have quoted that sentence verbatim from the statement of an agent of such a firm.)

Mr. Sharp believes the education of all children in common schools makes for democracy. To a certain extent, perhaps, it does, if the standards of such persons are not too entirely dissimilar. But what should I have advised a refined mother, herself a public-school teacher, who asked me if I thought she was wrong in sending her delicate little daughter to a private school? ‘In the public school to which I sent her for a time,’ said she, ‘she picked up vermin, diseases, and bad language.’

Even if Mr. Sharp’s theory were carried out, and children of all classes tumbled into properly fumigated and inspected common schools, what would be the result? Not, I fear, the stimulating, hearty democracy which Mr. Sharp looks forward to, but rather a division into groups, congenial within themselves, scornful or quarrelsome toward the other groups. I have myself observed this tendency in publicschool life. It seems to show that even a common education does not root out snobbishness or class-feeling.

No. The forced association of uncongenial units does not break down exclusiveness. It often creates it. Certainly it does not ensure mutual understanding. A little aloofness often makes for both understanding and sympathy.

To Mr. Sharp’s contention that unless labor and capital are educated together they can never understand each other, I would reply that the willingness to understand each other is far more needed than any association of school-days, and that it is a lack of fairmindedness rather than of understanding that is at the bottom of all the trouble between labor and capital. Not closer association, but better moral culture, will help solve the problem. In my ideal democracy, strong, sympathetic brotherhood sometimes looms so large that it gathers unto itself all that we know of human rights and the essential equality of men.

It is the more sympathetic education in ideals, in true values, in brotherhood, that I look to the regenerated boarding-school to give. Never must this school teach the condescension of superior beings for inferior, but always the responsibility of privilege, and the supreme obligation of fairmindedness in those who are permitted the highest training to fit them for the highest duties.

Thus it is that, with firm faith in democracy, a hatred of caste, and an ardent enthusiasm for our amazing American opportunities for advancement, I find myself, after sharply criticizing one class of our private schools as at present administered, defending the system in its ideal form, and earnestly desirous that it may be purged and used as it should be in the high interest of the nation.

For I believe in the special cloistered education for boys. I believe it is capable of giving them benefits that a public day school can never give. For years I have watched its influence on boys of the right qualities, and I have found this influence to be good. The distinct gain in manliness and independence that results from the separation of adolescent boys from their homes and families is good. The power they develop of getting on well with their fellows is good. The intimate association in daily life with other youths of kindred minds and common aims is good. The training in manners is good. The health they build up by regular life in favorable surroundings is good. And the gain that comes from detaching them from the distractions and temptations of mixed society and enabling them to concentrate attention on their studies is inestimable.

More can be done with earnest boys in these boarding-schools than anywhere else. I am sure of that. To-day we need these schools alarmingly if we would save and develop our choicest treasures of boyhood, and raise up men of power and integrity who will lead us aright. But I insist that such schools are not now fulfilling their mission. They cannot be permitted to go on as ‘cramming’ schools, elegant reformatories, rungs in the social ladder, or money-making businesses. They can no longer, in these stirring, anxious days of the new world, continue as they have been. They must be freed from the compromises and concessions that have been required of them; they must be relieved from the necessity of nursing defective, subnormal scions of proud families, and crude or impossible scions of ‘climbers.’ They must not remain the caterers to the cheap ideas of half-baked youths, inoculated with the ‘Rah-rah’ virus eternally raging in our colleges. But they must be opened, not to the richest, but to the best of our youths — to those who will feel that their admission to special privileges pledges them to unusual effort. These schools must bring together and bind together only the choicest, the most honorable youths, to whatever class of society they may belong. They should be made centres of the most solid and the most stimulating culture — physical, mental, ethical — which the world can give to its best sons. They must come to stand on their own feet, dispensing without fear or favor the education which the most experienced men may deem desirable; and nurturing the loftiest ideals of brotherhood, of service, and of enthusiasm for what is true, honest, just, lovely, and of good report.

The best schools should be for the best boys; the best boys for the best schools — the schools which can kindle their spirits at the most points and can command all their time, effort, and devotion.

For in a democracy there should be one thing that money cannot buy, that influence cannot buy, that worth alone can buy: and that thing is Education.

1. ‘Patrons of Democracy,’ in the issue for November, 1919.↩