My earliest memory of professional jealousy goes back to the age of seven. I lived next door to a dentist, a real qualified L.D.S. Across the street lived a quack dental surgeon. When trade was dull these two used to come to their respective doors and converse with each other in the good old simple way of putting the fingers to the nose. They never spoke to each other. Life in a northern town was simple in these days.

* * * * *

Helen Macdonald is four years old, and her mother and I have some breezy discussions about her upbringing. Mrs. Mac has a great admiration for her own mother, and she is bent on bringing up her daughter in the way that she was brought up.

"Mother made me obey and I'll make Helen obey," she said to-day with decision.

"It's dangerous," I said.

"No it isn't; it worked well enough in my case anyway."

"Don't blow your own trumpet, madam!"

She smiled.

"I don't think I am a bad product of the good old way," she said with a self-satisfied air.

"Madam, shall I tell you the truth about yourself?"

She bubbled and drew her chair closer to mine.

"Do!" she cried, and then added: "But I won't believe the nasty bits."

Mac chuckled.

"To begin with," I said pompously, "you are an awful example of a bad education."

She bowed mockingly and Mac guffawed. He is a wee bit afraid of his wife and he marvels at my courage in ragging her.

"You," I continued, "were made to obey as a child, and as a result you became dependent on your mother. In short you are your own mother."

"Don't be silly," she said with a frown; "I want your serious opinion."

"And you are getting it," I replied. "Because you had to obey you never lived your own life, and naturally you never had a mind of your own. To this day you act as your mother acted. She made her daughter obey; you follow her example; she made scones in such and such a way; you make scones in exactly the same way."

"That's right!" laughed Mac.

Mrs. Mac looked thoughtful.

"Anyway," she said quickly, "they are excellent scones."

"Most excellent scones," I hastened to add, "but my point is that if we all follow our parents there will be no progress."

"Progress will never bring better scones," said Mac and he patted his wife's cheek.

"Mac," I said gallantly, "your wife has brought scones to their perfect and utmost evolution. She has made the super-scone. Only, Helen isn't a scone you know."

At this point Helen was found trying to pull the marble clock down from the mantlepiece. Her mother rescued the clock as it was falling, and she scolded the fair Helen.

"You are all theory," she cried to me. "What would you do in a case like this?"

"Same as you did," I answered hastily, and then added: "Only I would try to give her so many interesting things to play with that she'd forget to want the clock."

Then Mrs. Mac indignantly dragged out Helen's toys from a cupboard.

"Dozens of them!" she cried, "and she is tired of every one."

Then I discoursed on toys. The toys of the world are nearly all bad. Helen has a beautiful sleeping doll that cost five pounds; rather I should say that Helen had a beautiful sleeping doll that cost five pounds. On the one occasion that Helen was allowed to play with it she made a careful attempt to open the head with a pair of scissors to see what made the eyes close and open. Then her mother put the doll in a box, packed the box in a trunk, and explained to Helen that the doll was to lie in that trunk until Helen had a little baby girl of her own.

I explained to Mrs. Mac that the toy a child needs is one that will take to pieces. Every toy should be a mine of discovery. The only good toys that I know of are Meccano and Primus, but there is much need for constructive toys for younger children.

"Mac," I said, "if you were even a passably good husband you would be making Montessori apparatus for your offspring."

We have many arguments like this. Mrs. Mac's problem is that of a million mothers; she has to fit the child into an adult environment. Yesterday she was painting in oils. The baker whistled outside and she ran out to get the bread. On her return she found that Helen was busily painting the pink wall-paper a prussian blue.

Wealthy mothers solve the problem by employing nurses, but the solution is a poor one. Few nurses know enough about children, and many do positive harm by frightening the child. Nor can the hired nurse give the infinite amount of love that a child demands. If she could it is probable that she would be sacked, for no mother likes to see her child lavish his love on another. On more than one occasion I have discovered that the parents of children who loved me were hostile to me. That is natural. If a father is continually hearing his daughter say: "Mr. Neill says this; Mr. Neill says that," I have every sympathy with him when he growls: "Damn this Neill blighter!" On the other hand I have no sympathy with him if he expects me to ask his little Ada how her dear charming papa is.

* * * * *

A book of ten volumes might well be written on the subject of parents and teachers. If a teacher were the author no publisher would look at it, for the language would be unprintable.

To the teacher the parent is an enemy. When Mrs. Brown comes to school she and the dominie chat pleasantly about the weather, while the children look on and marvel. Little Willie is amazed to see his mother smile as she talks, for it was only last night that he heard her say: "That Mr. Smith is by no means a gentleman. Did you see his nails?" Poor little Willie does not know that his mother and the dominie are using fair smiles to cover a real hostility. Mrs. Brown will talk agreeably all through her visit, but as she is shaking hands on the doorstep she will say, "Oh, by the way, Mr. Smith, Willie came home last night saying that he wasn't allowed to play hockey yesterday. I want him to play every Wednesday."

"But," says Mr. Smith deferentially, "I—er—well, Wednesday is the day when the Seniors play, and—er—since Willie is a Junior I—er—I—"

"Oh, thank you so much," she gushes, "I knew that you would arrange that he will play on Wednesdays," and she sails away.

Or perhaps Mrs. Brown will put it on to her husband.

"The way things are done at that school are disgraceful, Tom. You must go and see Smith and insist that the boy has his hockey."

Well, the poor father comes up to school, and he and the dominie discuss the weather and Lloyd George. All the time Brown is trying to muster up enough courage to tackle the hockey question.

"Er," he begins after clearing his throat, "my wife was saying something about—er—what a splendid view you have from here!"

"First rate," nods the dominie. "Your wife was saying?"

"Er—something about hockey." He coughs. "Splendid game! I—er—I must go . . . er—good-bye."

No mere man can badger a dominie.

From the parent's point of view a teacher is a rival when he isn't a sort of under-gardener. The parent would never think of arguing with the doctor when he says that Willie has measles; the doctor is a specialist in disease, and the parent is not. But it is different with the dominie. He is a specialist in education, but then so is the parent. That is possibly one of the reasons that the teaching profession is such a low-class one, for a teacher is merely a specialist in a world of specialists. Everybody knows how a child ought to be brought up. In justice to parents I must confess that there are only two teachers in Britain to whom I should trust the education of any child of mine. Most teachers are instructionists only, and the parent has some ground for suspicion.



X.

Duncan was talking about awkward moments to-night, and he told of the shock he got when he joined the army and found that the sergeant of his squad was an old pupil of his.

"I think I can beat that, Duncan," I said, and told him the story of an army lecture. I had a commission in the R.G.A. for a short time, and one morning I had to give a lecture to the men of the battery on lines of fire. They were mostly miners, and I tried to make the lecture as simple as possible. I began with the definition of an angle and went on to circular measurement. I noticed that one man stared at the blackboard in bewilderment, a very stupid looking fellow he was. When the lecture was over I approached him.

"I don't think you understood what I was trying to tell you," I said.

"I did have some difficulty in following it, sir," he said.

"H'm! What were you in civil life?"

"Mathematical master in a secondary school, sir."

I could not rise to the occasion. I fled to the mess and ordered a brandy and soda.

Speaking about rising to the occasion brings to my mind another army incident in which I did not shine. I was a recruit in the infantry, and a gym sergeant was putting us through physical jerks. He told us the familiar tale that although we had broken our mothers' hearts we wouldn't break his; in short he put the wind up us. I got very nervous.

"Right turn!" he roared, and I thought he said "Right about turn."

He told the squad to stand easy, and then he eyed me curiously.

"You! Big fellow! Take that smile off your face!"

I don't know why he said that for I couldn't have smiled at that moment for anything less than my ticket. He studied me carefully for a bit, then enlightenment seemed to dawn on him.

"I got it!" he exclaimed triumphantly.

"I know wot's wrong with you! You've got a stupid face; you can't think; you never thought in yer life."

I looked on the ground.

"Did yer ever think in yer life?"

"No, sergeant," I said humbly.

"I blinkin' well thought so!" he said and moved away.

Then the worm turned. Who was he that he should bully a scholar and a gentleman? I would lower him to the dust.

"Sergeant!"

He turned quickly.

"Wot d'ye want?" and he tried to freeze me with his look.

"It isn't my fault I can't think, sergeant; I was unfortunate enough to spend five years at a university."

His mouth gaped, and his eyes stared, but only for a moment. Then he rose to the occasion.

"I blinkin' well thought so!" he cried. "Squad! . . . . Tshun!"

* * * * *

It is Sunday night, and I have just been to town. At the Cross I stood and listened to a revivalist bellowing from a soap-box. His message was Salvation but I was more interested in the man than his message. Consciously he is out to save sinners, but I suspect that unconsciously he is out to draw attention to himself. I do not blame him. I do the same thing when I publish a book; Lloyd George and George Robey and the revivalist and I are all striving each in his little corner to draw attention to ourselves.

The exhibition impulse is in every child. A child loves to run about naked, but then society in the form of the mother steps in and says: "You must not do that!" But we know that every wish lives on in the depths of the mind, and the childish wish to exhibit the body appears in later years as a desire to preach or sing or act or lecture.

This is the psychology of the testimonials for liver pills which appear in every local paper. It is the psychology of much crime. Many a slum youth glories in having been birched, simply because his gang looks on him as a hero.

I hasten to state that exhibitionism alone does not make a Cabinet Minister or a comedian. There are other motives from infancy, an important one being the desire for power. I recall that as a boy I delighted in following a drove of cattle and smiting the poor creatures hard with a cudgel. Freud would say that in this way I was releasing sex energy, but I think that the infantile sense of power was at the root of my cruelty; here was I, a wee boy, controlling a big heavy stot. It is love of power that makes little boys want to be engine-drivers.

To the teacher this love of power is the most vital thing in a child's make-up. Discipline thwarts the boy at every turn, and our adult authority is fatally injuring the boy's character. Our task is to provide the child with opportunity to wield his power. We suppress it and the lad shows his power in destructive instead of constructive activities. I find that I keep returning to this subject of suppression, but it is the most important evil in education. It does not matter how perfect a teacher makes his instruction in arithmetic; if he has not come to see that suppression of a child is a tragedy, his instruction is of no value. From an examination point of view, yes; from a spiritual point of view, no.

* * * * *

Parents and teachers fail because they cannot see the world as the child sees it. The child of three is a frank egoist. He cares for no one but himself, and the world is his. Anger him and he would have you drawn and quartered if he had the power. His instincts prompt him to master his environment, and to begin with, when he is a few weeks old, his environment and his own person are indistinguishable.

Homer Lane gives a delightful description of the child's first efforts and how they are frustrated by ignorant adults.

"At a very early age the child becomes aware through various processes that his own hand which he has seen moving across his line of vision is a part of himself, and that he can move it himself. He has discovered power. He then enters upon his career. The same motive that will govern his behaviour for the rest of his life comes into operation, and he wants to use this new-found power for some purpose that will increase his enjoyment of life. Up to this time he has had only one pleasure, and that was to do with the commissariat. Having discovered power over his fist he therefore wants to put it in his mouth . . . a difficult task requiring much practice and patient perseverance.

"As he goes on working he learns that his power increases with effort, and now his motive is modified. At first it was purely materialistic; he wanted to have his fist in his mouth. Now he wants to put it there. His interest is in doing the thing rather than in having it.

"This is the spiritual element in his present desire, and now comes the first mistake in education. The mother, analysing the behaviour of the child, has noticed his complaint at the difficulty of the task as fatigue sets in, and, misunderstanding the motive of the child she helps him to put his fist in his mouth. But that is just what the child did not want, and he protests violently against this interference with his purpose in life.

"The mother again makes a false analysis of the situation, and concludes that his protest is the result of his disappointment that there is no nourishment in the fist. She then gives him food or paregoric, whatever may be her method of dealing with the spiritual unrest of her child, and thus drugs his creative faculties."

I have said that the infant is an egoist. If his egoism is allowed full scope he will enter upon the next stage of life, the self-assertive stage, with a huge capacity for being altruistic. This stage comes on about the age of six or seven. But if the child has had parents who believe in moulding character he will have had many severe lectures about his selfishness. These lectures will not have cured his selfishness; they will have driven it underground for the moment. The selfishness of adults is one result of the moral lecture in childhood, for no wish or emotion will remain buried for ever.

The age of self-assertion is the rowdy age, and naturally it is now that father uses his authority. The child is still ego-centric, but in a different way. At the age of three he was the king of the world; at the age of seven he is the king of the other boys who play with him. He is now reckoning with society, and he uses society as a background against which he may play the hero. Thus be bleeds Jack's nose for no reason in the world other than that he thus asserts himself. If he plays horses with the boy next door he insists upon being the driver.

It is at this period that he should be free from authority. If authority in the shape of father or teacher or policeman steps in to suppress his self-assertion the boy becomes an enemy of all authority and very often anti-social. The "rebel" in the Socialist camp is a good specimen of the man whose self-assertive period was injured by authority, and I suspect that the truculent drunk is letting off the steam that he should have let off at the age of eight.

The third stage in the evolution of a child is the adolescent stage. For the first time the boy becomes a unit in society. Hitherto he has played for his own hand; his games have been games in which personal prowess was the desired aim. Now he feels that he is one of a team. Even before puberty the team-forming impulse is seen; Putter, for instance, in The Boy and his Gang, gives ten to sixteen as the gang age.

These divisions are purely arbitrary, and children differ much in evolution. The teacher, however, should have a general knowledge of these three phases. I have often seen a school prescribe cricket or hockey for boys who are still in the self-assertive stage. The result was that, having no team impulse, each boy had no further interest in the game when the umpire shouted: "Out!"

I used to umpire for boys and girls of eight to eleven, and it was a tiresome business. Quite often when a boy had been bowled with the first ball, he would throw down the bat in disgust and refuse to give the other side an innings. There was nothing wrong with the children; what was wrong was that a team phase game was being forced on a self-assertive phase group.

* * * * *

Duncan and two other dominies were in to-night and we got on to golf yarns. I remarked that there were very few good ones, and they all trotted out their favourites. I liked Duncan's best.

An oldish man was ploughing his way to the tenth hole at St. Andrews, and, when he ultimately holed out in nineteen, he turned to his caddie.

"Caddie," he cried in disgust, "this is the worst game I ever played."

The caddie stared at him open-mouthed.

"So ye have played afore, have ye?" he gasped in amazement.

Why are there no cricket or football stories, I wonder? Possibly because they are team games; a team is a crowd, and I never heard of a joke against a crowd. A crowd is an impersonal thing, and no one can joke about an impersonal thing. I never heard of a joke about the moon or a turnip. Yet are there not jokes against a nation, and a nation is a crowd? Take the joke about the Scot who was brought up at Bow Street for being drunk and disorderly. The magistrate, before passing sentence, asked the accused if he had anything to say for himself.

"Weel, ma lord, it was like this. I travelled frae Glesga to London yesterday, and I got into bad company in the train."

"Bad company?"

"Aye, ma lord. When I got into the train at Glesga Central I had twa bottles o' whuskey in my bag, and . . . a' the other men in my compartment was teetotal."

That looks like a joke against a long-suffering race, but is it so in reality? Make the traveller an 'Oodersfield' man on his way to see the Cup-tie Final at Chelsea, and it is not changed in essence. Only it has become a convention that the Scot is a hard drinker. It is the personal touch that makes the joke, and it is the individual that we laugh at.

I presume that the typical joke about Scots' meanness appeals to Englishmen because Englishmen are mean themselves. No joke appeals to a man unless it releases some repressed wish of his own. No one expects a devout Roman Catholic to see the point of a joke about extreme unction. The professional comedian to be a success must know what the crowd repressions are. Dickens is a great humorist because he knew by intuition what the crowd would laugh at. And that brings me to the subject of human types.

Broadly speaking there are two types of man. One is called an extrovert (Latin, to turn outwards); he identifies himself with the crowd, and he lives the life of the crowd. Lloyd George and Horatio Bottomley are typical extroverts; they seem to know instinctively what the crowd is thinking, and unconsciously they speak and act as the crowd wants them to speak and act. Dickens was another, and that is why he has so universal an appeal.

The other type, the introvert type, turns inward. They do not identify themselves with the crowd. What the public wants does not concern them; they give the crowd what they think it ought to want. This class includes the thinkers, the men who are in advance of their time. An introvert is never popular with the crowd because the crowd never understands him. He can never get away from himself, and he sums up events according to the personal effect they have on himself. Yet to the unconscious of the introvert crowd opinion is of the greatest importance.

In the realm of humour the extrovert is a success; what amuses him amuses the crowds. But the introvert laughs alone, and in some cases he decides that the crowd has no sense of humour, and he becomes a cynic.

It is necessary that the teacher should be able to recognise the different types. The extrovert is popular; he it is who leads the gang. Doubts and fears do not trouble him; life is pleasant and he laughs his way through it. But the introvert is the boy who stands apart in a corner of the playground; he is timid and fears the rough and tumble of team games. He feels inferior and he turns in upon himself to find superiority. Thus he will day-dream of situations in which he is a hero like David Copperfield when he stood at Dora's garden gate and saw himself rescuing her from the burning house.

I think that the job of the teacher is to help each type to a position midway between introversion and extroversion. The boy who lives in the crowd might well be tempted to take more interest in his own individuality, and the introvert might well be encouraged to project his emotions outward.

* * * * *

To-night Mac told me a story about old Simpson the dominie over at Pikerton. Last summer an English bishop was touring Scotland, and one morning he drove up to Simpson's school in a big car, flung open the door and walked in.

"Good morning, children," he cried.

The bairns sat gazing at him in awe. He turned to Simpson.

"My good sir," he protested, "when I enter a village school in England, the children all rise and say: 'Good morning, sir'!"

"Possibly," said Simpson dryly, "but in Scotland children are not accustomed to see strangers walk into a school. Scots visitors always knock at the door and await the headmaster's invitation to enter."

* * * * *

Mac and I were talking about education to-night.

"I never heard you mention the teaching side of education," he remarked. "Giving a child freedom isn't enough, you know. What about History and Geography and so on?"

"I think they are jolly well taught in many schools, Mac," I said. "It is the psychological side of education that is a thousand years behind the times."

"Yes," said Mac doubtfully, "but suppose you have a school of your own, I presume you'd teach the English yourself?"

I nodded.

"How would you do it?"

I thought for a while.

"I'd reverse the usual process, Mac," I said. "Usually the teacher begins with Chaucer and works forward to Dickens; I would begin with Comic Cuts and Dead-wood Dick and work back to Chaucer."

"Oh, do be serious for once," he said impatiently.

"I am quite serious, Mac," I said. "The only thing that matters in school work is interest, and I know from experience that the child is interested in Comic Cuts but not in the Canterbury Tales. My job is to encourage the boy's interest in Comic Cuts."

I ignored Macdonald's reference to idiocy, and went on.

"You see, Mac, what you do is this: you see a boy reading Dead-wood Dick, and you take his paper away from him and possibly whack the little chap for wasting his time. But you don't kill his interest in penny dreadfuls, and the result is that in later years he reads the Sunday paper that supplies the most lurid details of murders and outrages. My way is to encourage the lad to devour tales of blood and thunder so that in a short time blood and thunder have no more interest for him. The reason why most of the literature published to-day is tripe is that the public likes tripe, and it likes tripe because its infantile interest in tripe was suppressed in favour of Chaucer and Shakespeare."

"But," cried Mac, "isn't Shakespeare better for him than tripe?"

"Yes and no. If every poet were a Shakespeare the world would be a dull place; you need the tripe to form a contrast. The best way to enjoy the quintessence of roses, Mac, is to take a walk through the dung-heaps first."

"What books would you advise your pupils to read?" asked Mac.

"In their proper sequence . . . Comic Cuts, Deadwood Dick, John Bull, Answers, Pearson's Weekly, Boy's Own Paper, Scout, Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, White Fang, The Call of the Wild, The Invisible Man, practically anything of Jack London, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Kipling."

"And serious literature?"

"All literature is serious, Mac."

"I mean Dr. Johnson, Swift, Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, and that lot," said Mac.

I smiled.

"Mac, I want you to answer this question: have you read Boswell's Life of Johnson?"

"Extracts," he admitted awkwardly.

"Bunyan's Life and Death of Mr. Badman?"

"No."

"Milton's Areopagitica?"

"Er—no."

"Swift's Tale of a Tub?"

"No."

I sighed.

"Would you like to read them?" I asked.

"I don't think they would interest me," he admitted.

"Then in heaven's name, why expect children to have any interest in them? If these classics weren't shoved down children's throats the adult population of this country would be sitting of an evening reading and enjoying Milton instead of John Bull."

Mac would not have this.

"Children must read the classics so that they may get a good style," he said.

"Style be blowed!" I cried. "The only way to get a style is by writing. Mac, I should cut out all the lectures about Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, and let the children write during the English period . . . if I had periods, which I wouldn't. I don't want style from kiddies; I want to see them create in their own way. If they are free to create they will form their own style."

In a conversation one always has a tendency to overstate a case, and as the argument went on I found myself saying wild things. Writing calmly now I still hold to my attitude concerning style. I love a book written in fine style, but I refuse to impose style on children. In every child there is a gigantic protest. Thus the son of praying parents often turns out to be a scoffer. I had a good instance of the danger of superimposition of style.

I had a class of boys and girls of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen years of age. For one period a week we all wrote five minute essays, and then we read them out. Sometimes we would make criticisms; for instance one girl used the word "beastly" in a serious essay, and we all protested against it. Then one day the head-master decided that they should write essays for him. He set a serious subject—The Function of Authority, I think it was—and then he went over their books with a blue pencil and corrected their spelling and style.

Three days later my English period came round. I entered the room and found the class sitting round the fire.

"Hullo!" I said, "aren't you going to write?"

"No," growled the class.

"Why not?"

"Fed up with writing. We want to talk about economics or psychology."

A fortnight later they made an attempt to write short essays, but it was a miserable failure; all the joy in creation had been killed by that blue pencil.

I can give an example of the other way, the only way. One boy of fifteen hated writing essays, and when I began the five minute essay game he sat and read a book. After a time I gave out the subject "Mystery," and I saw him look up quickly with flashing eyes.

"Phew! What a ripping subject!" he cried, "I must have a shot at that!"

His shot was promising, and he continued to make shots, until some of his essays were praised by the class. Then one day he came to me.

"I don't know anything about stops and things," he said, "and I want you to tell me about them."

This is my ideal of education; no child ever learns a thing until he wants to learn it. That lad picked up all he wanted to know about stops in half-an-hour. He was interested in stops because he wanted to write better essays. I need hardly say that he had listened to hundreds of lessons on stops during his school career.

* * * * *

To-morrow I return to London, and to-night I went over to say good-bye to Dauvit.

"Aye, dominie, and so ye're gaein' back to London!" he said.

"I don't want to leave this lazy life, Dauvit," I said, "but I must go back and start my school."

"It'll cost ye some bawbees to gang to London," put in Jake Tosh. "Penny three ha'pennies a mile noo-a-days I onderstand."

"A shullin' a mile for corps," remarked the undertaker.

Dauvit chuckled.

"So ye'll better no dee in London, dominie," he laughed.

"And that reminds me of Peter Wilson, him that passed into the Civil Service and gaed to London. He came hame onexpectedly wan mornin' and his father he says: 'What in a' the earth brocht ye hame in the month o' February, Peter? Surely ye dinna hae a holiday the noo?'

"'No,' says Peter, 'but I had a cauld and I thocht I was maybe takkin' pewmonia, and, weel father, corpses is a bob a mile on the railway.'"

"Dauvit," I said, "I don't care where I am buried."

"Is that so?" asked Jake in surprise. "What's become o' yer patriotism, dominie? I canna onderstand a man no wanting to be buried in his ain country. For my pairt I wudna like to be buried ony place but the wee kirkyaird up the brae there."

Dauvit grunted.

"What does it matter, Jake, whaur ye're buried?"

"Goad," said Jake, "it matters a lot. The grund up in the kirkyaird is the best grund in Scotland. It's a' sand, and they tell me that yer corp will keep for years in that grund."

Dauvit laughed, but the others seemed to take Jake's preservation argument seriously.

"Jake," said Dauvit, "does it no strike ye that to be buried in yer native place is a disgrace?"

"Hoo that, na?" said Jake.

"Because the man that bides in the place he was born in is of nae importance. A' the best men leave their native village, aye, and their native country. Aye, lads, the best men and the worst women leave their native country."

"I sincerely trust that you are not insinuating that they leave together, Dauvit," I put in hastily.

"No, they dinna do that, dominie; but whether they meet in London I dinna ken," and he smiled wickedly.

Jake spat in the grate.

"I dinna see what the attraction o' London is," he said with a touch of contempt.

"It is rather difficult to describe," I said. "For one thing you feel that you are in the centre of things. You are in the midst of all the best plays and concerts and processions . . . and you never think of going to see them. Then all the important people are there, the King and Lloyd George and Bernard Shaw . . . but you never see them anywhere. Then there are the places of historic interest, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's . . . and you don't know where they are until your cousins come up for a week's trip, and then you ask a policeman where the Tower is. And the strange thing is that you get to love London."

"There will be a fell puckle funerals I daresay," said the undertaker.

"To tell the truth," I answered, "I have never seen a funeral in London. In the suburbs, yes, but never in the centre of the West End. I've often seen them at the crematorium in Golders Green."

The undertaker frowned.

"That crematin' business shud be abolished by act o' Parliament," he said gruffly. "It's just a waste o' guid wood and coal. They tell me it taks twa ton o' coal ilka time."

I was surprised to find that the broad-minded Dauvit agreed with the undertaker in condemning cremation. I suspect that early training has something to do with it, and there may be an unconscious connecting of cremation with hell-fire. Dauvit's argument that cremation would destroy the evidence in poisoning cases was a pure rationalisation.

I wondered why the topic of funerals kept coming up, and I laughingly put the matter to Dauvit.

"Maybe it's because we're sad because ye're gaein' awa," he said half-seriously. "We'll miss yer crack at nichts."

At last I got up to go.

"Aweel, Dauvit, I'll be going," I said.

"Aweel, so long," said Dauvit without looking up. The others said "Guidnicht" or "So Long," and I went out. I was sorry to leave these good friends, and they were sorry to lose me; yet we parted, it may be, for years, just as if we were to see each other to-morrow. We are a queer race.



XI.

When I arrived in London to-night I received a blow. A letter awaited me saying that the landlord of the school I was taking over had decided to sell the property. Thus all my dreams of a free school vanished in smoke. There isn't a house to rent in London; thousands are for sale, but I have no money to buy. If I had money I should hesitate to buy, for if a school is a success it expands, and the ideal thing to do is to take it out to the country where there is fresh air and space to grow.

To-night I feel pessimistic; it is difficult to be an optimist when a long-planned scheme suddenly falls to pieces.

I think of my capitalist friend Lindsay. He could buy me a school to-morrow, and never miss the money, but I don't think I should accept it. He would always have a big say in the running of it, and his ideals are not mine. I know other people with money, but I fancy that they have no faith in me. That is one of the disadvantages of writing light books like A Dominie's Log. The adult reads it and says: "Funny chap this!" But people have little faith in funny chaps. You can be a funny chap if you are a magistrate or a cabinet minister, but a teacher must be a staid dignified person. He must be a man who by his serious demeanour will impress the children and lead them out of the morass of original sin in which they were born. Montessori is catching on in the educational world not entirely because of her excellent system; part of her success is due to the fact that she never makes a joke; she is always the dignified moral model teacher.

Poor Montessori! Here I am transferring my irritation at the landlord who sold my school to her. I beg her pardon. Nor am I really annoyed with the landlord; the person I am annoyed with is myself. I bungled that school business.

Now I feel better. When I am irritated I always think of the traveller from St. Andrews. He arrived at Leuchars Junction and had five minutes to wait for the Edinburgh train. He entered the bar and had a drink. He had a second drink, and then awoke to the fact that he had missed the train. The next train was due in two hours. The barmaid shut the bar between trains and the traveller went out on the platform. It was a cold rainy November night. He went to the waiting room, but there was no fire there.

"Anyway," he said, "I'll have a smoke," and he filled his pipe. Then he found that he had but one match left. He struck it, and it went out. He went out to the platform and found an old porter screwing down the lamps. The porter knelt down to tie his lace and the traveller approached him.

"Could you oblige me with a match?"

The old porter eyed him dispassionately.

"I dinna smoke. I dinna believe in smokin'. I dinna hae a match."

The traveller walked wearily forward to an automatic machine and inserted his last penny . . . and drew out a bar of butterscotch. He tossed it over the line, and then he threw his pipe after it. He walked along the platform, and then he came back. The old porter was again tying his lace. The traveller suddenly rushed at him and kicked him as hard as he could.

"What did ye do that for?" demanded the poor old man when he picked himself up.

The traveller turned away in disgust.

"Och, to hell wi' you; ye're ay tying your lace!" he said.

Lots of people cannot see the joke in this yarn, and I challenge anyone to explain the point.

* * * * *

Good fortune came to rescue me from sorrowing over my lost school. It sent me to Holland thuswise: about five hundred Famine Area children were coming from Vienna to England, and I was invited to become one of the escort. Then it struck me that I might go over earlier and have a look at the Dutch schools. I hastened to get a few passport photographs; I looked at them . . . and then I thought I shouldn't risk going. However, on second thoughts, I decided to risk it, and went to the passport office. There a gentleman with a big cigar looked at the photograph; then he looked at me.

"The face of a criminal," his eyes seemed to say as he studied the photo.

"Isn't it like me?" I asked in alarm.

"Quite a good likeness," he said brusquely, and passed me on to the next pigeon-hole.

At last I landed in Flushing, and a kind guard found me a carriage. There I began to learn the Dutch language. "Niet rooken." Scots reek means smoke: hurrah! "do not smoke!"

"Verbodden te spuwen." "It is forbidden to——" no, that wouldn't be nice! Got it! "Do not spit!"

At this juncture a pretty Scheveningen lassie entered and greeted me. Alas! I knew but five words of Dutch, and when I thought the matter over I concluded that they were not very appropriate for carrying on a mild flirtation. Still, it's wonderful how much you can do with facial expression. Just before the train started a man entered. He knew English, and with more kindness than knowledge of humanity he offered to act as interpreter. The ass! as if a fellow can tell a girl through an interpreter that her hair is just the shade he admires. This fisher lassie was the only pretty girl I saw in Holland in ten days.

Rotterdam. My first and abiding impression was that never before had I seen so many badly-dressed people. If I had money and a profiteering complex I should set up a Bond Street shop in the centre of Rotterdam. No, that's wrong; that wasn't my first impression at all: my first impression was of a window filled with cigars at six cents each—one and a fifth pence. From that moment I loved Holland and the Dutch. What did it matter if their clothes were badly cut? What did anything matter? I dived into that shop and bought twenty . . . and ten yards farther on discovered a shop with fatter and longer cigars at five cents each. Three days later in the Hague I walked round the cigar shops for two hours, dying for a smoke, but not daring to buy a cigar at five cents lest in the next street I should find a shop offering them at four cents.

It was in Rotterdam that I discovered how bad my manners were. I was sitting in a cafe when a gentleman entered. He swept off his hat and bowed graciously . . . and I hastily put a protecting hand on the pocket containing my pocket-book. But every man who entered greeted me in the same way, and I realised that I was in a polite country. By the end of the week I was beating the Dutch at their own game, for I swept off my hat to every policeman, shopkeeper, tramwayman I spoke to.

On a Monday morning I walked forth to inspect the Dutch schools. I saw a troop of little girls following a mistress, and I joined the procession. They turned into a playground, and I followed. I approached the lady.

"Do you speak English?"

"Engelish! Ja!" she said with a smile.

"I am an English—no, Scots teacher," I explained, "and I should like to see the school."

"I will ask the head-mistress," she said, and entered the school, while I stood and admired the bonny white dresses of the girls.

She returned shaking her head.

"The head-mistress says that it is not allowed to visit a school in Holland without a permit from the Mansion House."

"A rotten country!" I growled, and went away.

In the street I ran into a group of boys led by a master who was smoking a fat cigar.

"Speak English?" I asked, lifting my hat gracefully.

"Nichtenrichtilbricht," he said; at least that's how it sounded.

"Thank you," I said, lifted my hat again, and fell in behind the boys. I was determined to see this thing through.

I tackled him again when we reached the playground.

"I the head would see," I began, "the ober-johnny, the chef."

"Ja!" he exclaimed with an enlightened grin, and nodded. In ten seconds the chief stood before me. He could speak a broken English, and said he would be glad to show me round. It was a third class school, and I gathered that in Holland there are three grades of State school; the first class is attended by the rich, the second by the middle class, and the third by the poor.

The school was very like a Board School in England. The children sat in the familiar desks and were spoon-fed by the familiar teacher. There was nothing new about it. I noticed that hand writing seemed to be the most important thing, and each class teacher proudly showed me exercise books filled with beautiful copper-plate writing. Most obliging class teachers they were. Would I like to hear some singing? It was wonderful singing in three parts; what surprised me was that the boys seemed to be just as keen on singing as the girls. I have always found it otherwise in Scotland and England.

In this school I got the gratifying news that corporal punishment is not allowed in Dutch schools, and later I learned that this applies to all reformatories also.

I think the Dutch are fond of children. Children seem to be everywhere. I went to the police-station to register as an alien, and as the inspector was examining my passport this wee girl of three toddled in and climbed on his knees. He laid down his pen and fondled the child. Then his wife came in; she had been out shopping, and wanted him to admire the big potatoes she had bought. I was delighted to see the human element mingle with the official. A country that allows wives and children to mix up with its red-tape is on the right road to health if not wealth.

I went to the Hague next day, and English friends met me at the station and piloted me to their home. Next morning I visited an establishment called the Observatiehuis, and found that the superintendent had spent six years in England and had an English wife. The observation house, he explained, is a home for bad boys. When convicted they are sent there and are "observed." If a boy is well-behaved he is sent to live with a family and learn a trade; if he is incorrigible he is sent to a reformatory.

I looked in vain for the new psychological way of treating delinquents. There was discipline here, but it was kindly discipline, for Mr. Engels is a kindly man; the boys sang as they swept the stairs. That was good, yet, it was Mr. Engels that brought freedom into the school; his successor may be a bully.

From Mr. Engels I got a letter of introduction to a real reformatory in Amersfoort, and off I set. Amersfoort is inland and I expected to find much language difficulty there, for I thought it unlikely that English would be spoken so far inland.

Amersfoort is a beautiful old town, and I at once set out to find the Coppleport mentioned in my guide-book. I suppose I looked a lost soul. A youth of eighteen jumped off his cycle and lifted his cap. Then he pointed to a badge he wore in his coat.

"Boy scout!" he said.

"Excellent!" I cried, "you speak English?"

He held out his hand.

"Good bye!" he said; "pleased you to meet!"

"How do you do?" I said.

He grinned.

"God damn!" he said sweetly.

After that conversation seemed to die down. I managed to convey to him that I was looking for the Coppleport, and he led me to it. Gradually his English improved, and he told me of his brother in England. A nice lad. I told him that I had once had a long conversation with the great B.P., but he looked blank.

"Baden Powell, your chief," I explained.

He shook his head; he had never heard of B.P. I think now that what was wrong was that he did not understand the name as I pronounced it; possibly he knows B.P. under the sound of Bahah Povell or something similar.

On the following morning I went to the reformatory. It was a beautiful building fitted with every appliance necessary . . . and one not necessary—a solitary confinement room. A young teacher, Mr. Conijn, a very decent chap, who could speak excellent English, showed me round. Every door we came to had to be opened with a key and locked behind us. Here there was more of military discipline than in the Observatiehuis, but none of the boys looked sulky or unhappy. The relations of the boys and the teachers were fine; as Conijn passed a lad he would pull his hair or pass a funny remark, and the boy would grin and reply.

"Any self-government?" I asked.

"We tried it but it was no good. It may work with English boys but not with Dutch," said Mr. Conijn.

"Did you have locked doors?" I asked.

"Oh, yes."

"Then self-government hadn't the ghost of a chance to succeed," I remarked.

We entered a class where an old man of about eighty was teaching a group.

"Why do these lads keep their eyes on the ground?" I asked. "Is their spirit crushed out of them?"

Conijn laughed.

"They are admiring your boots!" he cried.

I wore a pair of ski-ing boots on my trip, and all Holland stared open-mouthed at them. If I had been wanted for a murder I don't think anyone in Holland could have identified me, for their eyes never got above my boots.

One of the masters, Mr. van Something-or-other, very trustingly lent me his bike, and on the following day I cycled to Laren to see the Humanitarian School there. Nearly every road has a cycle path on one side and a riding path on the other, but in spite of the excellent roads I did not enjoy cycling in Holland; a free wheel was of little value on the flat surface. One delightful feature about cycling in Holland is that there are no mid-day closing times for pubs, but on the other hand you cannot raise much of a thirst in a flat country.

Well, I reached Laren after many narrow escapes, for I was continually forgetting that you keep to the right in Holland. A postman came along, and I jumped off.

"Humanitaire School?" I asked as I doffed my hat.

By his expression I judged that he did not know the institution under that name.

"School," I said, and he nodded and pointed to the village State school.

"Nay! School Humanitaire!" I persisted.

At this juncture another man came forward, and the two of them jawed away gutturally for some time. I began to grow weary.

"Hell!" I murmured to myself half aloud.

The postman brightened, and enlightenment came to him.

"Engelissman!" he exclaimed.

"Liar!" I cried, "I'm a Scot," and I left the two of them discussing Engelissmen.

After much trouble and many bitter words I found the school. A gentleman who looked extremely like Bernard Shaw before Shaw's hair turned grey, was digging in a garden with a lot of boys and girls. He was Mr. Elbrink, the head-master. He could speak English and he showed me round.

The school is rather like what is known as the crank school in England. In a manner it is the super-crank school, for everyone on the staff is teetotal, vegetarian, and a non-smoker. Here it was that I heard of Lightheart for the first time, and I blushed for my ignorance of the gentleman. It appears that he was a great educational reformer, a sort of Froebel I fancied, for handwork seemed to be the main consideration in the school. But I regret to say that the school did not impress me much. Too many children were doing the same sort of work; they sat in desks and held themselves more or less rigid. Here was benevolent authority again, not true freedom. All schools in Holland are State schools, and the Humanitarian School is one of them. It is almost impossible for a State school to be very much advanced; I think it is impossible, for the State is the national crowd, and a large crowd has little use for the crank.

I returned to Amersfoort, where by this time I had become the guest of the International School of Philosophy. This is a building standing in about twenty acres of ground amid the pine forests two miles south of the town. I was the sole guest, for the summer classes had not started. This school is the beginning of a great movement. Here students from every country will meet and discuss life and education. Mr. Reiman, the president, talked long and earnestly to me about the scheme, but I found myself challenging his insistence on spiritual education.

The aim of the school is to develop the spiritual side of man, an excellent aim . . . so long as man does not imagine that by living on the higher plane he is annihilating his earthly self. Everyone there was very, very kind to me, but I did not feel quite in my element, for I am not an obviously spiritual person. I find that I can discuss the higher life best when I have a glass of Pilsener at my elbow and a penny cigar in my mouth. It is clear that I have a complex about the higher life, and it may be a sour-grapes complex. All the same I should like to attend a summer course at Amersfoort and listen to the wise men dilate on the Bhagavadgita, Psycho-analysis and Religion, Plato, Sufism, and other subjects on the programme; anyway I would have no prepossessions and prejudices in listening to Dr. G. R. S. Meads' course of lectures on The Mystical Philosophy and Gnosis of the Trismegistic Tractates.

From Amersfoort I went to Amsterdam.

"Umsterdum, dree klasse, returig," I said to the ticket office girl.

"Third class return?" she asked with a smile and gave me the ticket.

I was indignant.

It is the most humiliating thing in the world to ask a question in Dutch and to be answered in English. In Rotterdam I had stopped a seafaring looking man and tried to ask him in Dutch what was the way to the Hotel de France. He listened patiently while I struggled with the language; then he spat on my boot.

"Hotel de France?" he replied in broad Cockney, "damned if I know."

On the way to Amsterdam I got into a carriage full of farmers and one of them made a remark to me. I shook my head.

"Engelissman?" he said.

I nodded.

Then those men began to talk about Engelissmen, and they talked and laughed all the way to Amsterdam. Every now and then one of them would jerk his thumb in my direction. It was a trying journey.

Arrived in Amsterdam I made for the Rijks Museum. At the door a seedy-looking man touched me on the arm.

"Guide, sir?"

"No thank you."

"Two hundred rooms, sir! Official guide."

"No thank you."

He kept pace with me, and in a weak moment I inquired his charge. It was three guilden (five shillings), and I saw at once that the dirty dog had won, for he took on an air of possession.

"Righto," I said resignedly, and he led me into the building.

He began his tiresome patter.

"Thees picture was painted in 1547; beautiful ees eet not? Wonderful arteest!"

I sighed.

"Take me to the Rembrandts," I said.

I cannot describe this incident. I hated the beast because I had been so weak as to accept his services. The beauty of Rembrandt and Franz Hals was lost on me; all I could see was the dirty face of that guide. Rembrandt's Night Watch made me forget the creature for a moment, but when he began to describe it I fled in horror. We finished up in the modern section, and as I looked at van Gogh and Cezanne and Whistler's Effie Deans his squeaky voice kept up a running commentary. I rushed from the building after a ten minutes' tour, paid the worm his three guilden . . . and then went back and enjoyed the gallery. But I nearly committed murder in the Rijks Museum that day. If ever I am hanged it will be for murdering an official guide. This particular specimen spoiled my visit to Amsterdam. I could not get away from the thought of my weakness, and I fled the city.

In the train going back to Amersfoort a genial Dutchman made a remark to me. I resolved that I should pretend to be a fellow-countryman.

"Ja!" I said, and the answer seemed to satisfy him. He went on to say other things, and when his facial expression seemed to demand an affirmative I said "Ja!"

After a time he frowned as he said a sentence.

"Nay!" said I.

That did it. He became white with anger, and swore at me all the way to Amersfoort. He had a fine command of language, too, and I was extremely sorry that I could not understand it.

On the Saturday I set off on my return journey to Rotterdam, doing a tour in American fashion of Leiden on the way. It was like going home, for I liked Rotterdam. I think it was the gay paint on the barges that attracted me so much.

On the Sunday morning the Austrian kiddies arrived, and my sight-seeing ended.



XII.

The Austrian kiddies arrived at the Maas station on Sunday morning, and the Dutch folk gave them a kindly welcome. The Rotterdam committee was in charge, and I stood back because it was not my job. The kiddies came tumbling out of the train with great relief, for they had travelled for two nights. All had heavy rucksacks, many of them the packs of their dead fathers and brothers.

My eye lit on little Hansi. She stood on the platform crying, and I went forward to comfort her. Alas! I knew less German than I did Dutch, and I knew not what she said; but one of the Austrian escort told me that she had been homesick all the way. There is, however, a universal language that all children understand, and I took wee Hansi in my arms and cuddled her. The flow of tears stopped and she took from a small basket slung to her neck a tiny naked doll. I included Puppe in the cuddle, and Hansi smiled. A dear wee mite she was, very very thin, with great big eyes that were sunken. Her tears did not affect me, but when she smiled I found myself weeping, and I had to blow my nose hard.

The four hundred and fifty-eight children were bundled across the road to a ship, which took them in two parts across the Maas to the large building used by the Cunard Line for emigrants. Many of them thought they were on the way to England, and ten minutes later I found a wee chap gazing round in wonder on the land of England.

"This aint England, anywye," he said at last in evident disgust; "look at them clogs! This is Holland."

The boy was a Londoner resident in Vienna. There were about a dozen English children in the party. Later I found one standing in front of a group of Austrian boys.

"Any one o' you," he was shouting, "I'll box the whole gang o' you!"

This Cockney, his little brother, and their sister were the thorn in the flesh of the escort.

"Absolute terrors," declared everyone, but I liked them.

Many of the children were middle class, children of doctors, lawyers, architects, and so on; nice kiddies they were. The bigger girls could speak English, and I used them as interpreters.

On the Monday morning the English escort took charge. The first task was medical inspection, and the two English doctors and four or five Dutch doctors prepared for action. Our job was to marshal the kiddies, help them to take their shirts off, and then bundle them into the inspection room. It sounds easy, but it was a weary business. You looked down the list for No. 258, and you found a name.

"Mitzi Dvoracek!" you called, and wondered whether a boy or a girl would appear. There was no answer . . . and an hour later you found a little girl who had lost her identity card, and you concluded that she was Dvoracek, but she wasn't; her name was Leopoldine Czsthmkyghw, or something resembling that.

I was greatly troubled by their questions. Following a method I had used with indifferent effect while conversing with garrulous Dutchmen in railway carriages, I answered "Ja" and "Nay" alternately. Many of the children stared at me in wonder and I marvelled . . . until I discovered that most of them had been asking me the way to the lavatory. After that I just pointed to a door in the wall when a boy asked me a question, and when one lad didn't seem to understand, I took him by the back of the neck and shoved him through the door. Then I found that he had been asking the time.

I gave up replying to questions after that.

The children had all been examined, and one lad stood alone; he had no card and no one could place him. Then he confessed that he was a stowaway who had been too old to join the batch, and had boarded the train quietly at Vienna. Mrs. Ensor, the secretary of the Famine Area Committee, proved herself a sport by declaring that she would take him to England. The good Dutch folk also rose to the occasion, and went out and bought him a pair of short trousers.

In the afternoon I sat down beside a few boys. And then I did a fatal thing. A boy dropped his pencil and I picked it up, threw it over the house . . . and then produced it from another lad's pocket. That did it. In two seconds I had a hundred children round me roaring at me. An Austrian lady explained that they were calling me a magician and asking for more. I blushingly told her to explain to them that it was my only trick. Sighs of disgust followed, and I was on the point of losing my popularity when I hastily got the lady to explain to them that I had a better talent . . . I could make anyone laugh merely by looking at him. Fifty of them at once challenged me to begin, and I had a great time. One lad beat me, but then he had toothache, a blistered heel, and was homesick.

After a time I asked them to sing to me, and they sang sweet folk songs of their home. They were delightful singers, and the boys sang as eagerly and as well as the girls. In England boys usually hate singing. I marvelled at their all knowing the same songs, and one of the girls explained to me that in Austria every school has the same songs; more than that, every school has the same class-books, and if two children living a hundred miles apart meet on the street they can say to each other: "I'm at page 67 of my Geography. What page are you at?"

They demanded a song from me, and I sang Now is the Month of Maying, and, by special request, Tipperary. Then I asked them to sing their National Anthem, and the lady began it, but the children did not follow her. At my look of surprise the lady said: "They cannot sing it because now they feel that they have no Austria left to sing about."

A man's voice sounded from inside the building, and they rushed indoors, for it was the voice of their beloved Ministry of Health doctor, who had brought them from Vienna, and they all loved him. They forgot me at once and left me . . . all but one. Little Hansi put her wee hand in mine and snuggled closer . . . and that's why I love her so very much.

On Tuesday morning they all took up their packs, and we set off for England via the Maas boat and station. We packed into carriages and set off. There was no water on the train, but we laughed and said: "We'll be in Flushing in two hours! We are a special!" We were. We left the Maas station at one o'clock, and we travelled until three. Then we drew up . . . and found we were back at the Maas station. Where we had been I don't know, but it was the biggest mystery of my life. Well, we crawled along past picturesque villages where women with white caps and red arms smiled on us and gave us water to drink. And at eight o'clock we reached Flushing all very weary and extremely dirty. The kiddies had a good meal set out on white tablecloths, and the doctor and I had the best Pilsener of our lives. We handed over the kiddies to the ship stewards and the fresh escort from England, and retired to rest.

I awoke at six and found that all the children were on deck, and the bad English boy almost in the water, for his heels were off the ground and his head far down towards the water. He was looking for fish, he said. None of the children had seen the sea before, but I think they were too tired to be excited about it. They did become excited when they saw the cliffs of Dover.

Much to my annoyance a gentleman had been teaching them God Save the King on the way over. I was annoyed because I knew it was a piece of jingoism meant for the journalists at Folkestone. When we drew up at the pier, sure enough the gentleman struck up the tune, and the kiddies sang it. But the girls who could speak English sang God Save YOUR Gracious King. I thought it a beautiful touch; the finest piece of good taste I have ever come across.

I didn't like the well-dressed ladies who came bossing around at Folkestone. Frankly I was jealous. As I was leading the children off the steamer, one of them touched me on the arm and asked me to make way for the children. And I smiled to see that the women in rich dresses managed somehow to get in front of the camera.

We took the children to Sandwich by rail and then to a camp by motor lorry. It was a tiresome job loading and unloading the lorry, but after six trips I found that every child was in camp. I went off to have a wash and some tea, and then, glowing with self-satisfaction at all I had done, I lit a cigar and walked outside. A gentleman passed me.

"Are you a worker?" he demanded.

"I—er—I suppose I am—in a way," I said modestly.

"Well, don't you think you might find something to do?" he asked. "There's plenty to do, you know."

Then for the first time in my life I understood the old Mons Ribbon men who used to annihilate the recruit with the terse phrase: "Afore you came up!"

The pressmen passed by, a dozen of them with the stowaway in their midst. Presently they posed him and a dozen cameras snapped while a cinema burred. And next day the papers told a romantic story; the stowaway had crept into the train at Vienna, and, foodless, had hid until he arrived in Rotterdam. Then darkly he had crept on board the ship and had been discovered at Folkestone. Also when next day I saw in the pictorial papers a photograph of a boy violinist playing to his chums, I was not very much surprised to find the title of the photo was: The Stowaway Entertains His Companions. As a matter of fact, the fiddler wasn't the stowaway at all, but this incident makes me think hard about history. If a Fleet Street reporter changes one boy into another, why, we may be all wrong in our history. Henry VIII. may only have had one wife, and the reporter who interviewed him may have had so much sack to drink that his vision along with the journalistic touch may have manufactured the other five. The tale of King Harold being shot through the eye at the Battle of Hastings may have arisen from a reporter's using the figurative expression that William the Conqueror "put his eye out." Nor, after reading the account of the landing of the Austrian children, can I believe the tale of the minstrel Taillifer who sprang into the water to lead the Normans in landing. And as for the time-honoured phrases, "Take away that bauble!" and "England expects every man to do his duty," I don't believe they were ever uttered—not now.

I am not singling out journalists as special misreporters. Not one of us can report an incident truly. There is a good example of this truth in Swift's Psychology and Everyday Life, just published. Swift prepared a stunt as a test for his adult class. In the midst of a serious lecture two men and two women students created a disturbance outside in the lobby, then they burst into the room. One held a banana pistol-wise at another's head. Swift dropped a toy bomb, and one of the students staggered back crying: "I'm shot!"

One student dropped a parcel containing a brick, and all yelled and made much noise. The class was seriously alarmed until they were assured that the whole affair was a put-up job. Each student was asked to write an account of what had happened, and the result of their attempts is so astounding that the reader becomes uncertain whether any witness in a law-court ever tells the truth. Few, if any, students could identify one of the wranglers; every account said that the banana was a real pistol; only one or two saw the brick drop. The strangest thing was that many were quite sure of the identity of the actors . . . and one or two of the accounts named students who had long since left the college. I write from memory, but the facts were as arresting as the ones I have given.

This makes one uneasy about the methods the police adopt to identify a prisoner. If I saw a man shoot another in Piccadilly, it is a thousand to one chance that I should not be able to identify him later. Yet many a man has been hanged on identification.

But I meant to finish my account of the Austrian kiddies. The time came when I had to leave them and return to London. I set out to find my Hansi to say good-bye to her. I saw her in the distance . . . and then I ran away, for I hate saying good-bye.

I liked those kiddies, dear wee souls, just as sweet as any English kiddies, but then children have no nationality; they are lovable for they all belong to the Never Never Land. Barrie proved himself a genius when he created Peter Pan, for Peter symbolises man's highest wish—to become a little child and never grow up. "Genius," he says, "is the power of being a boy again at will." It is true in his case. Yet this kind of genius is retrospective; it is a regression. The genius who will help man to look forward instead of backward must not return to boyhood; he must go forward to superman. To put it psychologically, Barrie's genius comes from the unconscious, but what the world needs is a man whose genius will come from the superconscious, the divine.



XIII.

I have just been reading Jack London's Michael, Brother of Jerry, and I am full of righteous rage. What a picture! It is the story of how performing animals are trained, and before I had read half the book I made a vow that never again will I sit through a performance of animals.

The tale of Ben Bolt the tiger, if known by the masses, would kill every animal turn on the stage. Ben Bolt, fresh from the jungle, is broken by the trainers. The method is unspeakable; he is lashed with iron bars and stabbed with forks until in agony he falls senseless in the arena. This treatment goes on for weeks . . . and in the end many good, kindly people see Ben Bolt, a miserable, broken animal, sit up in a chair like a human. And they laugh. My God!

Then there is Barney the good-natured mule that was once a family pet. Later he becomes the celebrated bucking mule, and a prize is offered to anyone who will keep on his back for one minute. Audiences go into fits of laughter at his antics. But the audiences do not know that Barney was trained with a spiked saddle, and that for months life was one long agony of pain.

Is my anger due to the cruelty I am repressing in myself? I don't care whether it is sadism or the spark of the divine in me. All I care about is that this inferno of pain must cease.

Never has any book affected me as this one has done. By word of mouth and by my pen I shall try my hardest to send dear old Jack London's message round the world. Public opinion is the only thing that can stop the misery of these broken creatures, and I suggest that the anti-vivisectionists turn their energies to this infinitely worse evil. The vivisectionists, at any rate, are working for humanity, but the brutes who break performing animals are merely amusing crowds of good people who know nothing about what goes on behind the scenes.

* * * * *

I see in the newspaper that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks held up the traffic in Piccadilly. They appeared on a balcony at the Ritz, and the crowd went frantic. The super-hero and the super-heroine of the cinema drew the crowd's emotion to them, and Tagore the Indian poet arrived in town at the same time unnoticed. It would seem that the crowd responds to the presence of the unimportant person only. London went mad over Hawker and Jack Johnson, and Georges Carpentier; and if Charlie Chaplin were to come over, I fancy London would take a general holiday.

No one will contend that these people are of supreme importance in the scheme of life. Charlie is a funny little man; Douglas Fairbanks is a fine lump of a fellow; Mary Pickford is a sweet little woman. But Tagore will live longer; Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud are of greater moment to humanity, yet each could walk out of Paddington Station and be unrecognised by the crowd.

The morning paper shows well that the crowd is interested only in unessentials. "Punish the profiteers!" was the press cry a few months ago. Well, they punished the profiteers . . . and prices continued to rise. A few years ago the cry was: "Flog the white slave traffickers!" They flogged them, and yet I still see thousands of white slaves in the West End of London. And while Europe is sinking into anarchy and bankruptcy to-day, the only remedies the crowd representatives—the press—can think of are remedies of the Hang-the-Kaiser type. I believe that the crowd still thinks that juvenile crime is mainly caused by cinema five-part dramas.

The crowd is rather like the individual unconscious; it is primitive, and like the unconscious it can only wish. The crowd that welcomed Mary and Douglas was closely akin to the personal unconscious. Douglas stands to each individual in the crowd as the eternal hero, the man who always wins. Each man in the crowd sees in Douglas his own ideal self, so that when the office boy cheers Douglas he is cheering himself. Mary has been well named "the world's sweet-heart"; she is the ideal heroine, beautiful, wronged, protected by six foot of masculinity. Both come from the world of make-believe, the world of phantasy. Their arrival in England simply made a dream come true.

Now I am certain that if any individual in the great Piccadilly crowd had met Douglas and Mary on the boat, he or she would have looked at them with interest, but there would have been no cheering and throwing of roses. What the crowd does is to raise an emotion to a superlative degree. In a full hall you will laugh at a joke that would not bring a smile to your face in a room. You become absorbed in your crowd, and you are fully open to your crowd's suggestion. I generally laugh at Charlie Chaplin, but one night a cinema manager, a friend of mine, gave me a private view of Charlie's latest production. I sat alone in the large cinema palace . . . and I couldn't even smile. Had a crowd been there to share my laugh, I should have roared.

The Douglas-Mary episode makes me pessimistic about the future of democracy. For democracy is crowd rule, and the crowd is a baby when it isn't a savage. Yet we have no real democracy in this country. We have a slave state, the exploiters and the exploited, the "haves" and the "have nots." Douglas and Mary came over, and the poor beauty-starved populace forgot for the moment its poverty, and showered all its pent-up emotion on the people from picture-book land.

In Elizabethan times the world was a place of wonder; every mariner was coming home with wondrous tales of Spanish gold and men with necks like bulls. All you had to do to find a reality that was more wonderful than fancy was to sail away across the sea. But to-day the world holds no mystery; there are no pirates to overcome, no prisoned maidens to rescue. Reality means toil and taxes and trouble. But there is a land where men are dew-lapped like bulls . . . the land of phantasy. There is a society where the villain always gets his deserts . . . the land of film pictures. And when your hero and heroine walk out of the picture and become real flesh and blood, what are you to do? After all, you cannot pour all your emotion into your looms and office-desks and counters. Sweet-faced Mary does not know it, but she is one of the best allies that our capitalist system could have; for if the crowd were not showering its emotion on her it might well be using it up in the smashing of all the ugly things in our civilisation.

* * * * *

I have been thinking of the crowd in another aspect. Last year in a merry mood I sat down to write a novel. I meant it to be a comedy, but, having no control over the characters, I found that they insisted in making the story a farce. The result was The Booming of Bunkie. I thought it a very funny book, and I laughed at some of my own jokes and murmured, "Good!" I impatiently awaited the book's appearance, and when the day of publication came I sat down hopefully to await the press notices. The first one to come in was lukewarm.

"Why do papers send a funny book to an old fossil of a reviewer with no sense of humour?" I said, testily and waited for the next post. Well, it came; it brought three adverse notices and a letter.

"Dear Dominie, I admired your Log, but why, oh why, did you perpetrate such a monstrosity as The Booming of Bunkie?"

Then a friend wrote me a letter.

"Dear old chap,—You are suffering from the effects of the war. If the war has induced you to write Bunkie, I am all for hanging the Kaiser."

For weeks I clung to the belief that the crowd had no sense of humour . . . then I re-read my novel. I still hold that it is funny in parts, but I see what is wrong. It is a specialised type of humour, or rather wit, the type that undergraduates might appreciate. In fact I was recently gratified to hear that the students of a Scots university were rhapsodising about it. The real fault of the book is that it is clever, and to be clever is to be at once suspect.

I naturally like to think that the circulation of a book is generally in inverse proportion to its intrinsic merit. J. D. Beresford's novels are, to me, much better than those of the late Charles Garvice, yet I make a guess that Garvice's circulation was many times greater than Beresford's. Still I cannot argue that the reverse is true—that because a book does not go into its second edition it is necessarily good. I find that the problem of circulations is a difficult one. I cannot, for instance, understand why The Young Visitors sold in thousands; I failed to raise a smile at it. Again, there is my friend although publisher, Herbert Jenkins. I didn't think Bindle funny, yet it has been translated into umpteen European languages. Jenkins himself does not think it funny, and that, possibly, is why he is my friend.

The most surprising success to me was Ian Hay's The First Hundred Thousand. I read Pat MacGill's Red Horizon about the same time, and thought Hay was stilted and superior with a public-school man's patronising Punch-like attitude to the working-class recruits. I thought that he didn't know what he was writing about, that he had not reached the souls of the men. MacGill, on the other hand, gave me the impression of a warm, passionate, intense knowledge of men; he wrote as one who lived with ordinary men and knew them through and through. Yet I fancy that The Red Horizon, popular as it was, did not have the sales of The First Hundred Thousand.

I was lunching with Professor John Adams one day in London. We got on to the subject of circulations, and he said that he had just been asking the biggest bookseller in London what novel sold best.

"Have a guess," said the Professor to me.

"David Copperfield," I said promptly.

He laughed.

"Not bad!" he said, "you've got the author right, but the book is A Tale of Two Cities."

He then asked me to guess what two authors sold best among the troops at the front during the war.

"Charles Garvice and Nat Gould," I said, and the Professor thought me a wonderful fellow, for I had guessed aright.

There is a whiskered Ford story which tells that Mr. Ford took a new car from his factory and invited a visitor to have a spin. They started off, and went seven miles out. Then the car stopped. Ford jumped out and lifted the bonnet.

"Good Lord!" he cried, "the engine hasn't been put in! The car must have run seven miles on its reputation!"

I think that books run many miles on reputation alone. Like a snowball the farther a circulation rolls the more it gathers to itself. But what is it that makes a book popular? The best press notices in the world will not send the circulation of a book up to a hundred thousand level. What sells a book is talk. Scores of people said to me: "Oh, have you read The Young Visitors?" I hasten to add, as a Scot, that I personally did not help to increase the circulation; I borrowed the book from an enthusiast. Talk sells a book, but we have to discover why people talk about The Young Visitors and not about—er—The Booming of Bunkie. The book that is to sell well must be able to touch a chord in the crowd heart, and The Young Visitors sold because it touched the infantile chord in the crowd heart; it brought back the happiest days of life, the schooldays: again, its naive Malapropisms appealed to the crowd, because we are all glad to laugh at the social and grammatical errors we have made and conveniently forgotten about.

Bunkie did not reach the hundred thousand level because it was too clever; it was a purely intellectual essay in wit rather than humour. And the crowd distrusts wit, and that is why the witty plays of Oscar Wilde are seldom produced, while Charley's Aunt goes on for ever.

I am tempted to go on to a comparison of wit with humour, but I shall only remark that wit is an intellectual thing, whereas humour is emotional. Humour is elemental, but wit is cultural. Without a language you could have humour, but without language there could be no wit.

* * * * *

I have just come across a small book entitled Hints on School Discipline, by Ernest F. Row, B.Sc.

"Boys will only respect a master whom they fear," he says. I have been preaching this doctrine for years . . . that respect always has fear behind it . . . and it pleases me to find that an exponent of the old methods should support my argument.

When I began to read the book I was amazed.

"Good Lord!" I cried, "this chap should have published his book in the year 1820. He advocates a system that modern psychology has shown to be fatal to the child. It is army discipline applied to schools."

I found it hard to finish the book, but I read every word of it and then I said to myself: "The majority is on the side of Row. Eton, Harrow, many elementary teachers would agree with him. He is evidently an honest sort of fellow, and he must be reckoned with. I must try to see his point of view."

And I think I see it. He accepts current education with its set subjects, time-tables, order, morality, and he is trying to adapt the young teacher to what is established. Hence to maintain all these things, we must have stern discipline and swift punishment. But I wonder if Row has thought of the other side of the question; I wonder if he has asked himself whether order and time-tables and obedience and respect are really necessary. I should like to meet him and have a chat; I think I should like him, and further, I think that I could convert him to the other way . . . if he is under forty.

Ah! Horrid thought! Is it possible that Row is pulling our legs? No, he writes as an honest man. Perhaps he knows all about the modern movement; perhaps he has studied Montessori, Freud, Jung, Homer Lane, Edmond Holmes, and found that they are all pathetically wrong. Mayhap he has proved that the child is a sinner.

"The young teacher should never address a boy by his Christian name or nickname," he says.

Oh, surely he is pulling our legs!

* * * * *

At intervals during the past few years I have been puzzled when people congratulated me on my village school in Lancashire. I had quite a number of misunderstandings on the subject. Then one day I discovered that there was a village schoolmaster in Lancashire called E. F. O'Neill. I wrote him telling him that I was coming to see his school, and one July morning I alighted at one of the ugliest villages in the world, and I walked past slag-heaps and all the horrors of industrialism to a red building on the outskirts. Three or four boys were digging in the school garden. I walked into the school, and two seconds after entering I said to myself: "E. F. O'Neill, you are a great man!"

There were no desks, and I could see no teacher. Half-a-dozen children stood round a table weighing things and cutting things.

"What's this?" I asked.

"The shop," said a girl, and after a little time I grasped the idea. You have paste-board coins, and you come to the shop and buy a pound of butter (plasticene), two pounds of sugar (sand), and a bottle of Yorkshire Relish (a brown mixture unrecognisable to me). You pay your sovereign and the shop-keeper gives you the change, remarks on the likelihood of the weather's keeping up and turns to the next customer.

I walked on and found a boy writing.

"Hullo, sonny, what are you on?"

"My novel," he said, and showed me the beginning of chapter XII.

A young man came forward, a slim youth with twinkling eyes.

"E. F. O'Neill?"

"A. S. Neill?"

We shook hands, and then he began to talk. I wanted to tell him that his school was a pure delight, but I couldn't get a word in edgeways. If anything, he was over-explanatory, but I pardoned him, for I realised that the poor man's life must be spent in explaining himself to unbelievers. I disliked his tacit classing of me with the infidel, and I indignantly took the side of the infidel and asked him questions. Then he gave me of his best.

He is a great man. I don't think he has any theoretical knowledge, and I believe that anyone could trip him up over Freud or Jung, Montessori or Froebel, Dewey or Homer Lane; but the man seems to know it all by instinct or intuition. To him creation is everything. I was half afraid that he might have the typical crank's belief in imposing his taste on the pupils, and I mentioned my doubt.

"No," he said, "we have a gramophone with fox-trots, ragtimes, Beethoven and Melba, and the children nearly always choose the best records."

Love of beauty is a real thing in this school. The playground is full of bonny corners with flowers and bushes. The school writing books are bound in artistic wallpaper by the children, and hand-made frames enclose reproductions of good pictures on the walls.

I saw no corporate teaching, and I should have asked O'Neill if he had any. If he hasn't I think he is wrong, for the other way—the learn-by-doing individual way—starves the group spirit. The class-teaching system has many faults, and O'Neill seems to have abolished spoon-feeding, but the class has one merit—it is a crowd. Each child measures himself against the others, not necessarily in competition. Perhaps it is the psychological effect of having an audience that I am trying to praise. Yes, that is it: the individual-work way is like a rehearsal of a play to empty seats; the class-way is like a performance before a crowded house. It is a projection of one's ego outward.

"This method," said O'Neill, "may be out-of-date in a month."

I think highly of him for these words alone. He has no fixed beliefs about methods of study; he himself learns by doing, and to-morrow will be cheerfully willing to scrap the method he is using to-day. If the ideal teacher is the man who is always learning, then O'Neill comes pretty near that ideal. I wish that every teacher in Britain could see his school.

The big problem for the heretical teacher is the problem of order, or rather of disorder. When a child is free from authority, he usually leaves his path untidy; he leaves his chisels on the bench or the ground; he strews the floor with papers; he throws his books all over the room. Now O'Neill's school was not untidy, and I marvelled.

"Oh, the kiddies look after that," he explained. "They have voluntary workers among themselves who do all that, and if a child does not do his job, the others naturally complain: 'Why did you take it on if you aren't going to do it properly?'"

But somehow I am not convinced; I want to know more about this business. To find so highly developed a social sense in small children runs dead against all my experience. I must write to O'Neill for further information.

* * * * *

On re-reading the pages of this book I feel like throwing it on the fire. I find myself disagreeing with the statements I made a few weeks ago. When I began to write it I was a more or less complete Freudian, and in an airy fashion I explained away my actions. Why should pale blue be my favourite colour? I asked myself this when I painted my cycle blue, and I found a ready answer in a reminiscence . . . my first sweetheart wore a blue tam-o'-shanter. This is called the "nothing but" psychology. Do I dream of a train? Quite simple! It is merely "nothing but" a sexual symbol!

Life is too complex for a "nothing but" psychology. Last night a girl told me a sexual dream she had had, but when she gave her associations we found that the deep meaning of the dream had nothing to do with sex. Freud says that about every dream is the mark of the beast, but then I think he believes in original sin.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the psychology of flogging. It is generally stated that the flogger is a sexual pervert, a Sadist, and undoubtedly there are pathological cases where men find sexual gratification in inflicting or in watching the infliction of pain. In the pathological case the gratification is conscious, but I believe that many respectable parents and teachers find an unconscious gratification. It is absurd to say to a man like Macdonald: "Your punishing is 'nothing but' Sadism." Yet I think that a little test might decide the matter. If the accused flogger is shocked or indignant at the idea I should be inclined to think that the accusation was a just one.

If I say to Simpson: "Excuse my mentioning it, old man, but I don't think you love your wife," he will laugh heartily, for he has been married for a month only, and is still very much in love. His laugh shows that his love is real; my rude remark touches no chord in his unconscious. But suppose I make a similar remark to Smith, who has been very much married for ten years! He will hit me in the eye, thereby betraying the fact that my remark touched what his unconscious knows to be true. His blow is physically directed to me, but psychically he is hitting to defend his conscious from his unconscious.

Hence if a flogger is angry when I accuse him of being a Sadist, I guess that he is a Sadist.

I tried the experiment on Macdonald. He shook his head sadly.

"Poor chap," he said feelingly, "you're daft!"

"Right!" I said, "you aren't a Sadist, anyway, Mac. You must flog because it is your method of self-assertion. As I've told you many times, you strap kids because wielding a strap is your childish way of showing your power."

Then Mac became angry, and when I hinted that my remarks must have hit the bull's-eye . . . he laughed again. He is a baffling study in psychology.

"You don't know much about it, old chap," he said genially.

"Hardly anything at all," I said with true modesty, "only I know one thing about you, and that is that the fault always lies in yourself. When you flog Tom Murray, you are really chastising the Tom Murray in yourself . . . that is, the part that your wife knows so well—the part of you that leaves the new graip out in the rain all night, that rebels against the authority of the School Board and the inspectorate. Tom is being crucified for your transgressions."

Barrie, wizard as he is, failed to understand the full significance of Shakespeare's line: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves."

* * * * *

The opposite of the Sadist is the Masochist—the person who finds sexual gratification in being beaten or bullied. When 'Arriet proudly boasts about the black eye that 'Arry gave her on Saturday night, she is being masochistic, and the woman who likes to be bullied by the strong, silent man is likewise a masochist. I do not say "nothing but" a masochist, because she is also a Sadist, for Sadism and Masochism are complementary in the same person.

It is an understood fact that many people find joy in suffering, and I can recollect feeling something akin to joy when the dentist, before the days of the local anaesthetic, used to lay hold on my molars.

Hence I look back to the day when I whacked Peter Smith for cruelty to a calf, and I acknowledge that I was wrong. I recall explaining to him that I wanted him to realise what suffering meant, but I was completely mistaken. If Peter were a Sadist in his cruelty, my cruelty to him was giving unconscious gratification to the Masochistic part of him. If his cruelty to the calf was due to his self-assertion again I did the wrong thing, for the fear evoked by my strap merely inhibited his desire to assert himself in cudgelling calves. I think now that there was nothing to be done; his cruelty showed that his whole education had been wrong. Had he been allowed to create all the way up from one week old he would have applied his interest to making rabbit-hutches instead of to beating calves.

I remember a questioner at one of my lectures. I had been trying to elaborate the release theory, and had said that a boy should be encouraged to make a noise so that he will release all his interest in noise as power.

"If a boy liked torturing cats, would you encourage him on the theory that suppression by an adult would cause the child to retain his interest in torturing cats?"

"Certainly not," I said, and the lady crowed. I do dislike questioners at any time, but when they crow . . . .! However, I tried to hide the murder in my heart by smiling.

"What would you do?" she asked sweetly.

"I don't know, madam," I said, "but I can make a rapid guess . . . I very probably would use the toe of my boot on him, thereby showing that my own interest in cruelty was still alive. But five minutes later I should try to discover what was at the back of the boy's mind."

Not long ago I studied a small boy whose chief pleasure was in pulling bees' wings off. I never mentioned bees to him, but I got him to talk about himself. He was suffering from a deep hatred of his teacher, and he had a bad inferiority complex. He feared to play games like football and hockey because of his sense of inferiority. All that was wrong with him was that he was regressing. Life was too difficult for him, and he took refuge in his infantile past; his pulling off wings was the destructiveness of the infant. But the important thing to remember is that destructiveness is simply constructiveness gone wrong. The child is born good, and all his instincts are to do good. Bad behaviour is the result of thwarted desire to do good. This is shown in the case of Tommy on page 115.

* * * * *

At one time I was absolutely certain that the Great War was caused by economic factors; British and German capital were competing, and the losing party took up the sword. I am not so certain now. It may be that the cataclysm was a natural ebullition of human nature, and as a cause the economic rivalry may have been just as insignificant as the murder of the Archduke.

During the last few decades education has been almost wholly intellectual and material; intellectual education gave us the don, and material education gave us the cotton-spinner. The emotional and the spiritual in mankind had no outlet. In the unconscious of man there is a God and a Devil, and intellectual activities afford no means of expression to either. And when any godlike or devilish libido can find no outlet it regresses to infantile primitive forms; thus, while the brain of man was concerned with mathematics and logic, the heart of man was seeking primitive things—cruelty, hate, and blood.

It may be then that the war was the direct result of the world's bad system of education. No boy will destroy property if he is free to create property, and no nation will take to killing if it is free to be creative. Intellectual education allows no freedom for the creative impulse; it not only starves the creative impulse but it drives it into rebellion. An outlet is always a door to purification. The old men who sat at home hated the Hun because their libido was being bottled up, but the young men who were using up their libido in fighting talked cheerfully of "Old Fritz." The chained dog soon becomes savage, and the chained libido reverts to savagery also.

I have often said that the outrages of the German troops in Belgium became understandable to me when I studied a Scots school where suppressive discipline turned good boys into demons. The brutality of the German army was a natural result of the brutality of their discipline. So is it in the individual soul, and in the national soul. Intellectualism and materialism were the Prussian drill-sergeants who enslaved the emotional life of the citizen and of the nation. War was a means of releasing this pent-up emotion.

The ultimate cure for war is the releasing of the beast in the heart of mankind . . . not the releasing after chaining him up, but the releasing of the beast from the beginning. Personally I do not believe that he is a wild beast until we make him one by chaining him; he is primitive and animal and amoral, but I believe that by kind treatment we can make him our ally in living a goodly life. The Devil is merely a chained God.

The problem for man and for mankind is to reconcile the God and the Devil in himself. The saint represses the devil; the sinner represses the god. The atheist cries: "There is no God!" because he has repressed the God in himself. Then, again, many people project their personal devil; the men who shouted "Hang the Kaiser!" were subjectively crying "Hang the Devil in me!"

Who and what is this devil we carry in our hearts? We cannot tame him unless we can know him. The Freudians would say that he is the primitive unconscious, the tree-dweller in us. But that explanation is not enough for me. The tiger has no devil in him, and why should our remote savage ancestors leave us a devil as legacy? Yet the tiger is a devil whenever man formulates a law against killing; the man-eater becomes bad because he is a danger to man, and because the tiger is bad it is assumed that man is good. The ox that is slaughtered for our dinners might well look upon man as its special objective devil.

I have often argued that it is Authority that makes the beast in children a wild beast. That is true, but it does not go down to first causes. Why do adults exercise authority? To keep down the devil in themselves, the beast that their parents and teachers made wild by authority. Truly a vicious circle! But the devil is the cause of authority in the beginning.

Since there is no devil in the tiger and the ox, the animalism of man cannot be his devil. But man made his animalism a devil when he began to have ideals. Then it was that he began to talk of crucifying the flesh; then it was that the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. The devil in man is the negative of man's ego-ideal. The ethical self says that honesty is good, and dishonesty comes to be of the devil; it says that love is good, and hate then becomes devilish. No ego-ideal, no devil. The ox has no ego-ideal; therefore it has no devil. Man invented the devil to account for his failures.

This brings me to the question: why should man want to have an ego-ideal? Why should he praise self-sacrifice, love, charity, honesty, unselfishness, while he contemns hats, murder, cruelty, stealing, selfishness? It might be argued that he praises those attributes that make for the good of the herd, but I cannot take this argument as final. Rather am I inclined to look for the answer in what we vaguely call the divine. I think that there is a power . . . call it God or intuition or the superconscious or what-not . . . that draws man toward higher things. This spark of the divine raises man above the beast of the field, but yesterday he was the beast of the field, and like the nouveau riche, he scorns his humble origins.

I am forced to conclude that wars will not cease until man realises that his ego-ideal must be capable of being the working partner of his primitive animalism. When that time comes man will know that he is neither god nor devil, but . . . mere man.

* * * * *

I am spending my days wandering round London suburbs looking for a school. Of an evening I sit and think about how I shall furnish it. There will be no desks; instead there will be tables for writing and drawing on, chairs of all descriptions—arm-chairs, deck-chairs, straight backed chairs, stools. The children will make the tables and stools, and we may make a combined effort to make and upholster an arm-chair.

Then we must have at least one typewriter, not for office use, but for the children's use. The children will use it to type their novels and poems, and I think they would be tempted to type out poems from Keats and Coleridge, binding their own anthologies in leather or coloured paper.

There will be no school readers and no school poetry books. I hope that with the aid of the typewriter each child will make his own selection of prose and poetry.