I explained that Hugh had come voluntarily to me saying: "My father can't read or write, and I can't either, but I want to be able to read about the war and things like that." "I don't know what to make of it," said my visitor. "It is a great lesson on education," I said. "He feels that he wants to read ... and he comes to school seeking knowledge. And that's what I want to supersede compulsion. If I had my way no boy would learn to read a word until he desired to read; no boy would do anything unless he wanted to do it." Then he brought forward the old argument that freedom like that was handicapping them for after life; they would not face difficulties. "Hugh was up against a greater difficulty than most boys ever come up against," I said, "and he faced it bravely and confidently. When you are free from authority you have a will of your own; you know exactly what you want and you set your teeth and get it. You are on your own, you have acquired responsibility. Given a dictating teacher or parent a boy will do the minimum on his own responsibility. Good lord! if I make all these youngsters sit up and attend strenuously to my speaking I am not training them to face difficulties; I am simply bullying them, making them a subject race." "You are training character." "I would be training children to obey, and the first thing a child should learn is to be a rebel. If a man isn't a rebel by the time he is twenty-five, God help him! Character simply means a man's nature, and I refuse to change a man's nature by force; I leave the experiment to the judges and prison warders." I want to ask every dominie who believes in coercion what he thinks of the results of many years' coercion. Obviously present-day civilisation with its criminal division of humanity into parasites and slaves is all wrong. "But," a dominie might cry, "can you definitely blame elementary education for that?" I answer: "Yes, yes, yes!" The manhood of Britain to-day has passed through the schools; they have been lulled to sleep; they have never learned to face the awful truth about civilisation. And I blame the coercion of the teachers. Train a boy to obey his teacher and he will naturally obey every dirty politician who has the faculty of rhetoric; he will naturally believe the lies of every dirty newspaper proprietor that is playing his own dirty game. * * * I have been spending the week-end with a man I used to dig with in London. He is a great raconteur and we sat late swopping yarns. "Did you ever hear a good yarn without a point?" he asked. I said that I hadn't. "Well, I'll tell you one," he said, and he trotted out the following. In a small seaside town on the east coast an ancient mariner sits on the beach and yarns to visitors. When the Balkan War was going on my friend asked him if he had ever been to Turkey. My friend assured me that the man had never been farther than Newcastle in his life.