So we went off at a tangent. I told him that personally I had not enough knowledge of black men to lay down the law about them, but I handed him a very suggestive article in this week's _New Age_ on the subject. The writer's theory is that in India black men are ostracised merely because they are a subject race, and he points out that in Germany and France the coloured man is treated as an equal. When I was told by a friend that the natives of India despised Keir Hardie because he carried his own bag off the vessel when he arrived in India I realised that the colour question was too complicated for me to settle. I have a sneaking suspicion that the coloured man is maligned; the average Anglo-Indian is so stupid in his attitude to most things that I can scarcely suspect him of being wise in his attitude to the native. I regret very much that I had not the moral courage to chum up with the coloured man at the university: prejudices leave one after one has left the university. I wish I knew what Modern Geography means. A few years ago the geography lesson was placed in the hands of the science teacher in our higher grade schools, and the educational papers commenced to talk of isotherms. I have never discovered what an isotherm is; I came very near to discovering once; I asked Dickson, a man of science, what they were, but a girl smiled to me before he got well into the subject (we were in a café), and I never discovered what an isotherm was. The old-fashioned geography wasn't a bad thing in its way. You got to know where places were, and your newspaper became intelligible. It is true that you wasted many an hour memorising stuff that was of no great importance. I recollect learning that Hexham was noted for hats and gloves. I stopped there once when I was motor-cycling. I asked an aged inhabitant what his town was noted for. "When I coom to think of it," he said as he scratched his head, "the North Eastern Railway passes through it." But the old geography familiarised you with the look of the map. Where it failed was in the appeal to the imagination. You learned a lot of facts but you never asked why. I should imagine that the new geography may deal with reasons why; it may enquire into racial differences; it may ask why London is situated where it is, why New York grew so big. For weeks before I left my school my geography lesson consisted of readings from Foster Fraser's _The Real Siberia_. I began to feel at home in Siberia, and what had been a large ugly chunk of pink on the map of Asia became a real place. There is a scarcity of books of this kind. Every school should have a book on every country written in Fraser's manner. I don't say that Fraser sees very deeply into the life of the Russian. I am quite content with his delightful stories of wayside stations and dirty peasants. He paints the place as it is; if I want to know what the philosophy of the Russian is I can take up Tolstoy or Dostoeivsky or Maxim Gorki.