This combining of the offices seems to me a great mistake. For an editor should be a literary man with ideas on education, while a good secretary should be an organizer. Because a man can write columns on education, that is no proof that he is the best man to write to the office washerwoman telling her not to come on Monday because it is a holiday. I could edit the paper (I would take on the job for a hundred a year and the sport of telling the other fellow that his notions of education were all wrong), but I couldn't organise a party of boys scouts. Kitchener is a great organiser, but I shouldn't care for the editorials of _The New Statesman_ if he were editor. I think that the Institute does not want a man with ideas. It wants a man who will mirror the opinions of the Institute. To do this is a work of genius, for the Institute has no opinions. No man can represent a body of men. Suppose the Institute decides by a majority that it will support the introduction of "Love" as a subject of the curriculum. The editor may be a misogynist, or he may have been married eight times, yet the poor devil has to sit down and write an editorial beginning: "Love has too long been absent from our schools. Who does not remember with holy tenderness his first kiss?..." A paper can be a force only when it is edited by a man of force and personality. A man who writes at the dictation of another is a tenth-rater. That, of course, is why our press says nothing. * * * Little Mary Brown was stung by a wasp the other day as she sat in the class. "Henceforward," I said, "the wasp that enters this room is to be slain. Tom Macintosh I appoint you commander in chief." I begin to think that I prefer the wasp to the campaign against it. To-day I was in the midst of a dissertation on Trusts when Tom started up. "Come on lads, there's a wasp!" They broke a window and two pens; then they slew the wasp. The less studious boys keep one eye on the window all day, and I found Dave Thomson chasing an imaginary wasp all round the room at Arithmetic time. Dave detests Arithmetic. But when I found that Tom Macintosh was smearing the inside window-sill with black currant jam, I disbanded the anti-wasp army. * * * The Inspectors refuse to allow teachers to use slates nowadays on the ground that they are insanitary. To-day I reintroduced slates to all classes. My one reason was that my bairns were missing one of the most delightful pastimes of youth--the joy of making a spittle run down the slate and back again. I always look back with tenderness to my old slate. It was such a serviceable article. By running my slate-pencil up it I got all the beats of a drum; its wooden sides were the acknowledged tests for a new knife, as a hammer it had few rivals. Then you could play at X-es and O-ies with impunity; you simply licked your palm and rubbed the whole game out when the teacher approached.