For this reason the English grammar schools, though despised because they are cheap and easily accessible to the middle classes, may have a better effect on the family life of the country than the fashionable public schools. The idea would be to get both good home education and good school education at the same time, especially when the parents have the luck to live in the country. Rural life is good for boys, both physically and mentally; it gives them a healthy interest in a thousand things, especially in a rudimentary kind of natural history, and it prevents them from acquiring the premature cynicism and sharpness that are amongst the most undesirable characteristics of young Parisians. [Sidenote: The Root of the Difficulty.] [Sidenote: The Natural World.] [Sidenote: The Argument from Social Interests.] The root of the moral difficulty is that the natural world is non-moral, and the natural world is all we have to appeal to when the various forms of the supernatural have all equally been rejected. After that we may argue that morality, in the most comprehensive sense, is the only sound basis for human societies, and that all social interests are on the side of it. That, no doubt, is true, and it is a good subject for sound reasoning, but reason is not authority, it is only an attempt to persuade, and the boyish nature detests moral lecturing. [Sidenote: International Immorality.] [Sidenote: The English Aristocracy.] [Sidenote: Want of Rectitude in its Judgment of Foreigners.] Boys, too, are sharp enough to perceive that all morality is abandoned by common consent in the dealings between nations. Both England and France have been thoroughly immoral in their dealings with weaker States, and in recent times Germany has shown herself no better. It is difficult to maintain fine moral theories in countries whose practice so openly contradicts them. Even the authoritative moral teaching of the English clergy, which may have had a good effect on the private lives of their pupils, has not given them anything like stern rectitude of judgment concerning foreigners; for the English aristocracy admired Louis Napoleon, certainly one of the lowest characters that ever existed. It was also entirely on the side of the immoral slave power in the United States. [Sidenote: Value of Public Opinion.] [Sidenote: French Disapproval of Debt.] [Sidenote: American Disapproval of Idleness.] [Sidenote: English Reprobation of what is Ungentlemanly.] [Sidenote: Military Professional Virtue.] [Sidenote: Medical Professional Virtue.]