That compromise is the start of a long process of self-deception. When he becomes a house master it will be so simple to put off parents with excuses. He will be able to justify himself, to say: 'These are stupid folk. They will worry me if I encourage them. I have my work to do. I must pacify them and get on with it.' And so the circle completes itself. The young man who sets out to reform school life, who brought to the task a fine, untried energy, ends in evasion, compromise and self-deception. Boys, parents, and masters are working at cross purposes. There are certainly a large number of entries on the debit side of the ledger. It remains to be decided what hand has written these entries and whether it is possible to erase them. To a large extent they are due to four things: the moral issue; the cult of athleticism, which is regarded as an antidote to immorality; the conspiracy of silence that exists between parents and boys and masters, and the long period a boy spends at school--the six years that separate so unduly the junior from the senior, that accentuate the blood system, that erect a wall shutting out the world at large. School life is too much of a walled garden, too much of a world in itself. It has remained monastic, it has not established contact with the movements of the hour. CHAPTER XII SOME SUGGESTIONS: THE LEAVING AGE WITH REGARD TO MORALS The ardent idealists with their thousand pretty schemes for the regeneration of mankind, find no difficulty in allotting a few panaceas to the Public School. We hear of the 'new world' and of the 'new spirit,' and there is glib talk about the phoenix and the ashes. A few laws have to be passed, a few peasants educated and there will be an end of competition. 'The strong will support the weak, the clever work unselfishly for the general good. Wealth and intellect will be placed at the service of the state. The relations of the sexes will be ordered by eugenics.' It is all very jolly, and unless to-day one subscribes unfalteringly to this belief in a new world, one is called a reactionary and a materialist. The millennium, we are told, is round the corner. The finest intellects of thirty centuries may have failed to find it, but the farm labourer has only to spend a few half-hours with an English grammar to discover it at his feet. It must be very nice to believe all that, to be able to comfort oneself in dark moments with the assurance that for one's children's children life will be a happy hunting ground. It must be a drug more potent than laudanum, more sweet than hashish. But it is of small avail in the dust and traffic of humanity. In the case of the Public Schools we shall do well to examine what is at hand and prescribe what cures we may, without the indulgence of distant speculation.