And it is only natural that parents who are not particularly well off, and who have no private business into which they can draft their children, should ask themselves whether or not a public school education is worth the considerable personal sacrifice that will be entailed if their sons are to be sent to Wellington, Clifton, or Uppingham. 'We want to do the best for Tommy,' they say. 'But after spending £250 a year on him for five years what do we get in return? Tommy is not clever enough to pass into the civil service; he may get a mastership on a salary only slightly better than that of a Metropolitan policeman. Is it worth it?' When the head master to whom these doubts are carried, commences to enlarge on the moral qualities that are revealed and strengthened by 'the honest give and take of public school life,' the parent is still unsatisfied. 'Are you quite sure?' they say. 'Of course we know it's all exaggerated, but where there's smoke, you know, and one has heard....' Is it surprising that under such circumstances the mandarins of the public school profession should have erected a barricade of prejudice between themselves and criticism. Their maintenance is at stake. They have to persuade the parent that he is getting his money's worth. Otherwise he will send his son to a day school, or, worse still, to some pension in Rome or Brussels. And so it has happened that any critic of the Public Schools is immediately driven into a false position. For so long the Public Schools have been accepted with an unquestioning reverence--for so long, that is to say, the authorities have been able to persuade the world that the goods they are selling are the best, in fact the only goods upon the market--that if any one breathes a word against them now he is labelled a revolutionary; it is assumed that politically he is a Socialist, that he wishes to substitute co-operation for competition, that he is a harbinger of red ruin, concealing a bomb intended for William of Wykeham's Tower or the green sward of Agar's plough; that his programme involves the complete destruction of the existing fabric, and that he proposes to erect about its ruins some bizarre construction of eugenics and modernity. Nothing, as a matter of fact, is further from the truth. The majority of assailants are anything but socialists. They consider an enlightened oligarchy the ideal form of government, and their chief quarrel with the Public Schools is the absence of that enlightened oligarchy. No one wants to destroy the Public Schools. No one would be so foolish. But we do maintain that the public school system--a very old, a very magnificent, a very venerable mansion--stands in drastic need of repair. It is some years since the drains were attended to; electric light is more serviceable than gas; the tapestries are a little moth-eaten; the books in the library are dusty. The house wants to be spring cleaned.