His three years' free training particularly tend to make a slack, unthinking sap-head of him. He gets a parchment which entitles him to call himself a certificated teacher, and he is taught to imagine that for downright learning there is nothing like himself under the sun. In this latter surmise he is quite right. The schoolmaster in England, though he will probably be another quarter of a century waking up to the fact, counts for next to nothing. Men of parts avoid him; men of no parts laugh at him. For himself, I imagine, he will long continue to believe in his heart that he is a great man, a little lower, perhaps, than a parson, but certainly a little higher than a policeman. The real value of English education, like the real value of most other things, becomes apparent when it is put to the test of practical affairs. Any employer of labour will tell you that, whether an English boy come to him from a board school or a school of a higher grade, whether he be the son of a ploughman or of what the English call a professional man, he is always and inevitably a good deal of a fool. You have to teach him how to lick stamps. You have to teach him that, excepting in so far as he can write and read, what he has learned at school is not wanted; you have to teach him how many beans make five; you have to teach him that punctuality and accuracy are worth more in business than all the botany he ever learned; and all the time you have to watch him like a cat watching a mouse. "Fire out the fools!" once exclaimed Dr. Robertson Nicoll. I do not think it is too much to say that, if the average English employer took the hint, he would have nobody left to do his business for him. CHAPTER XIX RECREATION