Anyhow, the cadet should have not merely a sound physique but a buoyant physique, and that cannot be ensured under the present system. Then he should be made a good sportsman; for the Indian civilian no training is more necessary than this. I do not mean only a cricketer or football player; neither of these games is of much use out in the East. I mean a rider who is also fond of horses; a shot who is also interested in birds and animals. There is in all sportsmen of this kind a quality which no one else has. I cannot define it. It comes, I think, from association with people out of his own rank in one pursuit, from having to go to them for knowledge he has not got himself and thereby recognising their value, from a subtle sympathy with nature as not apart from man, nor a setting for man, but another manifestation of the same Life that is in man. Nothing is more valuable in enabling a District Officer to keep his mind sweet. Official work is all concerned with the faults and shortcomings of others, wherein you are judge and they are culprits. Official work divides; it insensibly leads you to believe that all men are liars and robbers, and are trying to deceive you. Throw it aside, and go out to shoot, stopping in the villages talking of sport and village affairs, and the whole aspect of life changes. You wash off your priggishness; you cease to imagine yourself first cousin to the Deity; you return to your humanity, and with the first snipe you miss to your extreme fallibility. Then there is ability at languages. Now although some men may develop an excess of ability to learn languages, all people have that ability to a certain extent when young or they could not learn their own language. But it is an ability that quickly departs unless kept alive. The way Greek and Latin are taught is a sure way to destroy any ability for learning a language a boy may retain. Grammar should never be taught. No child learns its own language by grammar, and, in fact, grammar only applies to dead languages, not to living. That has to some extent dawned on modern educators, but I see that French grammar and regular and irregular verbs are taught to those learning French. Did Loti and Maupassant learn French grammar? I wonder. If not, why should anyone else? But schoolmasters are a hard lot, and there is no one who so absolutely refuses to learn as he who makes a profession of teaching. Why should not Hindustani be made the school language for Indian cadets?