We have both been schoolmasters; at the moment we are neither of us anything so useful; and we feel that we can say quite dogmatically that there is no happiness equal to that of the profession that was ours. And both of us fell into it accidently, as so many others have done. Yet the appeal for schoolmasters should surely not be based entirely or even mainly on the idyllic picture of the happy schoolmaster. John Stuart Mill reduced hedonism to its fundamental paradox when he declared that the way to find happiness was to turn your back on it. If there is one lesson which political education rightly conducted cannot fail to impress upon its best boys, it is the crying need of the schools for their services. From Plato and Aristotle down to the latest treatises on Reconstruction, be it the "Principles of Reconstruction," as laid down by Mr. Bertrand Russell, or the "Elements of Reconstruction," as reprinted from _The Times_ with an introduction by Lord Milner, all alike come round to education as the keystone of the arch of politics. The final appeal is always to the schoolmaster, and it is perhaps less hopeful to appeal to the actual schoolmaster of to-day than to the possible schoolmaster of to-morrow. As are our schools, so will be our Parliaments and our Civil Service, and some at any rate who have mapped out for themselves a career of political usefulness and honour in Westminster, Whitehall, or abroad, might bethink themselves first of Banquo. "Lesser than Macbeth and greater: Not so happy yet much happier; Thou shalt get kings though thou be none." CHAPTER VI THE MAKING OF "POLITICIANS" "The way the authors wish to realise their ideal would, I fear, merely increase the output of politicians and political journalists, of whom an adequate supply already exists."--Mr. E. B. Osborn, in _The Morning Post_. Sharp-wittedness playing on ignorance to the end of personal advancement--so dominant a feature has this become of our political life, that any protest against the misuse of a noble word, when men speak contemptuously of politics, is no doubt quite untimely. Untimely, because it is too early, not because it is too late. We retain the word ourselves, and call the kind of education we advocate political education; appropriately it seems to us, for we believe that its wide adoption would remove the root cause which has made such a stigma possible, and free the very name of politics from the indignities it now justly suffers.