And they will find good material awaiting them. The English public school boy shares with all the youth of all the nations an immense store of latent idealism, which can be brought to a splendid fruition if atrophy and decay are not allowed to overtake it. But he possesses other things also, over and above this common heritage. The intellectualist has often got beyond the big ideas, if such a paradox may be allowed; they have been for so long the platitudes of his caste, and he has grown so hopeless of their general acceptance, that he has turned to a search after subtle refinements and intellectual novelties, in the course of which much generous breadth of vision has been lost. Again, many working-class reformers--can it be wondered?--not only bring to their task a bitterness against the world which has so misused them and their fellows, but also have inevitably been cut off from those gentle manners of life which have been gradually evolved by the more fortunate to express, however imperfectly, the feeling for grace and beauty which it should be our aim, not to crush, but to extend to all. But with the public school boy all is different. Once he has begun to think in any real sense of the word, his intellectual life develops as joyfully and naturally as does the physical life of the beasts of the field. Freshly and spontaneously, and with no trace of self-consciousness or affectation, he leaps to greet ideas and principles, between which and his own true nature there is a glorious bond of kinship. We have seen boy after boy, as he realises, for instance, the meaning of Liberty, and gets his first glimpse of the wide country which such a realisation opens up, experiencing an emotion of happiness which we can only compare to the catch of breath with which men see great scenes of beauty, or hear of lovely deeds of generosity and heroism. Given their chance, public school boys (not one or two, but great masses of average humanity) will rediscover for themselves the simple things which Christ and Plato taught; and once that is achieved a general advance all along the line toward the goal of a worthy human society may begin. CHAPTER VIII MORALITY "Generally speaking, the intellectualist phase [of a boy's career] is remarkably brief. Just occasionally its morals are such as to cause the swift expulsion of its leaders. More often they leave in the natural course of things, or grow weary of their pose--which has, indeed, not made them popular--and return after the holidays frankly and unaffectedly Philistine. This transient fashion is not new. What is new is the deliberate encouragement given to it by a certain type of assistant master. We do not imply that the wise master will suppress... That kind of intellectual measles will work itself out... But to leave the phase alone is one thing; deliberately to foster and give it official backing is quite another."--_The Church Times_.