A timid obstructiveness is the atmosphere in which almost all educational effort has to work, and schoolmasters are denied a liberty of thought and speech conceded to every other class of respectable men. They must still be mealy-mouthed about Darwin, fatuously conventional in politics, and emptily orthodox in religion. If they stimulate their boys they must stimulate as a brass trumpet does, without words or ideas. They may be great leaders of men--provided they lead backwards or nowhither. Sanderson in his latter days broke into unexampled freedom, but for the greater part of his life he was--like most of his profession--'wading hips-deep in fools,' and equally resolved to work out his personal impulse and retain the great opportunities that the governing body of Oundle School had, almost unwittingly, put into his hands. He was therefore not only a great revolutionary but something of a Vicar of Bray. A large part of the amusing subtlety of his personality was the result of the balanced course he had to pursue. In all he did, in all he said, he was feeling his way. No other schoolmaster--and there must be many a rebellious heart lying still in the graves of dead schoolmasters and many a stifled rebel in the schoolrooms of to-day--no other schoolmaster has ever felt his way so discreetly, so far and, at last, so triumphantly. I remember as a very characteristic thing that he said one day when I asked for his opinion of a particularly progressive and hopeful addition to his board of governors: 'He does not know much about schools yet, but he will learn. Oundle will teach him.' And in his last great lecture, he flung out a general 'aside'--that lecture was full of astonishing 'asides'--'I turned round on the boys and the parents,' he said, '_both are my business_.' Never was schoolmaster so emancipated as he in his latter years from the ancient servility of the pedagogue. Not for him the handing on of mellow traditions and genteel gestures of the mind, not for him the obedient administration of useful information to employers' sons by the docile employee. He saw the modern teacher in university and school plainly for what he has to be, the anticipator, the planner, and the foundation-maker of the new and greater order of human life that arises now visibly amidst the decaying structures of the old. § 2