It is a relief to write to you on the subject. Yet I don't see my way out. One must have an opinion about one's life-work. My business is education, and I have tried to use my eyes and see things as they are. I am quite prepared to admit that I may be wrong; but if everybody who formed opinions abstained from expressing them out of deference to the people who were not prepared to admit that they themselves could be mistaken, there would be an end of all progress. Minds of the sturdy, unconvinced order are generally found to range themselves on the side of things as they are; and that is at all events a good guarantee that things won't move too fast, and against the trying of rash experiments. But I don't want to be rash; I think that for a great many boys our type of education is a failure, and I want to see if something cannot be devised to meet their needs. But my opponents won't admit any failure. They say that the boys who, I think, end by being hopelessly uneducated would be worse off if they had not been grounded in the classics. They say that my theory is only to make things easier for boys; and they add that, if any boy's education is an entire failure (they admit a few incapables are to be found), it is the boy's own fault; he has been idle and listless; if he had worked properly it would have been all right; he would have been fortified; and anyhow, they say, it doesn't matter what you teach such boys--they would have been hopeless anyhow. Of course the difficulty of proving my case is great. You can't, in education, get two exactly parallel boys and try the effect of different types of education on the two. A chemist can put exactly the same quantity of some salt in two vessels, and, by treating them in different ways, produce a demonstration which is irrefragable. But no two boys are exactly alike, and, while classics are demanded at the university, boys of ability will tend to keep on the classical side; so that the admitted failure of modern sides in many places to produce boys of high intellectual ability results from the fact that boys of ability do not tend to join the modern sides. So one hammers on, and, as it is always easier to leave an object at rest than to set it moving, we remain very much where we were. The cynical solution is to say, let us have peace at any cost; let the thing alone; let us teach what we have to teach, and not bother about results. But that appears to me to be a cowardly attitude. If one expresses dissatisfaction to one of the cheerful stationary party, they reply, "Oh, take our word for it, it is all right; do your best; you don't teach at all badly, though you lack conviction; leave it to us, and never mind the discontent expressed by parents, and the cynical contempt felt by boys for intellectual things." "Meanwhile, regardless of their doom, The little victims play."