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a man whose only asset is his savoir-faire, his health, and his degree and it is due to its initial attraction that such schools are able to find so many applicants for their masterships; the £200 a year to start with and the joy of the games, the outdoor life, and the love of boys attract a man just leaving the university: it is later on when he marries and has a family that doubts, due to financial worry, begin to enter into his anxieties, and he wonders whether he could not have done better for himself and for others in some other walk of life. He sees school-fellows, whom he knew as inferior to himself in mental power and activity, and whose education cost a mere fraction of his own both in money, time, and strain, leaving him far behind in wealth and all the advantages which wealth brings with it. He realizes that £200 a year at the age of twenty-three is a very much higher salary than £350 a year at the age of thirty-five. The start is attractive, the final goal nothing but a disappointment: and in taking the case to which I have referred-which is the actual condition at a great school-I am taking a case which is very much better than that at many good secondary schools. The teaching profession is not well paid. On the contrary, considering the long and expensive education which is necessary for the man who is likely to be appointed to the post to which I have referred, it is very badly paid. Three hundred and fifty pounds a year ought not to be the limit or anything like the limit which he has a right to look forward to for his successful work.

Then I come to what are called the plums of the profession-a mastership at one of the great Public Schools as they are called -i.e. the great boarding schools. A mastership here is much sought after, it is regarded as the crowning step in an assistant master's career. A master here probably starts at £300 a year and rises to some £500, £600, or £700 in some ten or fifteen years' time and therefore perhaps he may consider himself as well paid. Certainly relatively to many of his less fortunate comrades he is very well paid: but is he in comparison with men who have attained to the plums of other professions? That is the question in considering whether the profession, as a whole, is well or fairly paid. A man at the top of the Civil Service would regard a limiting salary of £700 as a very poor thing, as would also successful doctors, barristers, and accountants, while it would be regarded as a mere trifle, almost an unconsidered trifle, to a successful business man. The profession is not only not well paid whether we look at the primary schools or at the secondary schools, and considering the great responsibility which rests upon it, it is very badly paid.

But it may be urged that the limit which I have just stated is not the final limit, if they are good schoolmasters they succeed

VOL. LXX

14

to boarding houses and in that way materially increase the value of their emoluments. That is perfectly true, they become hotelkeepers, and in that business capacity try to run their houses profitably and well let it be said that the writer believes and firmly believes that it is the first aim of every master to run his house for the welfare of the boys committed to his care; but at the same time whatever profit he makes, if he makes any profit, he makes as a hotel-keeper and out of catering. The position is grossly incongruous and without any redeeming feature-incapable of any justification. A successful schoolmaster, who has proved himself in his career, when he becomes a house-master is faced with an entirely new set of conditions, outside his experience, and repellent to all his instincts, which are of such an absorbing anxiety that they detract from his power as a teacher; instead of doing his work he has to serve tables. A house-master no doubt has added opportunities of doing his bit in the great work of Empire-building which is the glory of the English schools, but it is ludicrous that his pecuniary reward for this should be the profit which is to be made out of food. A wise and comprehensive scheme of reform-and any reform which does not take account of the Public Schools is a mere tinkering-would abolish the present house system so far as catering is concerned. Put in a manager a contractor-who would do the work much better, and allow the master to continue the educational work with his wider powers and fuller scope. No man can be a free agent so long as his salary is dependent upon the number of boys he has in his house.

The question then arises, How can the financial position of an assistant schoolmaster be improved?

Mr. Fisher's plan for improving the position of the primary schoolmasters is simple and effective. He goes to the Big Purse and gets additional grants from the State, and in doing so has met with a chorus of approval. For my part, I hold that if he would extend his scheme to include the case of secondary schoolmasters he would do well for the profession as a whole, but this is a controversial question; it would bring with it State control and State inspection, and for the present, at any rate, it does not seem likely. There are, however, other ways.

(1) Education is too cheap. The whole standard of what are the things that really matter altered during the long years of luxurious peace it has required this vast convulsion of society to bring us back to the conception that true education is after all the one thing that really matters in the life of the nation. We spent hundreds of pounds upon luxuries, and grudged a mere tithe of it upon education. It was a false standard, and had far-reaching consequences: the thing that took the eye and had the price

was what we valued, and it was only ephemeral, while education is spiritual.

(2) In schools where there are ample funds, the head master is often paid far too much in comparison with his colleagues. At the schools of which I have full knowledge the head masters receive a salary at least five times as great as that of any member of their staff. This is out of all proportion, it is a higher rate than in any other countries. I have known a case in which a head master realized the injustice of the inequality and voluntarily gave up more than £1000 a year to his staff, that his colleagues might be better paid in proportion to himself, and he was not the loser by it.

I have purposely refrained from saying anything about an assistant master's chance of becoming a head master. To become a head master, at any rate of any of the greatest schools-is to become a member of a very close confederation for which only a comparatively few, and a diminishing number of men, are qualified. A man must be a Classic, and must belong to another profession also, he must be a clergyman: with these two qualifications he may be a strong candidate for a head mastership, but the great majority of men must remain assistant masters.

As Ruskin says, "The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right thing but enjoy the right thing, not merely industrious but to love industry, not merely pure but to love purity, not merely just but to hunger and thirst after justice." It is a high ideal, and however far the teachers in their strivings fall short of it, the war has proved, without any doubt, that they point it out to their pupils, and lead them in the way which brings them to it. And they who have played their part in a career which has so high an ideal should not be allowed to feel, both by lack of recognition by the State and by an inadequate wage, that they are doing work which is of no national importance, and which has only led to a wreck of what may be called the mere business of life. The State has never yet recognized the work of an assistant schoolmaster-perhaps cannotyet a capable master is adding greatly to the national wealth, in the increased conception of the duties and privileges of citizenshp with which he is inspiring his pupils. ONE OF THEM

STUDIES IN INJURED

INNOCENCE

1. RE-ENTER LORD HALDANE

It is not my fault that I am compelled to recur to a nauseating topic. Lord Haldane refuses to give us any prolonged respite from his personality and performances, though if there be one living man who should desire to be neither seen nor heard from at the present juncture it is surely the ex-Lord Chancellor, who has most deserved impeachment of all the long line of Keepers of the King's Conscience, from the spacious days of Francis Bacon. Autres temps autres mœurs. In lieu of impeachment Lord Haldane draws a pension of £5000 a year from the unfortunate taxpayer he has so materially contributed to impoverish, and wears the Order of Merit which threatens to descend to the level of the Garter, described by Lord Melbourne as possessing "no damned merit. Moreover, Lord Haldane poses as an injured innocent who has rendered incalculable services which an ungrateful public refuses to recognize, and his Press claque, which makes up in noise what it lacks in numbers, demands, not that he make an amende to those whose interests he betrayed, but that amende be made to him by his "traducers." It is hinted that he is worth a Marquisate if not a Dukedom, and we should never be surprised were his pension doubled and he received a K.G. as well as an O.M. Why stop there? If Lord Haldane be the embodiment of all human wisdom, the God-given diplomat, the great constructive statesman, as well as the crystalline thinker and the far-seeing and perfervid patriot, he should at least be Prime Minister at this crisis of our fate, if not President of a British Republic. Surely if it were pointed out to King George, who only asks to be allowed to serve his country, that Lord Haldane would make a better Head of the State, His Majesty would, we may be sure, be only too anxious to oblige.

Such is the Haldane legend which continually crops up in one or other form until its object has become obsessed of the idea

that he was the saviour of the situation before the war and would have been its saviour during the war but for the base and baseless clamour raised in the Northcliffe Press and elsewhere. It must be delightful to be completely pachydermatous and to be at all times serenely satisfied of one's own omniscience and infallibility, to know that one cannot make a mistake despite all the evidence to the contrary and the general conviction of mankind that one has made an egregious exhibition of oneself. To maintain this self-sufficiency history must be rewritten and all the facts turned inside out, but that presents little difficulty to a man of the Haldane temperament.

It is a matter of common knowledge that throughout the fateful years preceding the Great War, Mr. (subsequently Viscount) Haldane stood sponsor for the good behaviour of Germany on this side of the North Sea. He was her British godfather. Neither in public nor in private did he miss any opportunity of glorifying everything German except the German tariff, especially the German Emperor, to whom he appeared to have constituted himself chief British flunkey.

I know something of Lord Haldane's sentiments when he became War Minister in November 1905, because I heard them from his own lips at the time of his appointment an event on which, in my innocence and misjudgment of his character, I cordially congratulated him and even expressed expectations of his success. It was a private conversation or I would gladly reproduce it. It remains vivid because in one respect so disquieting. Not through any preternatural sagacity, but because I had had the good fortune of learning from such masters of their subject as the late Sir Rowland Blennerhassett, Sir Valentine Chirol, and a Times correspondent who might be embarrassed if I mentioned his name, I had long been convinced that Prussianized Germany was the most deadly enemy of this country and of European civilization since Napoleon, and said so on every possible occasion. In this, my single conversation with Lord Haldane after he became Minister, I warned him against the German Government, only to be received with the polite but pitying contempt of a superior person. He invariably posed as an authority upon Germany, apparently on the strength of having once spent a term or two at a German University and through having translated portions of Schopenhauer and occasionally walking with a German professor. What he did not know about Germany was not worth knowing. There can be no violation of confidence in saying as much, because he spoke in the same sense on all occasions, pooh-poohing the German danger among his colleagues, who took him at his own valuation, with no less gusto than he pooh-poohed it from every platform. For present

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