The Lighter Side of School Life Part 17

He has grave faults. Loving tradition, he dislikes change, and often stands mulishly in the way of necessary progress. Mistrusting precocity, he often snubs genuine and valuable enthusiasm. His anxiety to mind only his own business sometimes leads him into deciding that some urgent matter does not concern him when in point of fact it does. As a schoolboy he was the avowed enemy of all "cads," and his views on what const.i.tuted a cad were rather too comprehensive. Riper years do not always correct this fault, and he is considered--too often, rightly--cliquey and stuck-up. Disliking a bounder, he sometimes fails to penetrate the disguise of a man of real ability. Similarly his loyalty to his friends sometimes leads him to believe that there can be no real ability or integrity of character outside his own circle; with the result that in filling up offices he is sometimes guilty of nepotism. The fact that the offence is world-old and world-wide does not excuse it in a public school man.

Finally, all public school boys are intensely reserved about their private ambitions and private feelings. So is the public school man.

Consequently soulful and communicative persons who do not understand him regard him as stodgy and unsociable.

But he serves his purpose. Like most things British, he is essentially a compromise. He is a type, not an individual; and when the daily, hourly business of a nation is to govern hundreds of other nations, perhaps it is as well to do so through the medium of men who, by merging their own individuality in a common stock, have evolved a standard of Character and Manners which, while never meteoric, seldom brilliant, too often hopelessly dull, is always conscientious, generally efficient, and never, never tyrannical or corrupt. If this be mediocrity, who would soar?