than ourselves. We have to remember that our pupils here are twentieth-century Englishmen, mostly belonging to a particular class in the community, almost all with a special and somewhat peculiar previous education, at a period of life with distinct and well-marked characteristics, just emerged from a stage in which they have been rightly engrossed in practice and what is called the formation of character, but one also in which the need of larger knowledge has not made itself poignantly felt and their intelligence not been spurred to any very serious effort. They easily believe, and are indeed sometimes encouraged to believe, that for life not much more knowledge, except of a technical character, is required. Of what is offered to them here, they cannot at first, if even in the end, see the use. Their love of truth, their belief in its vital value, their desire for it, are variable, fugitive, uncertain, and only too many sophistic voices din in their ears lessons which give a good conscience to their natural scepticism and supply apologies for mental inertia.
On the other hand, we find in them often a quick and ardent, if as yet undirected and indiscriminate curiosity which is as it were the first form of the love of truth, and a generous trust in their teachers which is an incipient faith in the value of that which they have to teach. The first is too often chilled, the latter too often disillusioned, both by our fault. The root of our fault lies not so much in lack of sympathy and slackness of will as in ignorance. We do not know, because we do not sufficiently study, the changes in the situation created by our abilities and endowments on the one hand, and on the other by the capacities, needs and desires of our pupils, and of our fellow citizens generally. At no time more than now has the need for reconsideration of this been so urgent, because
