compulsion. We are to be cured by an excess of the dose that has
poisoned us. Satan is to cast out Satan.




Under the Whip

Clearly this will not do. We must reconcile education with liberty.
We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need be,
warriors, without making them slaves. We must cultivate the noble
virtues that have their root in pride. Now no schoolmaster will teach
these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how to
mutiny and escape. Self-preservation forces him to break the spirit
that revolts against him, and to inculcate submission, even to obscene
assault, as a duty. A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he would
rather see England free than England sober. Nobody has yet dared to say
that he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than an England of
cowards and slaves. And if anyone did, it would be necessary to point
out that the antithesis is not a practical one, as we have got at
present an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves, and
extremely proud of it at that, because in school they are taught to
submit, with what they ridiculously call Oriental fatalism (as if any
Oriental has ever submitted more helplessly and sheepishly to robbery
and oppression than we Occidentals do), to be driven day after day into
compounds and set to the tasks they loathe by the men they hate and
fear, as if this were the inevitable destiny of mankind. And naturally,
when they grow up, they helplessly exchange the prison of the school for
the prison of the mine or the workshop or the office, and drudge along
stupidly and miserably, with just enough gregarious instinct to turn