THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has taken years of

adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we had Wood's

NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE

ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of

unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I

think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's

NEW TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other

informing books bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also,

with thousands of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and

one or two other important works in the sitting-room. I was allowed

to turn these over and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays

and other occasions of exceptional cleanliness.

And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the

fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that

fascinated me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a

pin.

2

My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and

with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher,

taking a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under

the old Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools;

and our resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a

hundred pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three

palatial but structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead

Station.

They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,

interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs

coal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect

vindictively devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so,

he had overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant

would stay in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional

tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every

storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which

would have been cool and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs

went steeply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for

occupation. The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical

design, fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and

the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern and much

variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.

As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses

at a time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable

tenants, he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and

devote the rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to

the incessant necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of

the repairing himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which

my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated

vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful ma

in the unoccupied gardens. The three houses faced north, and the

back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that

yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and

imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes

of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for

my father broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was

thirteen.

My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not

always good ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster

and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father

had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and

diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small

private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered.

Thereupon my father had roused himself and had qualified as a

science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these

days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the mass

of the English population, and had thrown himself into science

teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if

transitory zeal and success.

I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic

time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married

when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw

only the last decadent phase of his educational career.

The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the

world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness

and generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive,

more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.

The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how

many of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and

early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient

machinery. When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was

ruled by a strange body called a Local Board-it was the Age of

Boards-and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the

breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and

devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there

were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics

before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading

tentacles of the London County Council.

It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State

to remember that the very begi

my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic

people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of

the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate people who could

neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature,

were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the

population were getting no instruction at all. Only a few schools

flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the

country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and

dwindling; many of them had closed altogether. In the new great

centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the

factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and