← catalogue

A Dominie in Doubt

by Alexander Sutherland Neill · English · Gutenberg #25306 · 319,468 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Dominie in Doubt
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: A Dominie in Doubt

Author: Alexander Sutherland Neill


        
Release date: May 2, 2008 [eBook #25306]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25306

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DOMINIE IN DOUBT ***




Produced by Al Haines





A DOMINIE IN DOUBT


BY

A. S. NEILL, M.A.




BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  A DOMINIE'S LOG
  A DOMINIE DISMISSED
  THE BOOMING OF BUNKIE



HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED

3 YORK STREET ST. JAMES'S

LONDON S.W.1

MCMXXI




DEDICATION.

To Homer Lane, whose first lecture convinced me that I knew nothing
about education.  I owe much to him, but I hasten to warn educationists
that they must not hold him responsible for the views given in these
pages.  I never understood him fully enough to expound his wonderful
educational theories.

A. S. N.

FORFAR,
  AUGUST 12, 1920.




A DOMINIE IN DOUBT


I.

"Just give me your candid opinion of _A Dominie's_ Log; I'd like to
hear it."

Macdonald looked up from digging into the bowl of his pipe with a
dilapidated penknife.  He is now head-master of Tarbonny Public School,
a school I know well, for I taught in it for two years as an ex-pupil
teacher.

Six days ago he wrote asking me to come and spend a holiday with him,
so I hastily packed my bag and made for Euston.

This evening had been a sort of complimentary dinner in my honour, the
guests being neighbouring dominies and their wives, none of whom I
knew.  We had talked of the war, of rising prices, and a thousand other
things.  Suddenly someone mentioned education, and of course my
unfortunate _Log_ had come under discussion.

I had been anxious to continue my discussion with a Mrs. Brown on the
subject of the relative laying values of Minorcas and Buff Orpingtons,
but I had been dragged to the miserable business in spite of myself.

Now they were all gone, and Macdonald had returned to the charge.

"It's hardly a fair question," said Mrs. Macdonald, "to ask an author
what he thinks of his own book.  No man can judge his own work, any
more than a mother can judge her own child."

"That's true!" I said.  "A man can't judge his own behaviour, and
writing a book is an element of behaviour.  Besides, there is a better
reason why a writer cannot judge his own work," I added.

"Because he never reads it?" queried Macdonald with a grin.

I shook my head.

"An author has no further interest in his book after it is published."

Macdonald looked across at me.  It was clear that he doubted my
seriousness.

"Surely you don't mean to say that you have no interest in _A Dominie's
Log_?"

"None whatever!" I said.

"You mean it?" persisted Macdonald.

"My dear Mac," I said, "an author dare not read his own book."

"Dare not!  Why?"

"Because it's out of date five minutes after it's written."

For fully a minute we smoked in silence.  Macdonald appeared to be
digesting my remark.

"You see," I continued presently, "when I read a book on education, I
want to learn, and I certainly don't expect to learn anything from the
man I was five years ago."

"I think I understand," said Macdonald.  "You have come to realise that
what you wrote five years ago was wrong.  That it?"

"True for you, Mac.  You've just hit it."

"You needn't have waited five years to find that out," he said, with a
good-natured grin.  "I could have told you the day the book was
published--I bought one of the first copies."

"Still," he continued, "I don't see why a book should be out-of-date in
five years.  That is if it deals with the truth.  Truth is eternal."

"What is truth?" I asked wearily.  "We all thought we knew the truth
about gravitation.  Then Einstein came along with his relativity
theory, and told us we were wrong."

"Did he?" inquired Macdonald, with a faint smile.

"I am quoting from the newspapers," I added hastily.  "I haven't the
remotest idea what relativity means.  Perhaps it's Epstein I mean--no,
he's a sculptor."

"You're hedging!" said Macdonald.

"Can you blame me?" I asked.  "You're trying to get me to say what
truth is.  I am not a professor of philosophy, I'm a dominie.  All I
can say is that the _Log_ was the truth . . . for me . . . five years
ago; but it isn't the truth for me now."

"Then, what exactly is your honest opinion of the _Log_ as a work on
education?"

"As a work on education," I said deliberately, "the _Log_ isn't worth a
damn."

"Not a bad criticism, either," said Macdonald dryly.

"I say that," I continued, "because when I wrote it I knew nothing
about the most important factor in education--the psychology of
children."

"But," said Mrs. Macdonald in surprise--hitherto she had been an
interested listener--"I thought that the bits about the bairns were the
best part of the book."

"Possibly," I answered, "but I was looking at children from a grown-up
point of view.  I thought of them as they affected me, instead of as
they affected themselves.  I'll give you an instance.  I think I said
something about wanting to chuck woodwork and cookery out of the school
curriculum.  I was wrong, hopelessly wrong."

"I'm glad to hear you admit it," said Macdonald.  "I have always
thought that every boy ought to be taught to mend a hen-house and every
girl to cook a dinner."

"Then I was right after all," I said quickly.

Macdonald stared at me, whilst his wife looked up interrogatively from
her embroidery.

"If your aim is to make boys joiners and girls cooks," I explained,
"then I still hold that cookery and woodwork ought to be chucked out of
the schools."

"But, man, what are schools for?"  I saw a combative light in
Macdonald's eye.

"Creation, self-expression . . . . the only thing that matters in
education.  I don't care what a child is doing in the way of creation,
whether he is making tables, or porridge, or sketches, or--or--"

"Snowballs!" prompted Macdonald.

"Or snowballs," I said.  "There is more true education in making a
snowball than in listening to an hour's lecture on grammar."

Mrs. Macdonald dropped her embroidery into her lap, with a little gasp
at the heresy of my remark.

"You're talking pure balderdash!" said Macdonald, leaning forward to
knock the ashes from his pipe on the bars of the grate.

"Very well," I said cheerfully.  "Let's discuss it.  You make a class
sit in front of you for an hour, and you threaten to whack the first
child that doesn't pay attention to your lesson on nouns and pronouns."

"Discipline," said Macdonald.

"I don't care what you call it.  I say it's stupidity."

"But, hang it all, man, you can't teach if you haven't got the
children's attention."

"And you can't teach when you have got it," I said.  "A child learns
only when it is interested."

"But surely, discipline makes them interested," said Mrs. Macdonald.

I shook my head.  "It only makes them attentive."

"Same thing," said Macdonald.

"No, Mac," I replied.  "It is not the same thing.  Attention means the
applying of the conscious mind to a thing; interest means the
application of both the conscious and the unconscious mind.  When you
force a child to attend to a lesson for fear of the tawse, you merely
engage the least important part of his mind--the conscious.  While he
stares at the blackboard his unconscious is concerned with other
things."

"What sort of things?" asked Macdonald.

"Very probably his unconscious is working out an elaborate plan to
murder you," I said, "and I don't blame it either," I added.

"And the snowballs?" queried Mrs. Macdonald.

"When a boy makes a snowball, he is interested; his whole soul is in
the job, that is, his unconscious and his conscious are working
together.  For the moment he is an artist, a creator."

"So that's the new education . . . making snowballs?" said Macdonald.

"It isn't really," I said; "but what I want to do is to point out that
making snowballs is nearer to true education than the spoon-feeding we
call education to-day."

      *      *      *      *      *

Duncan does not like me.  He is a young dominie of twenty-three or
thereabouts, a friend of Macdonald, and he has just been demobilised.
He was a major, and he does not seem to have recovered from the
experience.  He has got what the vulgar call swelled head.  Last night
he was dilating upon the delinquencies of the old retired teacher who
ran the school while Duncan was on active service.  It seems that the
old man had allowed the school to run to seed.

"Would you believe it," I overheard Duncan say to Macdonald, "when I
came back I found that the boys and girls were playing in the same
playground.  Why, man, some of them were playing on the road!  And the
discipline!  Awful!"

Poor children!  I see it all; I see Duncan line them up like a squad of
recruits, and march them into school with never a smile on their faces
or a word on their lips.  Macdonald tells me that he makes them lift
their slates by numbers.

And the amusing thing is that Duncan thinks himself one of the more
advanced teachers.  He reads the educational journals, and eagerly
devours the articles about new methods in teaching arithmetic and
geography.  His school is only a mile and a half away, and I hope that
he will come over to see Mac a few times while I am here.

I have seen the old type of dominie, and I have seen the new type.  I
prefer the former.  He had many faults, but he usually managed to do
something for the human side of the children.  The new type is a danger
to children.  The old dominie leathered the children so that they might
make a good show before the inspector; the new dominie leathers them
because he thinks that children ought to be disciplined so that they
may be able to fight the battle of life.  He does not see that by using
authority he is doing the very opposite of what he intends; he is
making the child dependent on him, and for ever afterwards the child
will lack initiative, lack self-confidence, lack originality.

What the new dominie does do is to turn out excellent wage-slaves.  The
discipline of the school gives each child an inner sense of
inferiority . . . . what the psycho-analysts call an inferiority
complex.  And the working-classes are suffering from a gigantic
inferiority complex . . . . otherwise they would not be content to
remain wage-slaves.  The fear that Duncan inspires in a boy will remain
in that boy all his life.  When he enters the workshop he will
unconsciously identify the foreman with Duncan, and fear him and hate
him.  I believe that many a strike is really a vague insurrection
against the teacher.  For it is well known that the unconscious mind is
infantile.

      *      *      *      *      *

To-night I dropped in to see my old friend Dauvit Todd the cobbler.
Many an evening have I spent in his dirty shop.  Dauvit works on after
teatime, and the village worthies gather round his fire and smoke and
spit and grunt.  I have sat there for an hour many a night, and not a
single word was said.  Peter Smith the blacksmith would give a great
sigh and say: "Imphm!"  There would be silence for ten minutes, and
then Jake Tosh the roadman would stare at the fire, shake his head, and
say: "Aye, man!"  Then a ploughman would smack his lips and say: "Man,
aye!"  A southerner looking in might have jumped to the conclusion that
the assembly was collectively and individually bored, but boredom never
enters Dauvit's shop.  We Scots think better in crowds.

To-night the old gang was there.  The hypothetical southerner again
would have marvelled at the reception I received.  I walked into the
shop after an absence of five years.

"Weel, Dauvit," I said, and sat down in the basket chair.  Dauvit and I
have never shaken hands in our lives.  He looked up.

"Back again!" he said, without any evident surprise; then he added:
"And what like a nicht is 't ootside?"

Gradually other men dropped in, and the same sort of greeting took
place.  The weather continued to be discussed for a time.  Then the
blacksmith said: "Auld Tarn Davidson's swine dee'd last nicht."

Dauvit looked up from the boot he was repairing.

"What did it dee o'?" and there followed an argument about the symptoms
of swine fever.

An English reader of _The House with the Green Shutters_ would have
concluded that these villagers were deliberately trying to put me in my
place.  By ignoring me might they not be showing their contempt for
dominies who have just come from London?  Not they.  They were glad to
see me again, and their method of showing their gladness was to take up
our friendship at the point where it left off five years ago.

The only time a Scot distrusts other Scots is when they fuss over him.
The story goes in Tarbonny that when young Jim Lunan came home
unexpectedly after a ten years' farming in Canada, his mother was
washing the kitchen floor.

"Mother!" he cried, "I've come hame!"

She looked over her shoulder.

"Wipe yer feet afore ye come in, ye clorty laddie," she said.

But there is a garrulous type of Scot . . . or rather the type of Scot
that tries to make the other fellow garrulous.  In our county we call
them the speerin' bodie.  To speer means to ask questions.  The
speerin' bodie is common enough in Fife, and I suppose it was a Fifer
who entered a railway compartment one morning and sat down to study the
only other occupant--an Englishman.

"It's a fine day," said the Scot, and there was a question in his tone.

The Englishman sighed and laid aside his newspaper.

"Aye, mester," continued the inquisitive Fifer, "and ye'll be----"

The Englishman held up a forbidding hand.

"You needn't go on," he said; "I'll tell you everything about myself.
I was born in Leeds, the son of poor parents.  I left school at the age
of twelve, and I became a draper.  I gradually worked my way up, and
now I am traveller for a Manchester firm.  I married six years ago.
Three kids.  Wife has rheumatism.  Willie had measles last month.  I
have a seven room cottage; rent £27.  I vote Tory; go to the Baptist
church, and keep hens.  Anything else you want to know?"

The Scot had a very dissatisfied look.

"What did yer grandfaither dee o'?" he demanded gruffly.

When the argument about swine fever had died down, Dauvit turned to me.

"Aye, and how is Lunnon lookin'?"

"Same as ever," I answered.

"Ye'll have to tak' Dauvit doon on a trip," laughed the smith.

Dauvit drove in a tacket.

"Man, smith, I was in Lunnon afore you was born," he said.

"Go on, Dauvit," I said encouragingly, "tell us the story."  I had
heard it before, but I longed to hear it again.  Dauvit brightened up.

"There's no muckle to tell," he said, as he tossed the boot into a
corner and wiped his face with his apron.  "It'll be ten years come
Martimas.  Me and Will Tamson gaed up by boat frae Dundee.  Oh! we had
a graund time.  But there's no muckle to tell."

"What about Dave Brownlee?" I asked.

Dauvit chuckled softly.

"But ye've a' heard the story," he said, but we protested that we
hadn't.

"Aweel," he began, "some of you will no doubt mind o' Dave Broonlee him
that stoppit at Millend.  Dave served his time as a draper, and syne he
got a good job in a Lunnon shop.  Weel, me and Will Tamson was walkin'
along the Strand when Will he says to me, says he: 'Cud we no pay a
veesit to Dave Broonlee?'  Then I minded that Dave's father had said
something aboot payin' him a call, but I didna ken his address.  All I
kent was that he was in a big shop in Oxford Street.

"Weel, Will and me we goes up to a bobby and speers the way to Oxford
Street.  When we got there Will he goes up to another bobby and says:
'Please cud ye tell me whatna shop Dave Broonlee works intil?'  At that
I started to laugh, and syne the bobby he started to laugh.  He laughed
a lang time and syne when I telt him that it was a draper's shop he
directed us to a great big muckle shop wi' a thousand windows.

"'Try there first,' says the bobby.

"Weel, in we goes, and a mannie in a tail coat he comes forart rubbin'
his hands.

"'And what can I do for you, sir?' he says to Will.

"'Oh,' says Will, 'we want to see Dave Broonlee,' but the man didna ken
what Will was sayin'.  It took Will and me twenty meenutes to get him
to onderstand.

"'Oh,' says he, 'I understand now.  You want to see Mr. Brownlee?'

"'Ye're fell quick in the uptak,' says Will, but of coorse the man
didna ken what he was sayin'.

"He went to the backshop to speer aboot Dave, and when he cam back he
says, says he: 'I'm sorry, but Mr. Brownlee has gone out to lunch.
Will you leave a message?'

"Will turned to the door.

"'Never mind,' says he, 'we'll see him doon the toon.'"

      *      *      *      *      *

In reading my _Log_ I am appalled by the amount of lecturing I did in
school.  Since writing it I have visited most of the best schools in
England, and I found that I was not the only teacher who lectured.  But
we are all wrong.  I fancy that the real reason why I lectured so much
was to indulge my showing-off propensities.  To stand before a class or
an audience; to be the cynosure of all eyes; to have a crowd hanging on
your words . . . . all showing off!  Very, very human, but . . . . bad
for the audience.

When a teacher lectures he is unconsciously giving expression to his
desire to gain a feeling of superiority.  That, I fancy, is the deepest
wish of every one of us . . . . to impress others, to be superior.  You
see it in the smallest child.  Give him an audience, and he will show
off for hours.  The boy at the top of the class gains his feeling of
superiority by beating the others at arithmetic, while the dunce at the
bottom of the class gains his in more original ways . . . punching the
top boy at playtime, scoring goals at football, spitting farther than
anyone else in school.  I have seen a boy smash a window merely to draw
attention to himself, and thus to gain a momentary feeling of
superiority.

And we grown-ups are boys at heart.  The boy is the father to the man.
Take, for instance, a childish trait--exhibitionism.  Most children at
an early age love to run about naked, to show off their bodies.  Later
the conventions of society make the child repress this wish to exhibit
himself.  But we know that a repressed wish does not die; it merely
buries itself in the unconscious.  Many years later the exhibition
impulse comes out in sublimated form as a desire to show off before the
public . . . hence our politicians, actors, actresses, street-corner
revivalists, and--er--dominies.

Now I hasten to add that there is nothing to be ashamed of in being a
politician or a dominie.  But if I lecture a class I am making the
affair my show, and I am not the most important actor in the play; I am
the scene-shifter; the real actors who should be declaiming their lines
are sitting on hard benches staring at me and wondering what I am
raving about.  Each little person is thirsting to show his or her
superiority, and he never gets the chance.  Occasionally I may ask a
sleepy-looking urchin what are the exports to Canada, and he may gain a
slight feeling of superiority if he can tell the right answer.  Yet I
fancy that his unconscious self despises me and my question.  Why in
all the earth should I ask a question when I know the answer?  The
whole thing is an absurdity.  The only questions asked in a school
should be asked by the pupils.

The truth is that our schools do not give education; they give
instruction.  And it is so very easy to instruct, and so very easy to
go on talking, and so very easy to whack Tommy when he does not listen.
Our prosy lectures are wasted time.  The children would be better
employed playing marbles.

Of course if a child asks for information that is a different story.
He is obviously interested . . . that is if he isn't trying to tempt
you into a long explanation so that you will forget to hear his Latin
verbs.  Children soon understand our little vanities, and they soon
learn to exploit them.

      *      *      *      *      *

"I had a scene in school to-day," remarked Mac while we were at tea
to-night.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Tom Murray was wrong in all his sums, and he wouldn't hold out his
hand," and by Mac's grim smile I knew that the bold Tom had been
conquered.

"What would you have done in a case like that?" asked Mac.

"I would never have a case like that, Mac.  If he had all his sums
wrong I should sit down and ask myself what was wrong with my teaching."

"I didn't mean that," he said; "what I meant was: what would you do if
Tom defied you?"

"That wouldn't happen either, Mac.  Tom couldn't defy me because you
can only defy an authority, and I'm not an authority."

Mac shook his head.

"You won't convince me, old chap.  A boy like Tom has to be dealt with
with a firm hand."

I studied his face for a time.

"You know, Mac," I said, "you puzzle me.  You're one of the kindest
decentest chaps in the world, and yet you go leathering poor Tom
Murray.  Why do you do it?"

"You must keep discipline," he said.

I shook my head.

"Mac, if you knew yourself you wouldn't ever whack a child."

This seemed to tickle him.

"Good Lord!" he laughed, "I could write a book about myself!  I'm one
of the most introspective chaps ever born."

"And you understand yourself?"

"I have no illusions about myself at all, old chap.  I know my
limitations."

"Well, would you mind telling me why you are a bit of a nut?" I asked.
"It isn't usual for a country dominie to wear a wing collar, a bow tie,
and shot-silk socks."

"That's easy," he said quickly.  "I think that teachers haven't the
social standing they ought to have, and I dress well to uphold the
dignity of the profession.  Don't you believe me?" he demanded as I
smiled.

"Quite!  I believe you're quite honest in your belief, but it's wrong
you know.  There must be a much more personal reason than that."

"Rot!" he said.  "Anyway, what is the reason?"

"I don't know, Mac; it would take months of research to discover it.  I
can't explain your psychology, but I'll tell you something about my
own.  These swagger corduroys I'm wearing . . . when I bought them
someone asked me why I chose corduroy, and I at once answered:
'Economy!  They'll last ten years!'  But that wasn't the real reason, I
bought them because I wanted to have folk stare at me.  I've got an
inferiority complex, that is an inner feeling of inferiority.  To
compensate for it I go and order a suit that will make people look at
me; in short, that I may be the centre of all eyes, and thus gain a
feeling of outward superiority."

This sent Mac off into a roar of laughter.

"You're daft, man!" he roared.

After a minute or two he said; "But what has all this to do with Tom
Murray?"

"A lot," I said seriously.  "You think you whack Tom because you must
have discipline, but you whack him for a different reason.  In your
deep unconscious mind you are an infant.  You want to show your
self-assertion just as a kid does.  You leather Tom because you've
never outgrown your seven-year-old stage.  On market-day, when Tom
walks behind a drove and whacks the stots over the hips with a stick,
he is doing exactly what you did this afternoon.  You are both infants."

I have had to give up lecturing Mac, for he always takes me as a huge
joke.  He is a good fellow, but he has the wonderful gift of being
blind to anything that might make him reconsider his values.  Many
people protect themselves in the same way--by laughing.  I have more
than once seen an alcoholic laugh heartily at his wrecked home and lost
job.




II.

What an amount of excellent material Mac and his kind are spoiling.
Tom Murray is a fine lad, full of energy and initiative, but he has to
sit passive at a desk doing work that does not interest him.  His
creative faculties have no outlet at all during the day, and naturally
when free from authority at nights he expresses his creative interest
anti-socially.  He nearly wrecked the five-twenty the other night; he
tied a huge iron bolt to the rails.  Mac called it devilment, but it
was merely curiosity.  He had had innumerable pins and farthings
flattened on the line, and he wanted to see what the engine really
could do.

There is devilment in some of Tom's activities, for example in his
deliberate destruction of Dauvit's apple tree.  Mac and the law would
give him the birch for that, but fortunately Mac and the law don't know
who did it.  Tom's destructiveness is only the direct result of Mac's
authority.  Suppression always has the same result; it turns a young
god into a young devil.  Had I Tom in a free school all his activities
would be social and good.

And yet nearly every teacher believes in Mac's way.  They suppress all
the time, and what is worst of all they firmly believe they are doing
the best thing.

"Look at Glasgow!" cried Mac the other night when I was talking about
the crime of authority.  "Look at Glasgow!  What happened there during
the war?  Juvenile crime increased.  And why?  Because the fathers were
in the army and the boys had no control over them; they broke loose.
That proves that your theories are potty."

I believe that juvenile crime did increase during the war, and I
believe that Mac's explanation of the phenomenon is correct.  The
absence of the father gave the boy liberty to be a hooligan.  But no
boy wants to be a hooligan unless he has a strong rebellion against
authority.  No boy is destructive if he is free to be constructive.  I
think that the difference between Mac and myself is this: he believes
in original sin, while I believe in original virtue.

I wonder why it is so difficult to convert the authority people to the
new way of thinking.  There must be a deep reason why they want to
cling to their authority.  Authority gives much power, and love of
power may be at the root of the desire to retain authority.  Yet I
fancy that it is deeper than that.  In Mac, for instance, I think that
his quickness in becoming angry at Tom's insubordination is due to the
insubordination within himself.  Like most of us Mac has a father
complex, and he fears and hates any authority exercised over himself.
So in squashing Tom's rebellion he is unconsciously squashing the
rebellion in his own soul.  Tom's rebellion could not affect me because
I have got rid of my father complex, and his rebellion would touch
nothing in me.

Authority will be long in dying, for too many people cling to it as a
prop.  Most people like to have their minds made up for them; it is so
easy to obey orders, and so difficult to live your own life carrying
your own burden and finding your own path.  To live your own life . . .
that is the ideal.  To discover yourself bravely, to realise yourself
fully, to follow truth even if the crowd stone you.  That is
living . . . but it is dangerous living, for that way lies crucifixion.
No one in authority has ever been crucified; every martyr dies because
he challenges authority. . .  Christ, Thomas More, Jim Connolly.

      *      *      *      *      *

Duncan and McTaggart the minister were in to-night, and we got on to
the subject of wit and humour.  Having a psycho-analysis complex I
mentioned the theory that we laugh so as to give release to our
repressions.  The others shook their heads, and I decided to test my
theory on them.  I told them the story of the golfer who was driving
off about a foot in front of the teeing marks.  The club secretary
happened to come along.

"Here, my man!" cried the indignant secretary, "you're disqualified!"

"What for?" demanded the player.

"You're driving off in front of the teeing mark."

The player looked at him pityingly.

"Away, you bletherin' idiot!" he said tensely, "I'm playing my third!"

"Now," I said to the others, "I'm going to tell you one by one what
your golf is like.  You, McTaggart, are a scratch man or a plus man.
Is that so?"

"Plus one," he said in surprise.  "How did you guess?"

"I didn't guess," I said with great superiority.  "I found out by pure
science.  You didn't laugh at my joke; you merely smiled.  That shows
that bad golf doesn't touch any complex inside you.  The man who takes
three strokes to make one foot of ground means nothing to you because,
as I say, there's nothing in yourself it touches."

"Wonderful!" cried the minister.

"It's quite simple," I crowed, "and now for Mac!  You, Mac, are a
rotten player; you take sixteen to a hole."

"Only ten," protested Mac hastily.  "How the devil did you know?  I've
never played with you."

"Deduction, my boy.  You roared at my joke, because it touched your bad
golf complex.  In fact you were really laughing at yourself and your
own awful golf."

"What about me?" put in Duncan.

Now there was something in Duncan's eye that should have warned me of
danger, but I was so proud of my success that I plunged confidently.

"Oh, you don't play golf," I said airily.

"Wrong!" he cried, "I do!  And I'm worse than Mac too!"

I was astounded.

"Impossible!" I cried.  "You never laughed at my story at all; that is
it touched nothing whatsoever inside you."

Duncan shook his head.

"You're completely wrong this time."

"Well, why _didn't_ you laugh?" I asked.

He grinned.

"I dunno.  Possibly it is because I first heard that joke in my cradle."

      *      *      *      *      *

Mac's infant mistress was off duty to-day owing to an attack of
influenza, and he gladly accepted my offer to take her place.

Half-an-hour after my entry into the room Mac came in to see how I was
getting on.  Most of the infants were swarming over me, and Mac
frowned.  At his frown they all crept back silently to their seats.

"You seem to have the fatal gift of demoralising children," he growled.

It hadn't struck me before, but it is a fact; I do demoralise children.
Not long ago I entered a Montessori school, and I spoke not one word.
In five minutes the insets and long stairs were lying neglected in the
middle of the floor, and the kiddies were scrambling over me.  I felt
very guilty for I feared that if Montessori herself were to walk in she
would be indignant.  I cannot explain why I affect kiddies in this way.
It may be that intuitively they know that I do not inspire fear or
respect; it may be that they unconsciously recognise the baby in me.
Anyway, as Mac says, it is a fatal gift.

I think Miss Martin the infant mistress is a good teacher.  Her infants
do not fear her, and I am sure they love her.  The only person they
fear is Mac, poor dear old Mac, the most lovable soul in the world.  He
tries hard to show his love for the infants but somehow they know that
behind his smile is the grim head-master who leathers Tom Murray.  I
sent wee Mary Smith into Mac's room to fetch some chalk to-day, and she
wept and feared to enter.  Occasionally, I believe, Mac will enter the
room, seize a wee mite who is speaking instead of working, and give him
or her a scud with the tawse.  I wonder how a good soul like Mac can do
it.

I have an unlovely story of a board school.  An infant mistress lay
dying, and in her delirium she cried in terror lest her head-master
should come in again and strap her dear, wee infants.  It is a true
story, and it is the most damning indictment of board school education
anyone could wish for.  She was a good woman who loved children, and if
fear of her head-master brought terror to her on her deathbed, what
terrors are such men inspiring in poor wee infants?  The men who beat
children are exactly in the position of the men who stoned Jesus
Christ; they know not what they do, nor do they know why they do it.

      *      *      *      *      *

There was a stranger in Dauvit's shop when I entered to-day, a
seedy-looking whiskered man with a threadbare coat and extremely dirty
linen.  Shabby genteel would be the Scots description of him.

Dauvit asked me a casual question about London, and the stranger became
interested at once.

"Ah," he said, "you're from London, are ye?  Man, yon's a great place,
a wonderful place!"

I nodded assent.

"Man," he continued, "yon's the place for sichts!  Could anything beat
the procession at the Lord Mayor's show, eh?"

I meekly admitted that I had never seen the Lord Mayor's show, and he
raised his eyebrows in surprise.

"But I'll tell ye what's just as good, mister, and that's the King and
Queen opening Parliament.  Man, yon's a sicht, isn't it?"

"I--er--I haven't had the opportunity of seeing it," I said.

He looked more surprised than ever.

"But, man, I'll tell ye what's just as good, and that's a big London
fire.  Man, to see the way the firemen go up the ladders like monkeys.
Yon's a sicht for sair een!"

"I never had the luck to see a fire in London," I said hesitatingly.
"When were you last in town?"

He did not seem to hear my question; he was evidently thinking of other
London thrills.

"Man," he said ruminatingly, "often while I sit in the Tarbonny Kirk I
just sit and think aboot Westminster Abbey.  Man, yon's a kirk!   I
suppose you'll be there ilka Sunday?"

I found it difficult to tell him that I had never been in the Abbey,
but I managed to get the words out, and then I avoided his reproachful
eye.  He knocked out his pipe, and I took the action to be a symbolic
one meaning: You are an empty sort of person.  He studied me critically
for a time, then he brightened.

"Aye," he said cheerfully, "London's a graund place, but, for sichts
give me New York."

I felt more humble than ever, for I had never travelled.  He seemed to
guess that by the look of me, for he never asked my opinion of New York.

"Man," he said warmly, "yon's a place!  Yon skyscrapers!  Phew!" and he
whistled his wonder and admiration.  "And the streets!  Man, ye canna
walk on the sidewalk at the busy times.  A wonderfu' place, New York,
but, as for me, give me the West, California and Frisco."

"You have travelled much, sir," I said reverently.  The "sir" seemed to
come naturally; my inferiority complex was touched on the raw.

Again he ignored me.

"To see yon cowboys!  Man, yon's what I call riding!  And the Indians!"

He sighed; it was obvious that he was living over again his life in the
western wilds.  A wistful look crept into his eyes, and I began to
construct his sad story.  He loved a maid, but the bruiser of the camp
loved her also . . . hence the broken-down clothes, the dirty collar.
But anon he cheered up again.

"Yes," he said, "I love the West, but for colour and climate give me
Japan."

I was so confused now that I had to blow out my pipe vigorously.  I
glanced at Dauvit, but he was sharpening his knife on the emery hone,
and did not appear to be interested.  I felt a vague anger against
Dauvit; why wasn't he helping me in my trial?

"Japan," continued the irrepressible stranger, "is one of the finest
countries in the world, but, for climate give me Siberia."

I hastily thought to myself that if I were Lenin I . . . but I did not
follow out my daydream, for the stranger brought me back to earth by
inquiring what was my honest and unbiassed opinion of the Peruvians.  I
very cleverly pretended that I had swallowed some nicotine, and, after
a polite pause for my answer, he went off to the subject of pearl
fishing at Thursday Island.  Then he looked at Dauvit's clock.

"Jerusalem!" he gasped, "the pub shuts at twa o'clock!" and he rushed
out of the shop.  I heaved a great sigh of relief, and then I heaved a
greater sigh of relief.

I seized Dauvit by the arm.

"Dauvit," I gasped, "who--who is your cosmopolitan friend?"

"My what kind o' a friend?"

"Your world-travelled friend, Dauvit.  Tell me who he is."

Dauvit laughed softly.

"That," he said, "was Joe Mill.  He bides wi' his old mother in that
cottage at the foot o' the brae.  To the best o' my knowledge he hasna
been further than Perth in his life."

"But!" I cried in amazement, "he has been everywhere!"

"He hasna," said Dauvit shortly, "but he works the cinema lantern at
the Farfar picter hoose."

      *      *      *      *      *

I had a long talk to-night with Macdonald about self-government in
schools, and I told him of my plans for running a self-governing school
in Highgate.  At the end of the discussion I had the biggest surprise
of my life.  Mac smoked for a long time in silence, then he turned to
me suddenly.

"Look here, old chap, I'll have a shot at introducing self-government
to-morrow," he said with enthusiasm.

I grasped his hand.

"Excellent!  Mac, you're a wonder!  You're a brave man!"

"I don't feel brave," he said nervously.  "It's going to be a very
difficult job."

"It is," I said grimly, "and the most difficult part is for you to keep
out of it."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that you have been an authority for so long that you'll find
yourself issuing orders unthinkingly.  More than that the kiddies are
so much dependent on you that they will wait to see how you vote."

"What's the best way to begin it?" he asked.

"Simply walk in to-morrow and say: 'Look here, you are going to govern
yourselves.  I have no power; I won't order anyone to do anything; I
won't punish anyone.  Now, do what you like'."

Mac looked frightened.

"But, good Lord, man, they'll--they'll wreck the school!"

"Funk!" I laughed.

His eyes were full of excitement.

"It'll be an awful job to keep my hands off them," he said half to
himself.

"Funk!" I said again.

"It's all very well, but . . . well, I'm rather strict you know."

"So much the better!  All the better a row!"

"You Bolshevist!" he laughed.  He was like a boy divided between two
desires--to steal the apples and to escape the policeman.  I half
feared that his courage would desert him.

"Here," he said, "why not come over to school?"

The temptation was great and I wavered.

"No," I said at last, "I can't do it.  My presence would distract the
children, and . . . they won't smash all the windows in front of a
stranger.  You want my support, you dodger!"

But I would give ten pounds to be in Mac's schoolroom to-morrow morning.

      *      *      *      *      *

I went out this morning and sat on the school wall and smoked my pipe.
I strained my ears for the first murmur of the approaching storm.  Not
a sound came from the schoolroom.

"Mac has funked it after all," I groaned, and went in to help Mrs.
Macdonald to pare the potatoes.

When Mac came over at dinner-time his face wore a thoughtful look.

"You coward!" I cried.

"Coward!" he laughed.  "Why, man, the scheme is in full swing!"

Then I asked him to tell me all about it.

"Your knowledge of children is all bunkum," he began.  "You said there
would be a row when I announced that I gave up authority."

"And wasn't there?"

"Not a vestige of one.  The kids stared at me with open mouth,
and . . ."

"And what?"

"Oh, they simply got out their books and began their reading lesson.
As quiet as mice too."

"And do you mean to tell me that it made no difference?" I asked.

"None whatever.  I tell you they just went on with the timetable as
usual."

"But didn't they talk to each other more?"

"There wasn't a whisper."

I considered for a minute.

"What exactly did you say to them when you announced that they were to
have self-government?"

"I just said what you told me last night."

"Did you add anything?"

He avoided my eye.

"Of course I said that I trusted them to carry on the school as usual,"
he admitted reluctantly.

"Thereby showing them that you didn't trust them at all," I explained.
"Mac, you must have been a thundering strict disciplinarian.  The
kiddies are dead afraid of you.  I fear that you'll never manage to
have self-government.  This fear of you must be broken, and you've got
to break it."

"But how?" he asked helplessly.

"By coming down off your pedestal.  You must become one of the gang.
One dramatic exhibition will do it."

"What do you mean?"

"Smash a window; chuck books about the room . . . anything to break
this idea that you are an exalted being whose eye is like God's always
ready to see evil."

Mac looked annoyed and injured.

"What good will my fooling do?" he asked.

"But," I protested seriously, "it's essential.  You simply must break
your authority if you are to have a free school.  There can be no real
self-expression if you are always standing by to stamp out slacking and
noise."

"But," he protested, "didn't I tell 'em I was giving up my authority?"

"Yes, but they don't believe you.  You've got the eye of an authority."

He was by this time getting rather indignant.

"I can't go the length you do," he said sourly.  "I'm not an anarchist."

"In that case I'd advise you to chuck the experiment, Mac," I said with
an indifferent shrug of my shoulders.  The shrug nettled Mac; he is one
of the bull-dog breed, and I saw his lips set.

"I've begun it, and I won't chuck it," he said firmly.  "And I hope to
prove that your methods are all wrong.  Let it come gradually; that's
what I say."

When he came over at four o'clock his face glowed with excitement.  He
slapped me on the back with his heavy hand.

"Man," he cried, "it's going fine!  We had our first trial this
afternoon."

"Go on," I said.

"Oh, it was a first class start.  Jim Inglis threw his pencil at Peter
Mackie."

"I hope he didn't miss," I said flippantly.

Mac ignored my levity.

"And then I didn't know what to do.  My first impulse was to haul him
out and strap him, but of course I didn't.  I just said to the class:
'You saw what Jim Inglis did?  You have to decide what is to be done
about it'."

"And they answered: 'Please, sir, give him the tawse'?" I said.

Mac laughed.

"That's exactly what they did say, but I told them that they were
governing themselves, and suggested that they elect a chairman and
decide by vote."

"Bad tactics," I commented.  "You should have left them to settle their
own procedure.  What happened then?"

"They appointed Mary Wilson as chairman, and then John Smith got up and
proposed that the prisoner get six scuds with the tawse from me.  The
motion was carried unanimously."

"You refused of course?" I said.

"Man, I couldn't refuse.  I was alarmed, because six scuds are far too
many for a little offence like chucking a pencil.  I made them as light
as possible."

I groaned.

"What would you have done?" he asked.

"Taken the prisoner's side," I said promptly, "I should have chucked
every pencil in the room at the judge and jury.  Then I should have
pointed out that I refused to do the dirty work of the community."

"But where does the self-government come in there?" he protested.
"Chucking things at the jury is anarchy, pure anarchy."

"I know," I said simply.  "But then anarchy is necessary in your
school.  You don't mean to say that the children thought that throwing
a pencil was a great crime?  What happened was that they projected
themselves on to you; unconsciously they said: 'The Mester thinks this
a crime and he would punish it severely.'  They were trying to please
you.  I say that anarchy is necessary if these children are to get free
from their dependence on you and their fear of you.  So long as you
refuse to alter your old values you can't expect the kids to alter
their old values.  Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter
the kingdom of--er--self-government."

I know that Mac's experiment will fail, and for this reason; he wants
his children to run the school themselves, but to run it according to
his ideas of government.

      *      *      *      *      *

I think of an incident that happened when I was teaching in a school in
London.  I had a drawing lesson, and the children made so much noise
that the teacher in the adjoining room came in and protested that she
couldn't make her voice heard.  The noise in my room seemed to
increase . . . and the lady came in again.  The noise increased.

Next day I went to my class.

"You made such a noise yesterday that the teacher next door had to stop
teaching.  She rightly complained.  Now I want to ask you what you are
going to do about it."

"You should keep us in order," said Findlay, a boy of eleven.

"I refuse," I said; "it isn't my job."

This raised a lively discussion; the majority seemed to agree with
Findlay.

"Anyway," I said doggedly, "I refuse to be your policeman," and I sat
down.

There was much talking, and then Joy got up.

"I think we ought to settle it by a meeting, and I propose Diana as
chairman."

The idea was hailed with delight, and Diana was elected chairman and
she took my desk seat and I went and sat down in her place.

Joy jumped up again.

"I propose that Mr. Neill be put out of the room."

The motion was carried.

"Righto!" I said, as I moved to the door, "I'll go up to the staff-room
and have a smoke.  Send for me if you want me."

I smoked a cigarette in the staff-room, and as I threw the stump into
the grate Nancy came in.

"You can come down now."

I went down.

"Well," I said cheerily, "have you decided anything?"

"Yes," said the chairman, "we have decided that----"

Joy was on her feet at once.

"I propose that we don't tell Mr. Neill what we have decided.  We can
ask him at the end of the week if he notices any difference in our
behaviour."

Others objected, and the matter was put to the vote.  The voting was a
draw, and Diana gave the casting vote in favour of my being told.  Then
she said that the meeting had agreed that if anyone made a row in
class, he or she was to be sent to Coventry for a whole day.

"What will happen if I speak to the one that has been sent to
Coventry?" asked Wolodia.

"We'll send you to Coventry too," said Diana, and the meeting murmured
agreement.

No one was ever sent to Coventry, but I had no further complaints
against the class.  One interesting feature in the affair was this:
Violet, a lively girl full of fun, one day got up and, as a joke,
proposed that Mr. Neill be sent to Coventry.  The others, usually
willing to laugh with Violet, protested.

"That's just silly, Violet," they said.  "If you propose silly things
like that we'll send you to Coventry."

Then someone got up and proposed that Violet be sent to Coventry for
being silly, and Diana at once took the chair.  I got up and moved the
negative, pointing out that I made no charge against her, and she was
acquitted by a majority of one.  I mention this to show that children
of eleven and twelve can take their responsibilities seriously.

When I told the story to Macdonald he said: "But why didn't you join in
their noise?"

"For two reasons, Mac," I said.  "Firstly these children were not under
the suppression of government schools; secondly it wasn't my school."




III.

The servant girl at the Manse has had an illegitimate child, and Meg
Caddam, the out-worker at East Mains is cutting her dead.  Thus the
gossip of Mrs. Macdonald.  Meg Caddam is the unmarried mother of three.

I have noticed again and again that the most severe critic of the
unmarried mother is the unmarried mother, and I have many a time
wondered at the fact.  Now I know the explanation; it is the familiar
Projection of a Reproach.  Meg feels guilty because of her three
children, but her guilt is repressed, driven down into the unconscious.

She dare not allow her conscious mind to face the truth, for then the
truth would lower her self-respect; it would be unpleasant, out of
harmony with her ego-ideal.  But it is easy for her to project this
inner reproach on to someone else, hence her blaming of the Manse
lassie.  Meg Caddam is really condemning herself, but she does not know
it.

I used to despise the Meg Caddams as hypocrites, but, poor souls, they
are not hypocrites.  Their condemnation of their fallen sisters is
genuine.  It is wonderful how we all manage to divide our minds into
compartments.  Sandy Marshall of Brigs Farm is a most religious man,
yet the other day he was fined for watering his milk.  It is unjust to
say that his religion is hypocritical.  What happens is that his
religion is shut up in one compartment of his mind, and his dishonesty
is shut up in another compartment . . . and there is no direct
communication between the compartments.

The mind is like one of the older railway carriages; education's task
is to convert the old carriage into a new corridor carriage with
communication between the compartments.  Meg Caddam's own transgression
against current morality is locked up in one compartment; her
condemnation of the Manse girl is in another compartment.  There is an
unconscious communication, but there is no conscious communication.  I
don't know what Meg would say if a cruel friend pointed out to her that
she also was a fallen woman.

I think that the gossip of this village mostly consists of projected
reproaches.  Liz Ramsay, an old maid and the super-gossip of Tarbonny,
came into the schoolhouse this morning.

"Do ye ken this," she said to Mrs. Macdonald, "it's my opeenion that
Mrs. Broon died o' neglect.  I went to the door the day afore she died
to speer hoo she was, and her daughter cam to the door, and do ye ken
this?  That lassie was smiling . . . _smilin'_ . . . and her auld
mother upstairs at death's door.  Eh, Mrs. Macdonald, she's a heartless
woman that Mary Broon.  She killed her mother by neglect, that's what
she did."

After she had gone I said to Mrs. Macdonald: "Who nursed Liz's mother
when she died last June?"

"Nobody," said Mrs. Macdonald grimly.  "Liz had too much gossip to
retail in the village, and I'm told that Liz was seldom in the house."

I think I am guessing fairly rightly when I say that Liz feels guilty
of neglecting her own mother, and like Meg Caddam she projects the
reproach on to someone else.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

Last Friday night I gave a lecture to the literary Society in Tarby,
our nearest town.  I chose the subject of forgetting, and I told the
audience of Freud and his great work in connection with the
unconscious.  To-day's _Tarby Herald_ in reporting the lecture prints
phonetically the spelling "Froid," but the _Tarby Observer_ goes one
better when it says: "Mr. Neill is an exponent of the new science of
Cycloanalysis."

Which reminds me of a painful episode that took place when I was
eighteen.  I was much enamoured of a young university student, and I
always strove to gain her favour by being interested in the things she
liked.  One day she informed me that she intended to take the
Psychology class at St. Andrews the following session.  I had never
heard the word before, and I made a bold guess that it had something to
do with cycles.  In consequence we talked at cross purposes for a while.

"I'd love a subject like that," I said warmly.

"Most of it will be experimental psychology," she said.

My enthusiasm increased.  I thought of the many experiments I had tried
with my old cushion-tyred cycle.

"Excellent!" I cried.  "A sort of training in inventing.  Cranks, eh?"
At that time my one ambition in life was to invent a folding crank that
would give double power on hills.

The lady looked at me sharply.

"Why cranks?" she demanded.  "I don't see it.  Psychology has nothing
to do with crystal-gazing you know."

I was gravelled.

"But what's the idea?" I asked.  "Improvement of design?"

This made her think hard.

"H'm, yes, I think I know what you mean," she said slowly.  "But
remember that before you can improve the psyche you must know the
psyche."

I hastened to agree.

"Certainly, but all the same there is much room for improvement.  You
don't want to come off at every hill, do you?"

This seemed to make her more thoughtful still.

"No," she said, "but don't you think that the mind makes the hill?"

This staggered me.

"Eh?" I gasped.  "Mean to say that I broke my chain on Logie Brae
yesterday because----"

"I'm afraid it is too difficult for me," she said apologetically.  "I
get lost in metaphors."

Then I asked her something about ball bearings, and she threw me a
grateful smile . . . for changing the subject--as she thought.

The most amusing joke is the joke about the innocent or ignorant.
Everyone is tickled at the Hamlet joke I referred to in my _Log_.

The school inspector was dining with the local squire.

"Funny thing happened in the village school to-day," he said.  "I was a
little bit ratty, and I fired a question at a sleepy-looking boy at the
bottom of the class.

"Here, boy, who wrote _Hamlet_?"

The little chap got very flustered.

"P--please, sir, it wasna me!"

The squire laughed boisterously.

"And I suppose the little devil had done if after all!" he cried.

We laugh at that story because we have all made mistakes owing to
ignorance, and blushed for them a hundred times later.  When we laugh
at the squire, we are really laughing at ourselves; we are getting rid
of our pent-up self-shame.  That's why a good laugh is a medicine; it
allows us to get rid of psychic poison, just as a good sweat rids us of
somatic poison.  Charlie Chaplin has possibly cured more people than
all the psycho-analysts in the world.

      *      *      *      *      *

Public speaking is a most difficult thing.  It is difficult enough when
you know your subject, and it is almost impossible if you don't.  At a
dinner someone asks you to get up and propose the health of the ladies.
I tried proposing that toast once; luckily most of the diners were
under the table by that time.  What can one say about the ladies?

When you have a definite subject to talk about, and when you know
everything about it, even then public speaking is difficult.  You stand
up before a sea of faces.  You see no one; you dare not catch anyone's
eye.  The best plan is to fix your eye on the blurred face of the man
at the back of the hall.  You feel that the audience is vaguely hostile.

At one time I used to go straight into my subject . . .  "Ladies and
gentlemen, the subject of evolution has occupied the minds of--"  Then
the audience began to rustle, and the women turned to look at the hats
behind them.

Nowadays I am more wary.  I stand up and gaze over the sea of faces for
a full minute.  There is absolute silence.  I put my hands into my
trouser pockets and gaze at the ceiling, as if I were considering
whether I should go on or give it up and go home.  Even the boys at the
back of the hall begin to look towards the platform.

Then I look down and find that my tie is hanging out of my waistcoat,
and I adjust it.  A girl of ten giggles.

"What can you expect for fivepence half-penny?" I ask, and the audience
gasps.

"Why doesn't someone invent a long tie that won't come out at the
ends?" I ask wearily, and there is a laugh.  I go on from ties to
collars, and there is another laugh.  After that I can speak on
education for two hours, and everyone in the hall will listen with
great attention.

The first thing in public speaking is to get on good terms with your
audience, and I claim that the best way to do this is to show them the
human side of yourself.  Some of your hearers are agin you; they have
come out to criticise you.  You disarm them at once by treating
yourself as a joke.  Of course you must suit your tactics to your
audience.  The tie remark will put me on good terms with a rural
audience, but it would fail in a lecture to teachers in the Albert Hall.

An important thing to remember is that crowd humour is quite different
from individual humour.  A crowd will roar with delight if the lecturer
accidentally knocks over the drinking glass on the table, but no
individual ever laughs when a similar accident happens in a private
room.  Read the reports of speeches in the House of Commons.  You will
read that Lloyd George, in a speech, says: "And now let us turn to
Ireland (loud laughter)."  But in cold print it isn't a very good joke.

Quite a good way of commencing a lecture is to tell a short story . . .
about the chairman if possible.  But you must be careful.  Keep off the
topic of the chairman's marital affairs; he may have lodged a divorce
petition the week before.

On second thoughts I think it better not to mention the chairman at
all.  Last winter the local mayor was presiding at a lecture I gave in
an English town.  After I had delivered the lecture, he got up.

"I came to this meeting feeling dead tired," he said, "but after Mr.
Neill's lecture I feel as fresh as a daisy."

I rose in alarm.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said hastily, "the mayor has been sitting
behind me.  Do tell me: has he been asleep?"

In the ante-room afterwards he assured me solemnly that he hadn't been
asleep.

On Friday night I began thus: "Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I am
going to talk about Forgetting."  Then I put my hand in my inside coat
pocket; then I tried another pocket, and got very excited while I
rummaged every pocket I had.

"I must apologise," I said, "but I have forgotten my notes."

The audience laughed, and we became the best of friends.

      *      *      *      *      *

Forgetting is very often intentional.  We forget what we do not want to
remember.  Brown writes to me saying that he is taking the wife and
kids to the seaside, and would I please pay him the fiver I owe him?  I
at once sit down and write: "My dear Brown, I enclose a cheque for five
quid.  Many thanks for the loan.  Hope you all have a good time at the
sea."

Three days later Brown replies.

"Thanks for your letter, old man, but you forgot to enclose the cheque."

Why did I forget the cheque?  Because I did not want to pay up.
Consciously I did want to pay, for I wrote out the cheque all right,
but my unconscious did not want to pay, and it was my unconscious that
made me slip the cheque under the blotter.

Last summer I was invited to spend the week-end with some people at
Stanmore.  I did not want to go; a previous week-end with them had been
most boring.  However, I reluctantly consented to go out on the
Saturday morning.  When Saturday morning came I was not very much
surprised to find that I had forgotten to put out my boots to be
cleaned the night before.

"It looks as if I weren't keen on this trip," I said to myself.

I went down to Baker Street and got into the train.  We stopped at many
stations, and after an hour's journey I began to wonder what was wrong.
I asked another man in the compartment when we were due at Stanmore,
and he looked surprised.

"Why," he said, "you're on the wrong line; you ought to have changed at
Harrow."

I got out at the next station and found that I had an hour to wait for
the return train to Harrow.  As I sat on the platform I took from my
pocket my host's letter.

"Remember," it ran, "to change at Harrow," and the words were
underlined.

I arrived four hours late . . . and spent a pleasant week-end.

One night I was dining out in London, and I told my host the new theory
of forgetting.

"That's all bunkum," he said.  "Why, there is a flower growing at the
front door there, and I can never remember the name of it.  I am fond
of flowers and never have any difficulty in remembering their names as
a rule."

"What flower is it?" I asked.

He tried to recall it, and had to give it up.

"It's the joke of the family," said his wife.  "He can never remember
the name Begonia."

"Begonia!" cried my host, "that's the name!  But surely you don't mean
to tell me that I want to forget it?  Why should I?"

"It may be associated with something unpleasant in your life," I said.

"Nonsense!" he laughed.  "The name conveys nothing to me."

We began to talk about other things.  Ten minutes later my host
suddenly exclaimed:

"I've got it!"

"What?" I asked.

"That Begonia business.  When I began business as a chartered
accountant over twenty years ago, the first books I had to audit were
the books of a company calling itself The Begonia Furnishing Company.
I glanced through the books and soon concluded that they were
swindlers.  I worried over that case for a week; you see it was my
first case, and I felt a little superstitious about it.  However, at
the end of a week I sent the books back saying that I couldn't see my
way to undertake the auditing.  I've never given them a thought since."

I explained the mechanisms to him.  The whole idea of this Begonia
Company was so painful to him that he repressed it, that is, drove it
down into the unconscious.  Twenty years later he was unconsciously
afraid to recall the name of the flower, because the name might have
brought back the painful memories of the questionable books.

On Friday night during question time one man got up.

"Why is it, then," he asked, "that I cannot forget the painful time
when my wife died?"

I explained that a big thing like that cannot be forgotten, but pointed
out that in a case like that the tendency is to forget little things in
connection with the big pain.  I told him of a case I had myself known.
A lady of my acquaintance lived for a few years in Glasgow; then she
moved to Edinburgh, where she lived for almost thirty years.  Now she
lives in London.  When she talks of her old home in Edinburgh she
always says: "When we were in Glasgow."  Invariably she makes this
mistake.  The reason is almost certainly this: just before she left
Edinburgh she lost the one she loved most in life.  She says: "When we
were in Glasgow" because the word Edinburgh would at once bring back
the painful memories connected with her loved one's death.

When I was teaching in Hampstead one of my pupils, a boy of sixteen,
came to me one day.

"That's all rot, what you say about wanting to forget things," he said.
"I went and left my walking-stick in a bus yesterday."

"Were you tired of it?" I asked.

"Tired of it?" he said indignantly.  "Why, it was a beauty, a
silver-topped cane, got it from mother on my birthday.  That proves
your theory is all wrong."

"Tell me about yesterday," I said.

"Well, I was going to a match at lord's, and it looked rather dull, so
mother told me I'd better take a gamp.  I said it wasn't going to rain,
and took my cane, but I had just got on the top of a bus when down came
the rain in bucketfuls and I tell you I was wet to the skin."

"So you did mean to leave your cane behind?" I asked, with a smile.

"But I tell you I didn't!"

"You did, all the same.  You kicked yourself because you hadn't taken
your mother's advice and brought a gamp.  You deliberately left your
cane behind you because it had proved useless."

I must add that I failed to convince him.

Connected with forgetting are what Freud calls symptomatic acts.  I
leave my stick or gloves behind when I am calling at a house: I
conclude that I want to go back there.  I go to dinner at the
Thomsons', and at their front door I absent-mindedly take out my
latch-key.  This may mean that I feel at home there; on the other hand,
it may mean that I wish I were at home.  It is dangerous to dogmatise
about the unconscious.

I was sitting one night with Wilson, an old college friend of mine.  We
talked of old times, and I remarked that he had been very lucky in his
lodgings during his college course.

"Yes," he said, "I was in the same digs all the five years.  She was a
ripping landlady was Mrs.--Mrs.--Good Lord!  I've forgotten her name!"

He tried to recall the name, but had to give it up.  Two hours later,
as he rose to go, he exclaimed: "I remember the name now!  Mrs. Watson!"

"What are your associations to the name Watson?" I asked.

"Associations?  What do you mean?"

"What's the first thing that comes into your head in connection with
the name?" I asked.

He made an effort to concentrate his mind, then suddenly he laughed
shortly.

"Good Lord!" he cried, "that's my wife's name!"

I felt that I could not very well ask him anything further, but I
suspected that Wilson and his wife were not getting on well together.

      *      *      *      *      *

Macdonald's self-government scheme has fizzled out.  Yesterday his
scholars besought him to return to the old way of authority.

"They were fed up with looking after themselves," explained Mac to me.
"They were always trying each other for misdemeanours, and they got
sick of it."

I tried to explain to Mac why his attempt had failed.  Self-government
always fails unless it is complete self-government.  Mac was the
director and guide; it was he who decided the time-table; it was he who
rang the bell and decided the length of the intervals.  The children
had nothing to do but to keep themselves in order, hence they came to
spy on each other.  All their energies were directed to penal measures.
Their meeting degenerated into a police court.  That was inevitable;
Mac, by laying down all the laws, prevented their using their creative
energy on things and ideas.  Naturally they put all the energy they had
into the only thing open to them--the trial of offenders.  In short,
they were employing energy in destruction when they ought to have been
employing it in construction.  Mac seems indifferent now.  "The thing
is unworkable," he says.

      *      *      *      *      *

Duncan came over to-night.  I decided to let him do most of the
talking, and he did it well.  He has been doing a lot of Regional
Geography, and I learned much from his conversation.  As the evening
wore on he became very affable, and he treated me with the greatest
kindness.  When Mac was seeing him out Duncan remarked to him: "That
chap Neill isn't such a bad fellow after all."  Now that I have shown
Duncan that I am his inferior in Geography he will listen to me with
less irritation.

After supper I went over to see Dauvit.  His shop was crowded.
Conversation was going slowly, and Dauvit seemed to welcome my entrance.

"Man, Dominie," he said, "I am very glad to see ye, cos the smith here
has been tellin' his usual lees aboot the ten pund troot that he nearly
landed in the Kernet."

"I doot ye dreamt it, smith," said the foreman from Hillend.  "I ken
for mysell that the biggest troot I ever catched were in my dreams."

"Dreams is just a curran blethers," said the smith in scorn.

Dauvit looked at him thoughtfully.

"That's a very ignorant remark, smith," he said gravely.  "There's
naebody kens what a dream is.  Some o' thae spiritualist lads say that
when ye are asleep yer spirit goes to the next plane, and that maks yer
dreams."

The smith laughed loudly.

"Oh, Dauvit!  Why, man, I dreamed last nicht that I was sittin' we a
great muckle pint o' beer in my hand.  Do ye mean to tell me that there
is beer in heaven?"

There was a laugh at Dauvit's expense, but the laugh turned against the
smith when Dauvit remarked dryly: "I didna mention heaven; I said the
next plane, and onybody that kens you, smith, kens that the plane
you're gaein' to is the doon plane."

"Naturally, a muckle pint o' beer will be the exact thing ye need doon
there," he added.

"It's my opeenion," said old John Peters, "that dreams is just like a
motor car withoot the driver.  Or like a schule withoot the mester; the
bairns just run aboot whaur they like, nae control as ye micht say.
Weel, that's jest what happens in dreams; the mester is sleepin' and
the bairns do all sorts o' mad things."

"Aye, man, John," said Dauvit, who seemed to be struck with the idea,
"there's maybe something in that.  Just as bairns when they get free do
a' the things they're no meant to do, we do the same things in oor
dreams.  Goad, but I've done some awfu' things in my dreams!"

Here Jake Tosh the roadman began to cough, and Jake's cough always
means that he is about to say something.

"You're just a lot o' haverin' craturs," he said with conviction.  "If
ye had ony sense ye wud ken that the dream is just cheese and tripe for
supper."

Dauvit's eyes twinkled.

"And does the cheese wander frae yer stammick up to yer heid, Jake?"

"I wudna go so far as that," said Jake seriously, "but what I say is
that a' the different parts o' the body work thegether.  If the
stammick has to work a' nicht to digest the cheese, the heid has to
keep workin' at the same rate, and that's why ye dream."

"Aye, man, Jake," said Dauvit, "it's a bonny theory, but wud ye jest
tell me exactly what work yer toes and fingers and hair are doin' a'
nicht to keep upsides wi' yer stammick?"

Jake dismissed the question with an airy wave of his hand.

"Onybody kens that," he said; "they grow.  Yer hair and yer nails grow
at nichts, and that's why ye need a shave in the mornin'!"

"What if you don't dream at all, Jake?" I asked.

"Ye're needin' some grub," said Jake shortly.

On thinking it over I feel that Jake's theory throws some light on
Jung's theory of the libido.




IV.

This morning I had a letter from a friend in London asking when I am
going to set up my "Crank School" in London.  I began to think about the
word Crank.  What is a Crank?  Usually the name is applied to people who
wear long hair, eat vegetarian diet, wear sandals . . . or something in
that line.  A Crank therefore is someone who differs from the crowd, and
I am led to conclude that the Crank not only differs from the crowd but
is usually ahead of the crowd.

According to Sir Martin Conway the crowd has no head; it can only feel.
Hence it comes that the main feature of a crowd is its emotion.  When we
study the street crowd, the mob, this fact is evident; but can we say the
same of other crowds . . . the Public School crowd, the Church, the
Miners, the Doctors?  I think so.  The anger that Alec Waugh's book, _The
Loom of Youth_, aroused in the public schools was not a thought-out
anger; it came from the public school emotion.  So with vivisection; the
doctors' rage at the anti-vivisectionists is not an intellectual rage; it
is simply a professional emotion.  Just before I left London I happened
one night to be in a company of men who were arguing about
Re-incarnation.  I had no special views on the subject, but I soon found
myself supporting the crowd that was sceptical about Re-incarnation.  The
reason was that the leader of the anti-reincarnation crowd happened to be
a man called Neill.  It is highly probable that if two rag-and-bone men
got into a scrap in a public house they would support each other simply
out of a professional crowd emotion.

That the crowd has no head is evident when we read the popular papers or
see the popular films.  The most successful papers are those that touch
the passions of the mob.  I proved this one week last spring.  Judges
were beginning to introduce the "cat" for criminals, as a means to stem
the crime wave.  I sat down and wrote an article on the subject, pointing
out that this was a going back to the days of barbarism when lunatics
were whipped behind the cart's tail.  I made a strong plea for the
psychological treatment of the criminal, basing my plea on the fact that
crime is the result of unconscious workings of the mind, and stating that
instead of sending a poor man to penal servitude we ought to analyse his
mind and cure him of his anti-social tendencies.

I thought it a jolly good article, and when a prominent Sunday paper
returned the manuscript to me I was surprised.  My surprise left me on
the following Sunday when the same paper blared forth an article by
Horatio Bottomley.  His title was: "Wanted--the Cat!"

My article was more thoughtful, more humane, more scientific.  Why, then,
was it suppressed?  The answer is simple: it did not fit in with the
passions of the crowd.  It becomes clear why our best public
men--editors, cabinet ministers, publicists are not great thinkers.  They
must keep in touch with the crowd; they must express the emotions of the
crowd.

The attitude of the crowd to the anti-crowd person, the Crank, is never
one of contemptuous indifference.  It is always distinctly hostile.  If I
travel by tube from Hampstead to Piccadilly without a hat the other
travellers stare at me with mild hostility.  Why?  Conway, in _The Crowd
in Peace and War_, an excellent book, says that this hostility comes from
fear.  A crowd is always afraid of another crowd, because the only force
that can destroy a crowd is a rival crowd.  Every individual who differs
from the herd is suspect because he is perhaps the nucleus of a rival
crowd.  That is why the world always crucifies its Christs.

The Crank School, then, is a school where anti-crowd people send their
children.  It is the school _par excellence_ of the Intelligentsia.  The
tendency of every Crank School is to exaggerate the difference between
the crank and the crowd; hence its adoption of an ideal and its
concomitant crazes.  I cannot for the life of me see why ideals are
associated with vegetarianism, long hair, Grecian dress, and sandals,
just as I cannot see why art should attach itself to huge bow-ties, long
hair, and foot-long cigarette holders.

The Crank School holds up an ideal.  It plasters its walls with busts of
Walt Whitman and Blake; it hangs bad reproductions of Botticelli round
the walls; it sings songs to Freedom; it rhapsodises about Beethoven and
Bach.  The children of the Crank Schools are, I rejoice to say, not
cranks.  They leave the boredom of Bach and seek the jazz record on the
gramophone; they ignore the pictures of Whitman and Blake and study _The
Picture Show_ or _Funny Bits_.  Many of them think more highly of Charlie
Chaplin than of William Shakespeare.

I say again that I rejoice in this; it serves the Crank School people
jolly well right.  I cannot see by what right educators force what they
consider good taste down the children's throats.  That is a return to the
old way of authority, of treating the child's mind as a blank slate.  If
the Crank Schools are to improve, they must drop their high moral purpose
tone and come down to earth.  They must realise that Charlie Chaplin and
_John Bull_ have their place in education just as Shakespeare and
Beethoven have their place.  We do not want to turn out cranks who will
form a new superior crowd; we want to turn out men and women who will
readily join the conventional crowd and help it to reach better ideals.

This question of good taste is a sore one with me.  I think it fatal to
impose good taste on any child; the child must form his own taste.  I
know that it is possible to cultivate good taste and to become a very
superior cultivated person, but I know that the human, erring, vulgar,
music-hall, Charlie Chaplin part of such a person's make-up is not
annihilated; it is merely repressed into the unconscious.

I have a theory that each of us has a definite amount of human nature,
some of it high, some of it low, or, to phrase it differently, some of it
animal, some of it spiritual.  We can repress one part, and then we
become either a saint or a sinner; the better way is to be both saint and
sinner, to look life straight in the face, condemning no one, judging no
one.

      *      *      *      *      *

Macdonald was re-reading _A Dominie Dismissed_ to-night, and he looked up
and said: "Look here, you've got an awful lot of swear-words in this
book!"

"That," I said, "has a cause, Mac.  They aren't really swear-words; the
world has grown out of being shocked at a 'damn,' but I am willing to
admit that there are more damns and hells than is usual.  They are
symptomatic; they date back to my early days when swearing was a crime
punishable with the strap.  They are simply symbols of my freedom.  Most
bad language is from a like cause.  When you foozle on the first tee
there is no earthy reason why you should say 'Hell' rather than 'Onions'!
But if onions had been taboo when you were a child you would find
yourself using the word as a swear.  The curse word is the link that
joins your foozle with the nursery; whenever you curse you regress, that
is, you go back to the infantile."

"But," said Mac, "you don't mean to say that if swearing were permitted
to children that they wouldn't curse when they were grown up?"

"I don't think they would," I said.  "Nor would there be any unprintable
stories if we had a frank sex education.  It's a sad fact, Mac, but
nine-tenths of humour is due to early suppression and repression."

"Seems to me," said Mac with a laugh, "that if everybody were
psycho-analysed, the world would be a pretty dull place."

      *      *      *      *      *

A few days ago I found a pot of light paint in Mac's workshop, and,
impelled by heaven only knows what unconscious process, I painted my
bicycle blue.  This morning, the paint being dry, I rode forth into an
unsympathetic world.  Women came to their doors to stare at my machine,
and as they stared they broke into laughter.  When I reached the village
of Cordyke the school was coming out, and I was greeted with a howl of
derision.  I thought it a good instance of crowd psychology; I was
different from the crowd, and I evoked laughter and derision.

After cycling a few miles, I came to an old man breaking stones at the
bottom of a hill.  On my approaching he threw down his hammer and turned
to stare at my cycle.  I dismounted.

"Almichty me!" he said with surprise.  "That's a michty colour!"

"It's unusual," I said, as I lit a cigarette.

He fumbled for his clay pipe.

"I've seen black anes, and I wance saw a silver-plated ane, but I never
heard tell o' a blue bike afore," he said.  "Did you pent it?"

I acknowledged that it was my very own handiwork.

"But," he said in puzzled tones, "what was yer idea?" and he stared at it
again.  "A michty colour that!"

I threw my bike down on the grass and sat down on the cairn.

"Between you and me," I said mysteriously, "I had to paint it blue."

He raised his eyebrows.

"Yea, man!"

"Government orders," I said carelessly, and began to throw stones at a
tree trunk at the other side of the road.

"Government orders?"  He looked very much surprised.

"Yes," I said airily.  "You see, it's like this.  The Coalition
Government isn't very firmly placed these days, and, well, I'm an agent
for it.  Of course, you know that it is really a Tory government, and my
bike, as it were, invites the electorate to vote True Blue."

"Yea, man!  I thocht that you was maybe ane o' thae temperance lads frae
Americky."

"Ah!" I said solemnly, "that reminds me; Pussyfoot tried to induce me to
make my tour a sort of joint thing.  He suggested that I might carry on
my Tory work, and at the same time take part in the blue ribbon campaign.
Of course I refused."

"Of coorse," he nodded.

"Officially I am doing Coalition work," I continued conversationally,
"but I have motives of my own."

"You don't say!"

"Oh, yes.  I am a great admirer of Lord Fisher and the Blue Water school,
sometimes spoken of as the Blue Funk school.  Again, I find that the
Great War has left many people in the blues, and by means of homeopathy I
cure 'em; I mean to say that they come to their doors and laugh at my
blue bike.  My blue dispels their blues."

The old man did not seem to follow this.

"Of course," I went on, "the Bluebells of Scotland have something to do
with my selection of the colour."

"A verra nice sang," he commented.

"An excellent song!  Then there is the well-known phrase 'Once in a Blue
Moon,' and innumerable songs about the pale moonlight.  Also I once knew
a man who had the blue devils."

I tried to think of other phases of blueness, but my stock was almost
exhausted.

"Of course," I added, "I am not forgetting the other blues, the Oxford
blues, Reckitt's Blue, Blue Coupons, and--and--I'm afraid I can't think
of any other blues just at the moment."

The old man drew the back of his hand over his mouth.

"There's the 'Blue Bonnets' up at the tap o' the brae," he suggested
thirstily.

"Good idea!" I cried, "come on!" and together we climbed the brae.

      *      *      *      *      *

A friend of mine in London has written me asking if I will write an
article on Co-education for an educational journal, in which she is
interested.  I replied: "I can't see where the problem comes in; to a
Scot co-education is not a thing that has to be supported by argument; he
accepts it as he accepts the law of gravitation."

I wonder why English people are so afraid of co-education.  To this day
schools like Bedales, King Alfred's, Harpenden, and Arundale are reckoned
as crank schools.  The great middle-class of England believes in
segregation.  Even Dr. Ernest Jones, the most prominent Freudian
psycho-analyst in England, appears to be afraid of it.

I can only conjecture that Jones agrees with the middle and upper classes
in associating sex with sin.  I have never tried to think out my reasons
for believing in co-education; possibly the true reason is that having
grown up in a co-education atmosphere, co-education has become a part of
me just as my Scots accent has.  In other words, I may have a
co-education complex.  If that is so, my arguments will be mere
rationalisations, but I give them for what they are worth.

We are all born with a strong sex instinct, and this instinct must find
expression in some way.  We know that the sex energy can be sublimated,
that is, raised to a higher power.  For instance, the creative sex urge
may be directed to the making of a bookcase, or the making of a century
at cricket.  But I know of no evidence to prove that all the instinct can
be sublimated.  An adolescent may spend his days at craftwork and games,
but he will have erotic dreams at nights.  All the drawing and painting
in the world will not prevent his having emotion when he looks at the
face of a pretty girl.

In our segregation schools boys and girls see nothing of each other.  The
unsublimated sex instinct finds expression in homosexuality, that is the
emotion that should go to the opposite sex is fixed on a person of the
same sex.  I admit that we are all more or less homosexual; otherwise
there could be no friendship between man and man, or woman and woman.  In
our boarding schools the sex instinct often takes the road of
auto-eroticism.

In a co-education school the sex impulse is directed to one of the
opposite sex.  This attachment is nearly always a romantic ideal
attachment.  I have never known a case that went the length of kissing;
among little children at a rural school, yes; at the age of seven I
kissed my first sweetheart; but among adolescents I find that neither the
boy nor the girl has the courage to kiss.  Theirs is a sublimated
courtship; they never use the word Love; they talk about "liking
So-and-so."

That at many co-education schools this romantic attachment is more or
less an underground affair is due to the moral attitude of teachers.
They pride themselves on the beautiful sexless attachments of their
pupils; they give moral lectures on the subject of kissing, and naturally
every pupil in school at once becomes painfully self-conscious on the
subject.  The truth is that many co-educationists do not in their hearts
believe in the system; they still see sin in sex.

To be a thorough success the co-education school must include sex
education in its curriculum.  The children of the most advanced parents
seldom get it at home, and they come to school with the old attitude to
sex.  Sex education does not mean telling children where babies come
from; it should dwell mostly on the psychological side of the question.
The child ought to learn the truth about its sex instinct.  Most
important of all, the child who has indulged in auto-eroticism ought to
be helped to get rid of his or her sense of guilt.  This sense of guilt
is the primary evil of self-abuse; abolish it, and the child is on the
way to a self-cure.

How many children can go to their teacher and make confession of sex
troubles?  Very few.  It is the teachers' fault; they set themselves up
as moralists, and a moralist is a positive danger to any child.

Not long ago I was addressing a meeting of teachers in south London.  At
question time a woman challenged me.

"You have condemned moralists," she said; "do you mean to say that you
would never teach a child the difference between right and wrong?"

"Never," I answered, "for I do not know what is right and what is wrong."

"Then I think you ought not to be a teacher," she said.

"I know what is right for me, and wrong for me," I went on to explain,
"but I do not know what is right and wrong for you.  Nor do I presume to
know what is right or wrong for a child."

I was pleasingly surprised to find that the meeting roared approval of my
reply.

      *      *      *      *      *

Macdonald had to attend a funeral to-day, and he asked me if I would take
his classes for an hour.  I gladly agreed.

"Give them a lesson on psychology," he said; "it will maybe improve their
behaviour."

I went over to the school at two o'clock, and Mac introduced me, although
I had already made friends with most of the children in the playground
and the fields.  Mac then went away and I sat down at his desk.

"We'll have a talk," I said, "just a little friendly talk between you and
me.  I want to hear your opinions on some things."

They looked at me with interest.

"Why," I said, "why do you sit quiet in school?"

Andrew Smith put up his hand.

"Please, sir, 'cause if we don't the mester gies us the strap."

"A very sound reason, too," I commented.  "And now I want to ask you why
you sometimes want to throw papers or slate-pencils about the room."

"Please, sir, we never do that," said little Jeannie Simpson.

"The mester wud punish us," said another girl.

"But," I cried, "surely one of you has thrown things about the room?"

Tom Murray, the bad boy of the school (according to Mac), put up his hand.

"Please, sir, I did it once, but the mester licked me."

"Why did you do it, Tom?"

Tom thought hard.

"I didna like the lesson," he said simply.

I then went on further.

"Now I want you all to think this out: was Tom being selfish when he
threw paper, or was he unselfish?"

Everyone, Tom included, judged that the paper-throwing was a selfish act.

"I don't agree," I said.  "Tom was trying to do a service to the others;
you were all bored by a lesson, and Tom stepped in and took your
attention.  Unfortunately he also attracted the attention of Mr.
Macdonald, but that has nothing to do with Tom's reason for doing it.
Tom was the most unselfish of the lot of you; he showed more good than
any of you."

"The mester didna think that!" said Tom, with a grin.

Peter Wallace carefully rolled a paper pellet and threw it at Tom.

"Now," I said with a smile, "let's think this out; why did Peter throw
that pellet just now?"

"Because the class is bored," said a little girl, and there was a good
laugh at my expense.

"Righto!" I laughed, "shall we do something else?" but the class shouted
"No!" and I proceeded.

"Peter, do tell us why you threw that pellet."

"For fun," said Peter, blushing and smiling.

"He did it so's the class wud look at him," said Tom Murray, and Peter
hid his diminished head.

"A wise answer, Tom," I said; "but we are all like that; we all like to
be looked at.  Who is the best at arithmetic?"

"Willie Broon," said the class, and Willie Broon cocked his head proudly.

"And who is the best fighter?"

"Tom Murray," answered the boys, and one little chap added: "Tom cud
fecht Willie Broon wi' one hand."

Tom tried to look modest.

I went round the class and with one exception every child had at least
one branch of life in which he or she found a sense of superiority.  The
exception was Geordie Wylie, a small lad of thirteen with a white face
and a starved appearance.  The class were unanimous in declaring that
Geordie had no talent.

"He canna even spit far enough," said one boy.

Geordie's embarrassment made me change the subject quickly, but I made up
my mind to have a talk with him later.

Some of the reasons for individual pride were strange.  Jake Tosh's
feeling of superiority lay in the circumstance that his father had laid
out a gamekeeper while poaching.  Jock Wilson had once found a shilling;
another boy had seen "fower swine stickit a' in wan day;" another could
smoke a pipe of Bogie Roll without sickening (but I had to promise not to
tell the Mester).  The girls seemed to find their superiority mostly in
lessons, although a few were proud of their needle-work.

I then went on to ask them what their highest ambition in life was.  The
boys showed less imagination than the girls.  Six of them wanted to be
ploughmen like their fathers.  To a townsman this might appear to be a
very modest ambition, but to a boy it means power and position; to drive
a pair of horses tandem fashion as they do on the East Coast, with the
tracer prancing on the braes; that is what being a ploughman means to a
village lad.  One boy wanted to be an engineer, another a clerk ("'cos he
doesna need to tak' aff his jaicket to work!"), another a soldier.

"Not a single teacher!" I said.

"We're no clever enough," said Tom Murray.

I turned to the girls.

"Now, let's see what ambition you have," I said hopefully.  The result
was good; three teachers, two nurses, one typist, one lady doctor,
one . . . lady.  This was Maggie Clark.  She just wanted to be like one
of thae ladies in the picters with a motor car.

"And husband?" I asked.

"No, I dinna want a man, but I wud like a lot of bairns," she said, and
there was a snigger from the boys who had got their sex education from
the ploughmen at the Brig of evenings.

Another girl remarked that Maggie's ambition was a selfish one.

"But are you not all selfish?" I asked.

The class indignantly denied it.

"Right," I said, "what do you say to a composition exercise?"

They obediently got out their composition books, but I told them that my
exercise was an easy one.  I tore up a few pages into slips and
distributed them.

"Now," I said, "suppose I give you five pounds to do what you like with.
Write down what you would do with it, fold the paper, and hand it in to
me."

They eagerly agreed, and at the end of five minutes I had a hatful of
slips.  I then drew a line down the centre of the blackboard.  On one
side I wrote the word Selfish; on the other Unselfish.  The class groaned
and laughed.

"Now," I said cheerfully, "this will prove whether the class is unselfish
or not," and I unfolded the first slip.

"But you'll say we are selfish!" said a boy.

"I have nothing to do with it," I said; "you are to decide by vote.
First person . . . 'I would buy a bicycle': selfish or unselfish?"

"Selfish!" roared the class, and I put a mark in the first column.

"Next paper . . . 'Scooter, knife, and the rest on ice-cream.'"

"Selfish!" and I put down another mark.

"Next: . . . 'Buy a pair of boots' . . . selfish or unselfish?"

The class had to stop and think here.

"Selfish!" said a few.

"Unselfish," said others, "'cos he wud be helpin' his mother."

"Then we'll vote on it," I said, and by a majority of two the act was
declared to be unselfish.

We then had a run of knives, tops, candy, cycles, and no vote was
necessary.  Then came a puzzler.

"I would send every penny to the starving babies of Germany."

"Unselfish!" cried the class in one voice.  I was just about to put the
mark in the unselfish column when a boy said: "That's selfish, cos she'd
feel proud of being so--so unselfish."

"How do you know it is a she?" I asked.

"'Cause I ken it's Jean Wilson," he answered promptly; "she has took a
reid face."

There followed a breezy debate on Jean's act.

"It is selfish," said Mary, "because when you do a kind action you feel
pleased with yourself, and it was selfish because if it hadna pleased her
she wud never ha' done it."

I asked for a vote and to my astonishment the act was declared selfish by
a majority of three.  I suspect that conventional Hun Hatred had
something to do with the voting.

The voting over I totted up the marks.

"You have judged yourselves," I said, "and according to your own showing
you as a class are 87 per cent. selfish and 13 per cent. unselfish."

This essay in composition was not original; I got the idea from Homer
Lane, who claimed that it was the best introduction to school psychology.
"It is the best way to make children think of their own behaviour," he
said, and my experiment has shown this.

When Mac came back I said to him; "You've got a fine lot of bairns, Mac."

"Had you any difficulty?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I half thought they would try to pull your leg, especially a boy
like Tom Murray.  He is a most difficult chap, you know."

"Tom's a saint," I said; "every child is a saint if you treat him as an
equal.  No, I had no difficulty, but I want you to send over Geordie
Wylie to me this afternoon.  There is something wrong with that boy; he
has no ambition and he has one of the worst inferiority complexes I have
ever struck.  I want to have a quiet talk with him."

Mac promised, and at three o'clock Geordie came over to the schoolhouse.
I took him into the parlour, and he sat nervously on the edge of a chair.

"Tell me about yourself, Geordie," I said, but he did not answer.

"Do you keep rabbits?"

"Aye."

"What kind?"

"Twa Himalayas and a half Patty."

"Keep doos?"

"No."

It was like drawing blood from a milestone.

"What do you do when you go home at nights?"

It was a long difficult task to get anything out of him.  The only fact
of value I got was that he was a great reader of Wild West stories.  I
asked him to come to me again, and he said he would.

To-night I asked Mac about him.

"He's a dreamer," said Mac, "and he's lazy.  I am always strapping him
for inattention.  He's not a manly boy, never plays games, always stands
in a corner of the playground."

"Does he ever fight?" I asked.

"He's a great coward, but there's one queer thing about him; when any boy
challenges him to fight he goes white about the gills but he always
fights . . . and gets licked."

"Mac," I said, "will you do me a favour?  Don't whack him again; it is
the worst treatment you can give him.  He is a poor wee chap, and he is
badly in need of real help."

"All right," said the kindly Mac, "I'll try not to touch him, but he
irritates me many a time."

      *      *      *      *      *

I had Geordie for an hour this morning.  He was taciturn at first, but
later he talked freely.  He is very much afraid of his father, and he
weeps when his father scolds him.  This makes the father angrier and he
calls Geordie a lassie, a greetin' lassie.  This jeer wounds the boy
deeply.  He is afraid in the dark.  He told me that he was puzzled about
one thing; when he goes for his milk at night he is never afraid on the
outward journey, but when he leaves the dairy to come home he is always
in terror.  I asked him what he was afraid of and he told me that he
always imagined that there was a man in a cheese-cutter cap waiting to
murder him.

"What is a cheese-cutter?" I asked.

"It is a bonnet with a big snout, something like a railway porter's.  My
father's a porter and he has ane."

Evidently the man he is afraid of is his father.  This may account for
his lack of fear when he is walking from his home to the dairy.  Then he
is leaving his father; when he starts to return he is going back to his
father and is afraid.

I asked him about his fights with other boys.  He always feared a fight
but he went through with it so that the other boys should not call him a
coward.  Naturally he always lost the battle; he fought with a divided
mind; while his less imaginative opponent thought only of hitting and
winning, Geordie was picturing the end of the fight.

I asked him if he had a sweetheart, and he blushed deeply.  He told me
that he often took fancies for girls, but they would not have him.  Frank
Murray always cut him out; Frank was a big hefty lad and the girls like
the beefy manly boy.

He does much day-dreaming, phantasying it is called in analysis.  His
dreams always take the form of conquests; in his day-dream he is the best
fighter in the school, the best scholar, the most loved of the girls.
His night dreams are often terrifying, and he has more than once dreamt
that his father and Macdonald were dead.  He finds compensation for his
weaknesses in his day-dreams and his reading.  He likes tales of heroes
who always kill the villians and carry off the heroines.

It is difficult to know what to do in a case like this.  The best way
would be to change the boy's environment, but that is out of the
question.  Even then the early fears would go with him; he would transfer
his father-complex to another man.

I tried to explain to Mac the condition of Geordie.  The boy is all
bottled up; his energy should be going into play and work, but instead it
is regressing, going back to early ways of adaptation to environment.

"But what can I do with him?" asked Mac.

"Give him your love," I said.  "He fears you now, and your attitude to
him makes him worse.  You must never punish him again, Mac."

"That's all very well," said Mac ruefully, "but what am I to do?  Suppose
Tom Murray and he talk during a lesson, am I to whack Tom and allow
Geordie to get off?"

"Chuck punishment altogether," I said.  "You don't need it; it is always
the resort of a weak teacher."

"I couldn't do without it," he said.

"All right then," I said wearily, "but I want you to realise that your
punishments are making Geordie a cripple for life."

      *      *      *      *      *

I went down and had a talk with Geordie's father.  He was not very
pleasant about it; indeed he was almost unpleasant.

"There's nothing wrong wi' the laddie," he said aggressively.  "He's a
wee bit lassie-like and he has no pluck."

Here Geordie entered the kitchen, and his father turned on him harshly.

"Started to yer lessons yet?" he demanded.

Geordie muttered something about having had to feed his rabbits.

"I'll rabbit ye!  Get yer books oot this minute!" and Geordie crept to a
corner and rummaged among some old clothes for his school-bag.

I tried to be as amiable as I could, and avoided controversy.  I soon saw
that father and mother were not pulling well together, and I suspected
that the father's harshness to Geordie was often a weapon to wound the
fond mother.  I saw that nothing I could say would do any good, and I
took my departure.

Later I went to see Dauvit, and found him alone.  I asked him to tell me
about the Wylies.

"Tarn Wylie is wan o' the stupidest men in a ten mile radius," said
Dauvit.  "But he's no stupid whaur money is concerned; they tell me that
he drinks aboot half his week's wages, and his puir wife has to suffer.
That laddie o' theirs, he was born afore the marriage, and they tell me
that Tarn wud never ha' married her if he hadna been fell drunk the nicht
he put in the banns."

This case of poor Geordie shows what a complexity there is in human
affairs.  His father has a mental conflict, and he drinks so that he may
get away from reality.  The father's drinking and the son's reading of
romances are fundamentally the same thing; each is trying to get away
from a reality he dare not face.  No treatment of Geordie could be
satisfactory unless at the same time the parents were being treated.




V.

Carrotty Broon, one of my old scholars, came to Dauvit's shop to-night,
and he talked about his pigeons . . . his doos he calls them.  He keeps
a pigeon loft of homers, and he spends a considerable amount in
training them.

"Some fowk think," he said, "that a homer will flee hame if ye throw it
up five hunder miles awa."

"I've read of flights of seven hundred miles," I said.

Carrotty Broon chuckled.

"I mind o' a homer I had," he went on.  "He was a beauty, a reid
chequer.  His father had flown frae London to Glasgow, and his mither
was a flier too.  Weel, I took him doon to Monibreck on my bike, and
let him off.  I never saw him again; five mile, and he cudna find his
way hame!"

"He must ha' been shot," said Dauvit, "for thae homers find their way
hame by instinct."

"Na, na, Dauvit," said Broon, "they flee by sicht.  When ye train a
homer ye tak it a mile the first day, syne three miles, syne maybe
seven, ten, twenty, fifty, and so on.  Send the purest bred homer fower
mile without trainin' and ye'll never see him again."

Carrotty Broon told us many interesting things about doos and their
ways.  We listened to him because he was an authority and we knew
little about the subject.

"The only thing I ken aboot doos," said Dauvit with a laugh, "is that
when I was a laddie auld Peter Smith and John Wylie keepit homers and
they were aye trying compeetitions in fleein'.  John was gaein' to
London for his summer holiday, and so him and Peter made a bargain that
they wud flee twa homers from London.  Weel, John he got to London, and
he thocht to himsell that seein' they had a bet o' twa pund on the
race, he wud mak sure o' winnin', and so what does he do but tak a pair
o' shears and cut the wing o' Peter's doo.

"When John cam hame after a fortnight's trip he met auld Peter at the
station.

"'Weel, Peter,' says he, 'wha won the race?'

"'You,' said Peter; 'your doo cam hame the next day, but mine only got
hame this mornin'.  And it has corns on its feet like tatties.'"

      *      *      *      *      *

To-day was Macdonald's Inspection Day, and at dinner time he brought
over Mr. J. F. Mackenzie, H.M.I.S., a middle-aged man and Mr. L. P.
Smart, assistant I.S., a cheery youth fresh from Oxford.  When
inspectors dine with the village dominie they never mention the word
education.  These two talked a lot, and all their conversation was
about mountain-climbing in Switzerland.  They swopped long prosy yarns
about dull incidents, and I was very much bored.  So was Mac, but he
pretended to be interested, but then he was to see them again, and I
wasn't . . . at least I prayed that I might not.  After a time I began
to feel that I was being left out of the conversation, and I waited
until Mackenzie paused for a breath.

"Switzerland is very beautiful," I remarked, "but you should see the
Andes."

Mackenzie looked at me coldly.

"I haven't been to South America," he said.

"Same here," said I cheerfully, "but I remember seeing pictures of them
in the geography book at school."

Mackenzie looked at me more coldly than before.  I don't think he liked
me, and when the younger man chuckled Mackenzie glared at him.  Smart
had a sense of humour.

"I'm afraid we have been boring you," he said to me with a smile.

"I'd rather listen to you two talking education," I confessed.

Mackenzie waved the suggestion away.

"I leave education behind when I walk out of the school," he said in
grand manner.  "Most excellent rhubarb, Mrs. Macdonald.  Home grown?"
And then we had ten minutes of garden products versus shop greens.  I
admit that this inspector had a genius for small talk.  We dismissed
greens and I led the conversation to hens and ducks.  Mackenzie did not
know much about them, and he confirmed my opinion of his genius for
small talk by saying: "Buff Orpingtons!  They are named after Orpington
in Kent.  I remember staying a night there before I went to Switzerland
. . ." and the dirty dog took the conversation back to his mountain
climbing.

I made a gesture to the younger man and got him out into the garden.

"Why does he waste precious time talking about cabbages and dreary
Swiss inns?" I asked.

Smart laughed shortly.

"You know how rich folk talk at table when the servants are present?"

I nodded.

"Well, that's the Chief's attitude to teachers; he never says anything
of any importance whatever."

"But why?"

"He is of the old school.  He has been inspecting schools for forty
years.  In the olden days an inspector was a sort of Almighty; teachers
quaked before him because with a stroke of his pen he could reduce
their money grant.  To this day the old man treats teachers as a king
treats his subjects--with kindness but with distance."

"Has he any views on education?" I asked.

Smart shook his head.

"None, but he has heaps of views on instruction and discipline.  By the
way, he thinks that Macdonald's discipline is very good."

"And you?"

"I think it rotten," he said ruefully, "but what can I do?  A junior
inspector is a nobody; if he has any views of his own he has to pocket
them.  I would chuck out all this discipline rot and go in for the
Montessori stunt.  Take my tip and never accept an inspectorship."

"I won't," I said hastily.

I liked Smart, and I wish we had more of his stamp in the inspectorate.

When we returned to the dining-room Mackenzie looked at me with
interest.

"I didn't know that you were the _Dominie's Log_ man till Mr. Macdonald
told me two minutes ago," he said.  "I am delighted to meet you.  I
enjoyed your book very much indeed.  Very amusing."

He was quite affable now.  Writing a book gives a man a certain
standing.  I fancy it is the dignity of print that does it, and we all
have the print superstition.  I find myself accepting statements in
books, whereas if someone said the same things to me over a
dinner-table I should refute them with scorn.  "If it is in _John Bull_
it is so!"  Mr. Bottomley is a sound psychologist.

When they were departing I said to Smart: "Yes, he's very amiable and
all that, but I am jolly glad I had Frank Michie and not him as my
chief inspector when I wrote my _Log_."

Smart laughed.

"My dear chap, Mackenzie would have let you run your school in your own
way."

"But," I cried, "he doesn't believe in freedom!"

"He doesn't, but don't you see that he simply couldn't have jumped on
you?  He would have thought you either a lunatic or a genius, and he
would have feared to condemn you in case you might turn out to be the
latter.  I know an art critic in London, and, believe me, the poor
devil lives in terror lest he should damn the work of a new Augustus
John.  The Futurists aren't flourishing on their merits; they are
flourishing because the critics are in a holy funk to condemn them in
case they might be artists after all."

I want to meet Smart again.  I like his style.

      *      *      *      *      *

I am indeed a Dominie in Doubt.  What is education striving after?  I
cannot say, for education is life and what the aim of life is no one
knows.  Psycho-analysis can clear up a life; it can release bottled up
energy, but it cannot say how the released energy is to be used.  The
analyst cannot advise, because no man can tell another how to live his
life.  Freud clears up the past, but he cannot clear up the future.

Is there such a thing as Re-incarnation?  I wonder.  Am I living the
life that my past lives on earth fitted me for?  If so analysis is
wrong.  If I am suffering from a severe neurosis it is because I earned
this punishment in my past lives, and Freud has no right to cure me.
He is interfering with the plans of the Almighty.  If, as I have heard
a Theosophist declare, the children in the slums are miserable because
they failed to learn their lesson in previous lives, then the people
who try to abolish slums are all wrong.  I think my Theosophist would
argue that the charitable person is growing in grace, thereby rising
above his previous lives.  And thus one soul helps another to rise to
perfection.  It may be, and I hope it is so, for then life would have a
meaning.  Pain and war would then be less terrible, for they would be
but incidents in the eternal unfolding of perfection.

Yet I find myself doubting.  If I am William Shakespeare born again I
do not know it, and I am left in doubt as to whether I may not have
been Charles Peace instead.  Possibly I was both.

Then there is psychical research.  I have been to a medium and have
heard things that all the psycho-analysis in the world cannot account
for.  I want to believe that the dead can speak to us, but where are
the dead?  I have read Sir Oliver Lodge's _Raymond_, and the
description of the next world given there.  Frankly I don't fancy it,
and I have no desire to go there.

How then can I attempt to educate children when the ultimate solution
of life is denied me?  I can only stand by and give them freedom to
unfold.  I do not know whither they are going, but that is all the more
a reason why I ought not to try to guide their footsteps.  This is the
final argument for the abolition of authority.  We may beat and break a
horse because we selfishly require a horse's service, and according to
the accepted view a horse has no immortal soul.  We dare not beat and
break a child, for a child is going to an end that we cannot know.

I like the Theosophist schools, although I do not like all
Theosophists.  Some of them seem to be living the higher life
consciously, and repressing their lower natures.  Most of them do not
smoke or drink or eat meat or swear or go to music-halls.  That may be
living on a higher plane, but it is not living fully.  Still, in many
ways they are broad-minded.  In their schools they do not force
Theosophy down the children's throats; they allow a great amount of
freedom, but their schools are not free schools.  There is a definite
attempt to mould character chiefly by insisting on good taste.  I am
quite sure that no head-master of a Theosophical School would take his
children to see a Charlie Chaplin film.  Charlie is not obviously
living the higher life; he stands for the vulgar side of life; he picks
up girls and gets drunk (in the play) and is sea-sick and very vulgar
about soda-water.

I find myself insisting on the inclusion of Charlie in any scheme of
education because no one ought to be taught to be shocked at
sea-sickness and soda-water squirting.  Charlie to me is the antidote
to the higher-plane crowd; he and his kind are as essential as Shelley.
I admit that reading Shelley is a higher kind of pleasure than watching
"Champion Charlie," but no human being can safely live on the higher
plane, and no child wants to.  Education must deal with _all_ life; a
higher plane diet will produce hot-house plants, beautiful perhaps, but
delicate and artificial.

      *      *      *      *      *

Old Willie Murray the cobbler had been bed-ridden for over a year, and
when I dropped into Dauvit's shop this morning Mary Rickart was telling
Dauvit that his old master was dead.

"Aye, Dauvit," she was saying when I entered, "I'm no the kind that
speaks ill o' the deid, but I will say this, that Wull Murray had his
faults.  Aye, and though he's a corp the day, I canna pertend that he
was ony freend o' mine."

When Mary had gone Dauvit turned to me with a queer smile.

"Dominie, you tell me that you have studied the science o' the mind,
psy--what is't you call it?"

"Psychology," I said.

"That's the word.  Weel then, dominie, just tell me why Mary Rickart
had sic a pick at auld Willie Murray."

I smoked for a time thoughtfully.

"It's difficult, Dauvit.  I haven't got enough evidence.  However I
think I can make a good guess."

"Weel?"

"Mary and Willie sat in the same class at school?"

"Good!" said Dauvit, "they did."

"And Mary was Willie's first sweetheart?"

"Imphm!"

"Mary loved Willie and he loved her.  They were sweethearts for a long
time, but another damsel came and stole Willie's heart away.  Mary wept
bitter tears, but in time she repressed her love . . . and it changed
into hate."

Dauvit chuckled.

"A very nice story," he said, "but, ye ken, it's just a story.  You
cudna guess the real reason why Mary hated him so much."

"Then what was the real reason, Dauvit?"

He laughed.

"Mary hated Willie Murray because he aince telt her that she was a
silly woman to think that she cud wear a number fower shoe on a number
acht foot."

We laughed together, and then I said:

"Dauvit, why did you never marry?  You like women I fancy."

My remark made him thoughtful.

"Man," he said, "I've often speered the same question o' mysel.  As a
young man I was gye fond o' the lassies, but . . .  I dinna ken!" and
he broke off suddenly and took up a boot.  "Thae soles are just paper
noo-a-days," he growled.

I refused to let him run away from the subject.

"Had you a sweetheart?" I asked.

He laughed boisterously to hide his confusion.

"Dozens o' them!" he cried.

"Then why didn't you marry one of them?"

He shook his head.

"Dominie, that's the question."  He stared at the grate for a while.
"There was Maggie Adams, a bonny lassie she was.  Man, I mind when I
took her to Kirriemair Market . . ."  He sighed.  "Aye, man, dominie, I
liked Maggie mair than ony o' the others."

"Did she love someone else?" I asked softly.

Dauvit took some time to reply.

"No, man, Maggie wanted me."

"Then the fault lay on your side?  You didn't love her!"

Dauvit brought his hand down on the board.

"Goad, man, but I did!"

I could not understand.

"Man, on the road hame frae Kirrie Market I was to speer if she wud
marry me . . . but I didna."

We smoked silently for a long minute.

"Ye see," he went on slowly, "Maggie was a bonny lassie and I liked to
kiss and cuddle her, but kissin' and cuddlin' are a very sma' part o'
marriage, dominie.  There was something in Maggie that I was aye
lookin' for, but cud never find.  Aye, I tried to find it in other
lassies, but I never fund it."

"What was it you wanted to find, Dauvit?"

Dauvit paused.

"Ye micht call it a soul," he said.  "Oh, aye," he went on, "Maggie was
a bonny lassie wi' a heart o' gold, but she hadna a soul.  Wud ye like
to ken what stoppit me speerin' her that nicht as we cam through Zoar?
Man, I said to mysel: When we come to the toll bar I'll tak Maggie in
my arms and say: 'Maggie, I want ye, lassie!'"

He had to light his pipe here.

"Weelaweel, we got to the toll bar and I said: 'Maggie, we'll sit doon
on the bank for a while.'  So we sat doon, and I was just tryin' to
screw up my courage when she pointed to the settin' sun.  'I'd like a
dress like that, only bonnier,' she said.  Man, dominie, I looked at
that sunset wi' its gold and purple . . . and syne I kent that Maggie
was nae wife for me.  I kent that she had nae soul."

After a time I remarked: "And so, Dauvit, you are a bachelor because
you were a poet!"

He busied himself with the paper sole.

"Maggie married Bob Wilson the farmer o' East Mains.  Aye, and the
marriage turned oot a happy one, for Bob never rose abune neeps and
tatties in his life."  Dauvit sighed.  "But I sometimes used to look at
the twa o' them when their bairns were roond their knees, and syne I
used to gie a big _Dawm!_ and ging back to my wee hoose and mak my ain
tea."

"It doesna pay to hae a soul, dominie," he added with a short laugh.

"Perhaps you could have given her a soul, Dauvit," I said.

He shook his head with decision.

"Na, dominie, a soul is something ye're born wi'; if it isna there it
canna be put there.  You say that I'm a poet, and you may be richt;
there may be a wee bit o' the artist in me, and ye never heard o' an
artist that was happily married.  Wumman and art are opposites, and a
man canna marry both."

"That is true, Dauvit.  But art is the feminine side of a man's nature;
it is the woman in him . . . and the woman is superfluous to him, for
she becomes the rival of the woman in himself."

This thought impressed Dauvit.

"Noo I understand Rabbie Burns," he cried.  "Rabbie cudna love a wumman
because he loved the wumman in himsel.  She was the wife that bore his
bairns--his poems."  He paused, and a pained look came to his face.
"There may be a poet in me, dominie," he said ruefully, "but she has
borne me nae bairns.  I am ane o' the mute inglorious Miltons . . . and
I wud ha' been better if I had married Maggie and talked aboot neeps
and tatties a' my life."

"You couldn't have done it, Dauvit," I said as I rose to go.

From the door I looked back at the old man as he stared at the fender.

      *      *      *      *      *

One of the analysts says that the flirt is suffering from a mother
complex.  He has never got over his infantile love for his mother, and
he is always trying to find the mother again in women.  Hence he is
like a bee, sipping at one flower and then flying on to another.

I suspect that many a bachelor is a bachelor because his early love is
fixed on the mother.  Few mothers realise the danger of coddling their
children.  I have heard grown men dying in pain call on their mothers.
It is a hard task for parents, but they must always try to break their
children's fixation upon them.

Women having father-complexes are common.  The other day I met a girl
who had no interest in young men; all her interest was in men with
beards.  No matter what the conversation was about she managed to
mention her father. . .  "Father says!"  She will probably marry a man
twice her age.  It is well-known that boys of seventeen often fall in
love with women of thirty, while adolescent girls usually fall in love
with men of thirty.  They are not really in love; they are looking for
a substitute for the mother or father.

The psychology of the man of forty who falls in love with the girl of
sixteen is more difficult to grasp.  I think that in most cases the
man's love interest is fixed away back in childhood; often the girl of
sixteen is a substitute for a beloved sister.  Perhaps on the other
hand, a man of forty's paternal instinct has been starved so long that
he wants to find at once a wife and a child.

Few of us realise how much of our love interest is fixed in the past.
Think of the men who want to be mothered by their wives . . . they
generally address their wives as "Mother."  I know happily married men
who are psychically children; "mother" won't allow them to carry coals
or wash dishes or brush clothes; she treats them as they unconsciously
desire to be treated--as babes.

It may be that Dauvit has a strong mother complex.  He often talks of
his mother, and more than once I have heard him say that she was the
best woman he had ever known.  It may be that he was unconsciously
looking for the mother in Maggie and the other girls, and failed to
find her.  Maggie's remark about the sunset and the dress was not
enough to stifle his love declaration.  The soul he longed to find in
Maggie may have been the soul of the mother he knew as an infant . . .
the soul of his ideal woman.

The more I see of men the less importance I pay to their conscious
reasons for attitudes.  "I hate Brown; he never washes"; "I dislike
Mrs. Smith; she uses bad language."  "Murphy is a rotter; he has no
manners."  Statements like these are rationalisations; the real reason
for the dislike lies deeper in every case.




VI

The law courts have re-introduced flogging for criminals.  To the best
of my knowledge no member of the law profession has protested.  If
there is a reform movement within the law I never heard of it.

The curse of law is that it works according to precedent, and it is
therefore conservative.  Our judges hand out sentences in blissful
ignorance of later psychology.  Last week a boy of eleven was birched
for holding up another boy of nine on the highway and demanding
tuppence or his life.  The attitude of the bench is that fear of
another flogging will prevent that boy from turning highwayman again.
I admit that fear will cure him of that special vice, but what the
bench does not know is that the boy's anti-social energy will take
another form.  Every act of man is prompted by a wish, and very often
this wish is unconscious.  And all the birching in the world will not
destroy a wish; the most it can do is to change its form.

Without an analysis of the boy no one can tell what unconscious wish
impelled him to turn highwayman, but speaking generally a boy expresses
his self-assertion in terms of anti-social behaviour only when his
education has been bad.  I believe that all juvenile delinquency is due
to bad education.  Our schools enforce passivity on the child; his
creative energy is bottled up.  No boy who has tools and a bench to
work with will express himself by smashing windows.  Delinquency is
merely displaced social conduct; the motive of the little boy who
turned highwayman was essentially the motive of the boy who builds a
boat.

Ah! but we have Industrial Schools for bad boys!

I spent an evening with an Industrial School boy of thirteen not long
ago.  It was an unlovely tale he told me of his life in school.  I got
the impression of a building half-prison, half-barracks.  No one was
allowed to go out unless to football matches when the school team was
playing.  Punishment was stern and frequent.

"One old guy, 'e sends you to the boss for punishment and says you gave
'im an insubordinate look, and you ain't allowed to deny wot 'e says."

"Look here, Jim," I said, "suppose I took you to a free school
to-morrow, a school where you could do what you liked, what's the first
thing you would do?"

A wild look came into his eyes.

"I'd lay out the blarsted staff," he said tensely.

"But," I laughed, "what would be the point of laying me out if I gave
you freedom?  What have you got against _me_?"

"Oh," he said, "I thought you meant if I got freedom in the Industrial
School!"

That school is condemned; if a school produces one boy who hates and
fears its teachers, it is a bad school.

I think of the other way, the Homer Lane way.

Homer Lane was superintendent of the little Commonwealth in Dorset.  He
attended the juvenile courts and begged the magistrates to hand over to
him the worst cases they had.  He took the children down to Dorset and
gave them freedom.  He refused to lay down any laws, and naturally the
beginning of the Commonwealth was chaos.  Lane joined in the
anti-social behaviour; he became one of the gang.  When the citizens
thought that their best way of expressing themselves was to smash
windows, Lane helped them to smash them.  His marvellous psychological
insight will best be illustrated by the story of Jabez.

Jabez was a thoroughly bad character; he had been thief and highwayman,
a bully who could fight with science.  He came to the Commonwealth and
was astonished.  He found boys and girls working hard all day, and
making their own laws at their citizen meetings at night.  Jabez could
not understand it, and not understanding he felt hostile.

The citizens lived in cottages, and one night Lane went over to the
cottage in which Jabez lived.  They were having tea, and Lane sat down
beside Jabez.

"What are you always grousing about, Jabez?" he asked.  "Don't you like
the Commonwealth?"

"No," said Jabez viciously.

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's too respectable for me," said Jabez, and his eyes wandered to the
table.  "Them fancy cups and saucers!  Wot's the good o' things like
that to me?  I'd like to smash the whole lot o' them."

Lane rose from the table, walked to the fireplace, took up the poker
and handed it to Jabez.

"Smash them," he said.

Jabez had all eyes turned towards him.  He seized the poker and smashed
his cup and saucer.

"Excellent!" cried Lane, "Jabez is making the Commonwealth a better
place," and he pushed forward another cup and saucer.  These were at
once smashed, and Lane proceeded to shove forward the other dishes.
But by this time Jabez was beginning to feel queer.  Breaking dishes
was good fun when you were breaking laws, but here there was no law to
break, and Jabez felt that he was doing a foolish thing.  He wanted to
stop, but he could not see how he was to stop with dignity.
Fortunately one of the other inmates of the cottage came to his aid.

"It's all very well for you, Mr. Lane," she said, "but this isn't your
cottage, and you are making Jabez break our dishes."

Jabez hailed the idea with delight; he now had an excellent excuse for
stopping.

"Right you are!" cried Lane cheerfully, "Jabez will break something
else," and he took out his gold watch and placed it on the table.

"Smash that, Jabez."

"No," said Jabez, "I won't smash your watch."

Now Jabez had a saying that if a man were dared to do a thing and he
didn't do it he was a coward.

"I dare you to smash the watch."

Jabez seized the poker again.

"What!  You dare me!"

"Yes, I dare you."

He looked at the watch for a few seconds; then he threw down the poker
and rushed from the room.

Poor Jabez was killed in France.  I saw the letters that he wrote to
Lane from the front, and they were the letters of a decent, good boy.

The early history of Jabez was one of constant suppression.  Authority
was always stepping in and saying: "Don't do that!"  As a result Jabez
at the age of seventeen was psychically an infant.  The infantile
desire to break things was suppressed, but it lived on in the
unconscious, and years later Jabez found himself behaving like a child
of three.  The cure was to encourage him to act in his infantile way;
by smashing a few cups Jabez got rid of his long pent up infantile wish
to destroy.  Discipline would have kept the childish wish underground;
freedom led to the expression of the wish.

Homer Lane is the apostle of Release.  He holds that Authority is fatal
for the child; suppression is bad; the only way is to allow the child
freedom to express itself in the way it wants to.  And because I count
among my friends boys and girls who once went to the Little
Commonwealth as criminals, I believe that Lane is right.  I also
believe that the schools will come to see that he was right . . .
somewhere about the year 2500.

      *      *      *      *      *

Conversation to-night in Dauvit's shop turned on Spiritualism.  Dauvit
is a firm believer, and he often goes to Dundee and Aberdeen to attend
séances.

"It's just a lot o' blethers," said Jake Tosh contemptuously.  "When
ye're deid ye're deid, and that's a' aboot it.  Na, na, Dauvit, them
that sees ghosts is either drunk or daft."

"That's just yer ignorance, Jake," said Dauvit.  "Do ye ken whaur
Brazil is?"

"Wha is he?" asked Jake puzzled.

"It's no a he; it's a place.  I asked ye that question just to prove
that a man that doesna ken his ain world canna speak wi' ony authority
o' the next world.  Yer mind's ower narrow, Jake; ye've no vision."

"Na, na, Dauvit," laughed Jake, "it winna do.  Spooks and things is
just a curran nonsense, and no sane man wud believe in them.  What do
you say, dominie?"

"I am willing to believe that the dead do communicate," I said.

Jake was thoroughly amused.

"It's a queer thing," he said musingly, "that the more eddication a man
has the more he believes in rubbish.  Here's Dauvit here, a man that
reads Shakespeare and Burns and Carlyle, and the dominie there that
went through a college, and the both o' you believe things that I
stoppit believin' when I was sax year auld.  Then there's Sir Oliver
Lodge, and Conan Doyle.  Oh, aye, the Bible was quite richt when it
said: Much learning hath made them mad."

"What do you think happens to the dead, Jake?" I asked.

"As the tree falleth so it lies," quoted Jake.  "There's only the twa
places after death; if ye're good ye go to Heaven; if ye're bad ye go
to Hell.  And that's why I say that thae messages from the deid are
rubbish, cos if a man's in Heaven he's no going to leave a place like
that to come doon to speak to a daft auld cobbler like Dauvit in a wee
room doon in Dundee.  And if a man's in Hell the Devil will tak good
care that he doesna get oot."

I wondered to find that Dauvit had no answer to this.  I guessed that
Dauvit's silence was due to his early training.  He was brought up in
the old stern Scots way, and although he has now rejected the old
beliefs intellectually, his unconscious still clings to them
emotionally.  I fancy that if I were very very ill I might go back to
my childish fear of Hell-fire, for, in illness old emotions return, and
intellect flees.  Dauvit would no doubt react in the same way.

      *      *      *      *      *

Many people seem to have a decided fear of psycho-analysis.  A mother
writes me from London saying that she would like to send her girl to my
new school, only she is afraid that I shall attempt to analyse the
children.

The fear of psycho-analysis comes from the general belief that Freud
traces every neurosis to early sex experiences.  Whether Freud is right
or not does not concern the teacher; he deals with normal children, and
to try to analyse a normal child appears to me to be unnecessary.  The
teacher's job is to see that the children are free from fear and free
to create; if he does his task well he is preventing neurosis.

A neurosis is the outcome of repression; the neurotic is a person whose
libido or life force is bottled up; he can be cured only by letting his
pent up emotions free.  The aim of education is to allow emotional
release, so that there will be no bottling up, and no future neurosis;
and this release comes through interest.  The boy who hates algebra and
has to work examples is getting no release whatever, for his mind is
divided; his attention goes to his quadratic equations, but his
interest is elsewhere.

Hence I do not think analysis is necessary when children are being
freely educated.  In an exceptional case a little analysis will do
good.  If I see a child unhappy, moody, anti-social, a thief, a bully,
I consider it my job to make an attempt to find out what is at the back
of his mind.  With a young boy it is not advisable to tell him the
whole truth about himself; the teacher discovers the truth by watching
the child at play, by studying his wishes as expressed in his writing,
by noting his attitude to his playmates.  When he has made his
diagnosis the teacher can then make the necessary changes in the boy's
environment.

I recall the case of Tommy, aged ten.  His class was constructing a
Play Town after the fashion set by Caldwell Cook in his delightful book
_The Play Way_.  Tommy worked with enthusiasm, too much enthusiasm, for
he pinched the girls' sand for his railway track.  The girls objected,
and a regular wordy battle took place.  Tommy felt that he was beaten,
and he ceased work.

I was not very much surprised when the girls came and told me that
Tommy was shying bricks at the railway line he had been so keen on
constructing.  Tommy was brought up before the assembled class, and
they voted unanimously that he be forbidden to approach within ten
yards of Play Town.  Tommy grinned maliciously.  That night the town
appeared to have been the victim of an earthquake.

I went to Tommy.

"Why don't you like the Play Town?" I asked.

"Because the girls are too bossy," he said.  "It was my town; I began
it, and I don't see why they should be in it at all."

"And you want a Play Town all to yourself?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Right ho," I said easily.  "Why not start to build one?"

His eyes lit up, and away he ran to lay his foundations.  He worked
eagerly all day, but at night he seemed dissatisfied.

"I haven't got any railway or houses; Christo won't lend me a bit of
his railway, and Gerda has all the houses."

I left him to work out his problem.  In the morning he solved it;
Christo wouldn't lend him any rails, but if Tommy liked he, Christo,
would run his line up to Tommy's town from the class town.  Tommy
readily agreed.  In a week's time Tommy's town was a suburb of the
bigger town, and Tommy was appointed President of the whole state.  He
spent many an hour building his bridges and digging his tunnels.  At
first he would allow no one to enter his suburb, but in a few days he
ceased to claim it as his own, and he worked as a member of the gang.

I think that most anti-social children are like Tommy: when their
self-assertion is threatened they react with hostility.  The cure for
them is to direct their self-assertion to things instead of people.  No
boy will try to break up a ball game if he has a rabbit hutch to
construct.

The danger is that the teacher will often step in when the boy ought to
be left to his companions.  The gang is the best disciplinarian.

One day a class and I were writing five-minute essays.  I would call
out a word or a phrase, and we would all start to write.  The children
loved the method; it allowed so much play for originality.  For
example, when I gave the word "broken" one girl wrote of her broken
doll, another of a broken tramp, another of a broken heart; a boy wrote
a witty essay on being stoney broke, another wrote of a broken window.

On this day Wolodia, a boy of eleven, did not want to write essays.  I
called out a word, and we started to write.  Wolodia began to talk
loudly.

"Stop it, man," I said impatiently, "you're spoiling our essay."

He grinned and went on talking.

"Oh, shut up!" cried Joy.

"Shan't!" he snapped, and he went on talking.

Diana rose with a determined air.

"We'll chuck him out," she said grimly, and the class seized him and
heaved him out.  Then they barricaded the door with desks.  Wolodia
made a big row by hammering on the door, and as a result we could not
proceed with our writing.

"Let him in," I suggested.

The class protested.

"He'll sit like a lamb for the rest of the period," I said.

They took away the desk and Wolodia came in.  He went to his seat . . .
and not a sound came from him during the rest of the period.  This
incident impressed me greatly; my complaint, Joy's complaint did not
affect him, but when the gang was against him he was defeated.  It was
a beautiful instance of the force of public opinion.

Cases of stealing should be treated by analysis.  Moral lectures are
useless; the cause lies in the unconscious, and the moral lecture does
not touch the unconscious.  Nor does punishment affect the root cause
of the delinquency.  The teacher must dig down into the child's
unconscious in order to find the cause.

An illuminating book for all teachers and parents to read is Healy's
_Mental Disorders and Misconduct_.  He shows that stealing is very
often a symptomatic act.  The mechanism of many cases is something like
this: a child has been punished for sexual activities; later he breaks
into a store and steals an article.  Sex activities and thieving have
this in common, that they are both forbidden, but the boy has found
that much more ado is made about sex activities than about stealing.
So when he is actuated by a sexual urge he dare not indulge it; but his
sexual wish finds a substitute; it goes out to the associated forbidden
thing . . . the article on the store counter.

We see the same sort of mechanism in the neurotic patient; she fears
her own sex impulses, and because she dare not admit her sex wishes
into consciousness she projects her fear on to dogs or mice or rats.
All phobias--fear of closed places, fear of open places, fear of
heights--are displaced fears; the sufferer is really afraid of his own
unconscious wishes.

I do not say that all juvenile stealing is due to repressed sex.
Stealing may mean to a boy a method of self-assertion; it may mean that
thus he rebels against authority of father and teacher; it may be the
result of any one of a dozen causes.  But whatever the cause stealing
is always associated with unhappiness, and the teacher must try to cure
the unhappiness.

In my _Dominie's Log_ I confessed that I liked to cheat the railway
company, and I excused it on the ground that "a ten-mile journey
without a ticket is the only romantic experience left in a drab world."
That was a delightful bit of rationalisation.  The real reason for my
delinquency lay in my unconscious.  As a child I impotently rebelled
against the authority of parents and teachers.  Later in life I
unconsciously identified the railway company with the authorities of my
infancy.  Authority said: "Don't do that or you will be smacked"; the
railway company put up a notice saying: "Don't travel without a ticket
or you'll be fined forty shillings."

My rebellion was really a rebellion against authority.  This may seem
to be a far-fetched explanation, but the fact remains that now that I
have discovered the reason I have no more desire to cheat the railway
company.

      *      *      *      *      *

Old Jeems Broon was buried to-day, and Dauvit went to the funeral.  He
came back chuckling.

"What's the joke, Dauvit?" I asked.

"The burial service," laughed Dauvit.  "You ken what sort o' a man
Jeems was; an auld sinner if there ever was a sinner in Tarbonny, a bad
auld scoondrel.  Weel, Jeems hadna been at the kirk for twenty years,
and of coorse the minister didna ken ony thing aboot him.  So when he
gave the funeral prayer he referred to auld Jeems as 'this holy man
whose life stands as an example to those still tarrying in the flesh.'
Goad, but I burst oot laughin'!  I did that!"

"Had I been the minister," said I, "I should certainly have made a few
inquiries about Jeems."

"But there's a better story than that aboot the minister," went on
Dauvit with a laugh.  "Mag Currie's little lassie had the diphtheria,
and at the end o' the week the minister was asked to come oot to tak' a
burial service in Mag's bed room.  Man, he was eloquent!  He spoke
earnestly aboot this flower plucked before it had reached its full
bloom, this innocent life so sadly cut off; he was most touchin' when
he turned to Mag and her man and said: 'Mourn not for those hands that
never did wrong, the lisping tongue that never spoke evil, the wide
pure eyes that looked their love for you.'"

"I suppose the parents broke down at that," I said.

"Not they!" chuckled Dauvit, "for the corpse wasna their lassie ava; it
was auld Drucken Findlay the lodger."

I always like to hear Dauvit talk about ministers, and I encouraged him
to go on.

"It's a very queer thing, dominie, that a body ay wants to laugh at the
wrong time.  In the kirk and at a funeral--that's when I want to laugh.

"I mind when the minister was awa' for his holidays, and there was an
auld minister frae the Heelands cam' to tak' his place.  This auld man
had a habit o' readin' a verse and syne stoppin' to explain it to the
congregation.

"Weel aweel, wan Sunday he was readin' a chapter frae the Auld
Testament, and he cam' to the words: 'And the Angel of the Lord
appeared unto Hosea.'  So he looks at the congregation ower his specs
and he says: 'The Angel of the Lord appeared unto Hosea.'  Now,
prethren, we must ask ourselves this important question: Was Hosea
afraid?  No, Hosea was not afraid.  _You_ would have been afraid,
prethren; I would have been afraid.  You and I would have begun to
quake and tremble, but Hosea was not afraid; he was a prave man, a pold
man.  When we are in trouble let us remember that Hosea was not afraid.'

"So the auld man he turns ower the page and reads the next verse: 'And
Hosea was sore afraid.'"

"What did he say then?" I asked.

"He was a cunnin' auld deevil," said Dauvit, "for he gave a bit cough
and says: 'Prethren, that is a wrong translation from the original
Hebrew.'"

"I don't think you like ministers, Dauvit," I said.

He paused in his efforts to place a new needle in his sewing-machine.

"No, man, I do not," he said slowly.  "Nowadays the kirk is just a job
like anything else; men go in for it for the loaves and fishes mostly,
and their prayers never get past the roof.  And as for the
congregation, the kirk is just a respectable sort o' society.  I tell
ye, dominie, that releegion is deid.  At least, Christianity is deid.
That was bound to come; flowers, folk, hooses, trees, horses, aye, and
nations, have a birth, a youth, middle age, auld age, and then death.
It's the law o' nature, and a religion is no exception."

"True, O philosopher!" I said, "but there is always new life, and new
life comes from the old.  The flower dies and its seed lives; man dies
and his seed inherit the earth.  Christianity dies and--and what?"

"That may be," he said thoughtfully.  "It may be that the new religion
will grow from the seed o' the deid Christianity; that I canna say.
What I do say is that ministers are oot-o'-date; they are doin' useless
labour . . . when they're no fishin' and curlin'."




VII.

Duncan came over to-night, and he asked my advice about books.

"What books would you advise a teacher to buy?" he asked.

"There are scores of good books," I replied, "but no teacher can afford
to buy them."

"I know," he said crossly; "I've had a row with the Income Tax people.  I
asked for a rebate of ten pounds for necessary school books, and they
wouldn't allow it, although I'm told that if a London merchant buys a
London Directory he gets a rebate for the amount."

"I agree that it is unjust," I said, "but the new Income Tax proposals
allow twenty pounds a year for teachers' books."

"Just tell us what you would advise a teacher to spend his twenty quid
on," said Macdonald.

"It depends on his tastes," I said.  "If his subject is History he will
buy history books; if his subject is behaviour, he'll buy psychology
books."

"Give us an idea of your own library," said Duncan.

I sat down and wrote out a list from memory.

It ran as follows:--

BOOKS ON EDUCATION:--
  _The Play Way_, by Caldwell Cook.
  _The Path to Freedom in the School_, by Norman MacMunn.
  _What Is and What Might Be_, by Edmond Holmes.
  Montessori's three volumes.
  _An Adventure in Education_, by J. H. Simpson.

BOOKS ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND PSYCHOLOGY:
  Freud's _Interpretation of Dreams, Psychopathology
    of Everyday Life, Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory_.
  Jung's _Psychology of the Unconscious, Studies
    in Word Association, Analytical Psychology_.
  Frink's _Morbid Fears and Compulsions_.
  Maurice Nicoll's _Dream Psychology_.
  Morton Prince's _The Unconscious_.
  Pfister's _The Psycho-analytic Method_.
  Ernest Jones' _Psycho-analysis_.
  Ferenczi's _Contributions to Psycho-analysis_.
  Wilfred Lay's _The Child's Unconscious Mind_.
  Moll's _The Sexual Life of the Child_.
  Adler's _The Neurotic Constitution_.
  Bernard Hart's _The Psychology of Insanity_.

CROWD PSYCHOLOGY:--
  _The Crowd in Peace and War_, Martin Conway.
  _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_, Trotter.
  _The Crowd_, Gustave le Bon.

GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY:--
  _Psychology and Everyday Life_, Swift.
  _Textbook of Psychology_, James.
  _The Boy and His Gang_, Puffer.
  _Mental Conflicts and Misconduct_, Healy.
  _The Individual Delinquent_, Healy.
  _Rational Sex Ethics_, Robie.
  _Social Psychology_, McDougall.
  _The Play of Man_, Groos.

"That's too much for me," said Duncan.  "I couldn't afford a quarter of
these books.  What books would you recommend if you had to choose half a
dozen for a hard-up dominie?"

I thought for a little, and then I replied: "Bernard Hart's _The
Psychology of Insanity_, two bob; Frink's _Morbid Fears and Compulsions_,
a first-rate book on analysis, a guinea; _The Crowd in Peace and War_, by
Sir Martin Conway, eight and six; Healy's _Mental Conflicts and
Misconduct_, ten and six; and Wilfred Lay's _The Child's Unconscious
Mind_, ten and six."

"But," cried Duncan, "I don't want to set up an asylum!  What's the good
of books on insanity and morbid fears to a teacher?"

I explained that the titles of Hart's and Frink's books were misleading,
although the difference between the mind of the lunatic and the mind of
the average man is merely one of degree.  Bernard Hart shows that the
lunatic has the same faults as we have, only more so.  Frink's book is
badly named; it is an excellent work on mind mechanisms.  Any teacher who
reads these six books with understanding will never again use a strap on
a pupil.  If I were Education Minister, I should present every school in
Britain with a copy of each of the six.

Macdonald asked if I had any books on hypnotism and suggestion.

"No," I said, "but I have read them through a library.  I don't believe
in either because they do not touch root causes.  We are all suffering
from bottled up infantile emotion, and analysis goes to the root of the
matter; it makes what is unconscious conscious, and enables the patient
to re-educate himself, to use the old repressed emotion up in his daily
life.  Analysis means release.  Suggestion does not touch the root
repressed emotion, and I fancy that after suggestion the symptom merely
changes.  A man has a phobia of cats.  By suggestion I can dispel his
fear of cats, but the fear is transferred to something else, and he then
has an exaggerated fear of catching tuberculosis.  Unless the ancient
cause becomes conscious it is not released.

"We see suggestion working in our schools daily.  By suggestion parents
and teachers force the child to inhibit his gross sexual wishes, and in a
short time the child accepts the ideals of his masters.  At first he
inhibits a desire because father thinks it naughty; later he inhibits it
because he himself thinks it naughty.  But the gross sexual wish lives on
in the unconscious . . . hence the neurosis, hence the respectable old
men who are imprisoned for showing gross pictures to children, hence the
frequent indecent assaults on children.  All these unfortunate people are
suffering from the results of early suggestion--the suggestion that sex
is sin.  That primitive sex impulses can be sublimated I admit, but the
teacher's job is not to preach that sex activities are evil; his job is
to help the child to use up his primitive sex energy in creative work."

      *      *      *      *      *

What is education's chief aim?  The reply generally given is that
education's aim is to help a child to live its life fully.  Yet it seems
to me that that reply does not go far enough; I think that the aim should
be to help a child to live its cosmic life fully, to live for others.
Every human is egocentric, selfish.  No human ever rises above
selfishness, only there are degrees of selfishness.  I buy a motor-cycle
because I am selfish; and you found a hospital for orphans because you
are selfish.  It is my pleasure to have a Sunbeam; it is yours to help
the poor.  Your selfishness has become altruism; that is, in pleasing
yourself you have managed to please others.  The aim in education is not
to abolish selfishness; it is to educe the selfishness that is
altruistic.  Hence it may be said that education's chief aim is to teach
one how to love.  No, that won't do; no one can teach another how to
love; the teacher's job is to evoke love.  This he can do only by loving.
If I hate my pupils I evoke hate from them; if I love them I evoke love
from them in return.

Is it possible to love your neighbour as yourself?  It is when you know
yourself.  You hate in others what you hate in yourself, and you love in
others what is lovable in yourself.  So that in loving your neighbour you
are loving yourself.

If, then, the teacher's first aim is to evoke the love of his pupils, he
must know himself, and knowing must love himself.  Every day pupils are
suffering because of the teacher's hatred of himself.

Dominie Brown rises in the morning surly and unhappy.  He complains about
the bacon and eggs at breakfast . . . no, the red herring; dominies
cannot afford bacon and eggs . . . and Mrs. Brown makes unpleasant
remarks.  Brown crosses the road to school with thunder on his face, and
the children shiver in terror all morning.

If Brown could sit down calmly to think out his bad mood, he would
realise that he was punishing the children because he was worsted in his
word battle with his wife.  And _he would be quite wrong_.  The truth
would be that he was punishing the children because he was at war with
himself.  His early morning ugly mood betrayed a mental conflict.  Hating
himself, he hated his wife; his hate evoked her hate . . . and thus the
circle was completed.

We might trace all the futilities, all the stupidities of mankind, all
the wars and crimes and injustices to man's ignorance of self.  To know
all is to forgive all.  Christ condemned no one because he was at peace
with himself.  Yet, I suddenly remember that He whipped the
money-changers out of the Temple.  This incident is comforting, for it
shows that the most lovable man who ever lived betrayed one human frailty
on one occasion at least.  But now I am preaching again.

      *      *      *      *      *

I went to see Charlie Chaplin in "Shoulder Arms" last night.  Charlie is
an artist of high quality; for once I think as the crowd thinks.  But I
leave the crowd when it comes to appreciating the "moving human dramas"
in five parts.

The cinema must be reckoned with in any educational scheme.  One may
learn more about crowd psychology from attendance at cinemas than from
reading books on crowd psychology.  The cinema is popular because it
encourages day-dreaming or phantasy.  There are two kinds of thinking,
reality thinking and phantasy or day-dreaming.  Phantasying is the easier
of the two; I can sit for hours building castles in Spain, and I never
grow tired; but if I have to sit down and think out the Theory of
Quadratics I soon become weary.  In reality thinking the intellect is
active, but in day-dreaming emotion is in control.  Day-dreaming gets
nowhere; the asylums are full of day-dreamers who spend their hours
constructing beautiful phantasies.  In childhood phantasy is supreme.
Bobby turns the nursery into a jungle; the sofa is a tiger, the chairs
are lions, the rocking-horse is an elephant.  It is all real to him.  And
in later years Bobby often returns to his childish phantasying.  We all
do.  What young lover has not phantasied a burning mansion where his lady
love is imprisoned?  Have we not all clambered up the water pipes and
rescued her from the flames?

The world of the theatre is a phantasy world.  With the rising of the
curtain we forget our outside life; we live the part of the hero or the
heroine.  To this day I always leave a theatre with a vague depression of
spirits; everyday humdrum life chills me when I come out to the street.
Reality is always difficult to face.  The great popularity of the cinema
is due to this human desire for make-believe.  Cinema-going is a
regression to the infantile; we return to the childish phase where the
wish was all powerful.  In the cinema the villain is always worsted; the
wronged heroine always falls into the hero's arms at the end.  Life for
most of us means trials and sorrows and conflicts, and we long to return
to the nursery phase where life was what we wished it to be.  The cinema
and the public-house are the most convenient doors by which we can
regress.

The "moving drama" is the other side of the industrial picture.  Life for
the masses means dirt and disease, ugly factories, sordid homes, mean
streets.  The moving drama takes the masses away from grim reality; they
see beautifully gowned women in drawing-rooms; they see the King
reviewing his regiments; they see wild and free cowboys chasing Red
Indians.  For two hours they live . . . and then they go out again into
their world of mere existence.  And it is all wrong, tragically wrong.
The cinema craze means that life is too ugly to face; it means that the
masses are fleeing from reality and to flee from reality is fatal.
Day-dreams are laudable only when they come true.  If the masses
day-dreamed of an economic Utopia and forthwith set about building a New
Jerusalem, their phantasies would become realities; but the moving human
drama never leads to building; it is raw whisky swallowed to bring
oblivion.  The moving human drama will live and flourish so long as
mankind tolerates the slavery of industrialism.  It is a powerful weapon
for capitalism; like the church and the public-house, it keeps the
wage-slaves quiet.

      *      *      *      *      *

To-night the conversation in Dauvit's shop turned to the subject of
honours.

"They tell me," said Jake Tosh, "that you can buy a knighthood, or a
peerage for that matter."

"Yea, man!" said Willie Simpson, the joiner and undertaker from
Tillymains.

"So there's no muckle chance o' you getting ane, Willie," said Dauvit.

The joiner smoked thoughtfully for a while.

"Na, Dauvit," he said, "there's little chance o' an undertaker gettin' a
title.  You would think na that the man that coffined the likes o' Lloyd
George wud get a knighthood."

Dauvit cackled.

"Honours are sold, as Jake says; they are never given for public
services."

I am afraid the joke was lost on most of the assembly.  Jake failed to
see it.  It is said that Jake has been known to laugh at a joke only
once, and that was when the earth gave way beneath the minister's feet
when he was conducting a service at a grave-side, and he fell into the
open grave.

"Undertakin'," continued the joiner, "is a verra queer trade."

Jake shivered.

"I dinna ken how ye can do it," he said; "man, it wud gie me the
scunners."

"Man, ye soon get accustomed to it," said the joiner.  "Of course, it has
its limitations; ye canna verra weel advertise in the front page o' _The
Daily Mail_, but, man, it's what ye micht call a safe trade."

"How safe?" I asked.

"Oh, ye never need to worry aboot yer custom; it's aye there.  Noo in
other lines the laws o' supply and demand are tricky.  I mind a gey
puckle years syne there was a craze for walkin'-sticks wi' ebony handles.
Weel, I went doon to Dundee and bocht ten pund worth o' ebony, and afore
the wood was delivered the fashion had changed, and the men were all
buyin' cheese-cutter bonnets, so here was I left wi' ten pund worth o'
ebony on my hands . . . and if I hadna sold it to Davie Lamb the
cabinet-maker for thirteen pund I micht ha' lost the money.  Noo, in my
trade there's no sudden change o' fashion as ye micht say; the demand is
what ye micht call constant, and that's what makes me say it is a safe
trade."

Dauvit winked to me surreptitiously.

"Noo, joiner," he said, "will ye tell me wan thing?  I want to ken the
inner workin's o' an undertakker's mind.  When somebody is verra ill,
what's your attitude?  I mean to say, do ye sort o' look on the illness
wi' hope or what?  When ye see a fine set-up man on the road, do ye look
at him wi' a professional eye and say to yersell: 'Sax feet by twa; a
bonny corp!'?"

"I'm no so bad as that, Dauvit," he laughed, "though I dinna mind sayin'
that I've sometimes been a wee bit disappointed when somebody got better.
On the other hand, when big Tamson was badly, I keepit prayin' that he
wud get better."

"An unbusinesslike thing to do," I laughed.

"Aweel," said the joiner, "big Tamson weighed aboot saxteen stone, and at
the time I hadna the wood."

"I dinna like to hear aboot things like that," said Jake Tosh nervously;
"things like that give me the creeps, and besides it's no a proper way to
speak."

Dauvit turned to me.

"Man, dominie, it's a queer thing, but the more religious a man is the
less he likes to hear aboot death.  Jake here is an elder o' the auld
kirk; he's on the straight and narrow path; he's going straight to heaven
when he dees . . . and I never saw onybody so feared o' death as Jake is.
How wud ye explain that?"

"I think," I replied, "that it is due to the fact that Jake has been
brought up in the fear of the Lord."

"Exactly," nodded Dauvit.  "It's my belief that most religious fowk are
religious not becos they want specially to play harps in the next world,
but becos they dinna want to be roasted."

Dauvit's philosophy comes pretty near that of Edmond Holmes.  In _What Is
and What Might Be_ Holmes argues that our education system is founded on
the Old Testament.  Man is a sinner, prone to evil; a stern angry God
chastises him when he transgresses.  Education treats children as
sinners; it punishes the wrongdoer.  I believe Holmes is right, only he
does not trace back education far enough.  The God of the Old Testament
was a man-made God (Jung says that man makes his God in his own image;
his God is his ego-ideal).

The genesis of education is not the God of the Old Testament; it is the
unconscious wish of the primitive men who invented that God.  The
religion of the Old Testament is a father complex religion; God is the
hated and feared father, the authority who punishes, the provider of food
and clothing, the maker of laws.  Authority always makes the governed
inferior and dependent; the man with a father complex cannot stand alone;
he must always flee to his father or father substitute when he meets a
difficulty.  Thus does the Christian act; he seeks the Father; he places
his burden on the Lord; he avoids responsibility.  The Hebraic religion
and our modern education both demand that the individual shall avoid
responsibility; the good Christian and the good schoolboy must obey the
Law.  I think that if the world is to be free the church and the school
must aim at breaking the power of the Father.

      *      *      *      *      *

"Look here, Mac," I said last night, "I am going to pay you for my board."

Mac protested vigorously.

"You'll do nothing of the kind," he said firmly.

I went to the kitchen and made the offer to his wife, and she also
protested.

This morning I cycled to Dundee and bought a knife-cleaner and a vacuum
cleaner.  They arrived to-night, and Mrs. Mac gave a gasp of delight.
Mac tried to frown, but he could not manage it.  Both protested against
what they called my idiotic kindness, but their protests were
half-hearted.

It is a strange thing that money itself is considered a sordid thing.
Why should Mac refuse five pounds with anger, and accept a ten pound gift
with pleasure?  If anyone wants to study the psychological meaning of
money I recommend Chapter XL. in Dr. Ernest Jones' _Psycho-analysis_.  In
the unconscious, at any rate, money is assuredly "filthy lucre."

      *      *      *      *      *

A teacher should know very little about the subject he professes to
teach.  In my London school I succeeded a line of excellent teachers of
drawing.  I had not been long in the school when Di, aged 15, looked over
my shoulder one day and said: "Rotten!  You can't draw for nuts!"

A week later Malcolm looked at a water colour of mine.

"You've got a horrible sense of colour," he said brightly.

Then I began to wonder why everyone in school was much more keen on
drawing and painting than they had ever been in the days of the skilled
teachers.  The conclusion I came to was that my bad drawing encouraged
the children.  I remembered the beautiful copy-book headlines of my
boyhood, and I recalled the hopelessness of ever reaching the standard
set by the lithographers.  No child should have perfection put before
him.  The teacher should never try to teach; he should work alongside the
children; he should be a co-worker, not a model.

Most teachers set themselves on a pedestal.  They think that they lose
dignity if they are not able to answer every question that a child puts
to them.  One result is that the child develops a dangerous inferiority
complex.  I knew one boy who was a duffer at mathematics.  His weakness
was due to the inferiority he felt when he saw the learned mathematical
master juggle with figures as easily as a conjurer juggles with billiard
balls.  The little chap lost all hope, and when he worked problems he
worked solely to escape punishment.

The difficulty is that if a teacher works at a subject year after year he
is bound to become an expert.  The only remedy I can think of is to make
each teacher take up a new subject at the beginning of every school year.
By the time that he had been master of Mathematics, History, Drawing,
English, French, German, Latin, Geography, Chemistry, Physics,
Psychology, Physiology, Eurhythmics, Music, Woodwork, it would be time to
retire . . . with a pension or a psychosis.  The late Sir William Osier
said that a man was too old at forty; my experience leads me to conclude
that many a teacher is too old at twenty.

I sometimes think that every man has a certain definite psychic age fixed
for him by the Almighty before he is born.  I know a man of seventy who
is psychically five years old, and he will never grow older.  I know a
boy of ten who is psychically sixty years old, and he will never grow
younger.

Psycho-analysis is doing a lot of good, but I fear that it may do a lot
of harm, for, one fine day Professor Freud or Dr. Jung will get hold of
Peter Pan, take him by the back of the neck, and say: "My lad, you've got
a fixation somewhere; you are the super-regression-to-the-infantile
specimen; you've got to be analysed."  And then Peter will grow up and
read _The Daily News_ and own an allotment and a season ticket.

When we know all about psychology, the world will be rather dull.  The
Freudians have said that the play of _Hamlet_ is the result of
Shakespeare's Oedipus Complex.  If Shakespeare had not had an unconscious
hatred of his father, _Hamlet_ would never have been written.  In other
words, if Bacon had discovered the psychology of the unconscious,
Shakespeare might have been analysed and forthwith might have gone in for
keeping bees instead of writing plays.

It is the neurotic who leads the world; he is a rebel and he is an
idealist.  Yet when you analyse him you find what a poor devil he is.
His noble crusade against vivisection is due to the abnormal strain of
cruelty he is repressing in himself; his passion for Socialism comes from
his infant fear of and rebellion against his father.  The ardent
suffragette who smashes windows in a just cause is merely doing so
because the vote is a symbol of freedom from an arrogant husband.

What I want to know is this: In the year 5000, when everyone is free from
repressions and suppressions, will there be any rebels to spur humanity
on?  But then if humanity is free from unconscious urges there will be no
need for rebels, for there will be no crime or prison or wars or
politicians.  Every man will be a superman.

I firmly believe that Freud's discovery will have a greater influence on
the evolution of humanity than any discovery of the last ten centuries.
Freud has begun the road that leads to superman, and, although Jung and
Adler and others have begun to lead sideroads off the main track, the
sideroads are all leading forward.  Theirs is a great message of hope.

And yet, nineteen hundred years ago Jesus Christ gave the world a New
Psychology . . . and none of us have tried to apply it to our souls.




VIII.

Mac came across a vulgar word in a composition he was correcting
to-night, and it seemed to alarm him.  He could not understand why I
laughed, and I explained to him that I liked vulgarity.

I remember when a high-minded mother came into my class-room in
Hampstead.  The highest class was writing essays.  On her asking what
the subject was, I replied that each pupil had a different subject.
She walked round and looked over their shoulders.  I saw the lady's
eyebrows go up as she read titles such as these:--"I Grow Forty Feet
high in One Night"; "I Edit the Greenland _Morning Frost_" (the news
this boy gave was delightful); "I Interview Noah for the _Daily Mail_"
(photos on back page).  She nodded approvingly when she read the titles
of the more serious essays.  Then I saw her adjust her spectacles in
great haste; she was looking over Muriel's shoulder.

"Mr. Neill," she gasped, "do you think this a suitable subject for a
girl?"

I glanced at the title; it was; "Autobiography of My Nose."

"Er--what's wrong with it?" I said falteringly.

"It lends itself too readily to vulgarity," she said.

I picked up the book, and together we read the opening words.

"When first I began to run . . . ."

The high-minded lady left the room hurriedly.

I loved that class.  Often I wish that I had kept their essays.  One
day we had a five minute essay on the subject: Waiting for My Cue.
Lawrence wrote of standing on the steps in a cold sweat of fear.  He
had only five words to say--"The carriage waits, my lord," but he had
never acted before.  His cue was: "Ho!  Who comes here?"

"At last," he wrote, "I heard the fateful words: 'Ho!  Who comes
here?'  I could not move; I stood trembling on the stairs.

"'Get on, you idiot!' whispered the stage manager savagely, but still I
could not move.

"'Ho!  Who comes here?' repeated the fool on the stage.  Still I could
not move a step.

"'Ho!  Who comes here?'

"Suddenly I became aware of a disturbance in the auditorium.  The noise
increased, and then I heard the agonising words: 'Fire!  Fire!'  Panic
followed, and cries of terror rang out.

"But I . . . I jumped on the stage and cried: 'Hurrah!
Hoo-blinking-rah!'  It was the happiest moment of my life."

Sydney took a different line.  Her cue was the sound of a stage kiss.
Boldly she walked on, and the stage lovers glared at her, for she
arrived before the kiss was finished or rather properly begun.  The
audience chuckled.  At the next performance she determined to be less
punctual.  She heard the smack of the kiss, but she did not move.  As
she waited she heard the audience roaring with laughter, and then she
realised that the poor lovers had been standing kissing each other for
a full five minutes.

I must write to these dear old children to ask if they kept their
essays.

      *      *      *      *      *

Duncan was in to-night, and he told a school story that was new to me.

In a certain council school it was the custom for teachers to write
down on the blackboard any instructions they might have for the janitor
before they left at night.  One night he came in and read the words:
Find the L.C.M.

"Good gracious!" he growled, "has that dam thing gone and got lost
again?"

That version was new to me.  My own version ran thus:--

Little Willie is doing his home lessons, and he asks his father to help
him with a sum.  The father takes the slate in his hand and reads the
words:  Find the G.C.M.

"Good heavens!" he cries, "haven't they found that blamed thing yet?
They were hunting for it when I was at school."

I think both versions are very good.

      *      *      *      *      *

I have a strong Montessori complex.  I find myself being critical of
her system, and I have often wondered why.  I used to think that my
dislike of Montessori was a projection: I disliked a lady who raved
about Montessori, and I fancied that I had transferred my dislike of
the lady to poor Montessori.  But now I refuse to accept that
explanation; it is not good enough for me; there must be something
deeper.  I shall try to discover that something deeper.

When I first read Montessori's books I said to myself: "She is devoid
of humour."  This to me suggests a limitation in art, and I feel that
Montessori is always a scientist but never an artist.  Her system is
highly intellectual, but sadly lacking in emotionalism.  This is seen
in her attitude to phantasy.  She would probably argue that phantasy is
bad for a child, but it is a fact that much of a child's life is lived
in phantasy.  Phantasy is a means of gratifying an unfulfilled wish.
The kitchen-maid in her day-dream marries a prince, and, as Maurice
Nicoll says in his _Dream Psychology_, to destroy her phantasy without
putting something in its place is dangerous.

To a child, as to Cinderella, phantasy is a means of overcoming
reality.  Father bullies Willie and the boy retires into a day-dream
world where he becomes an all-powerful person . . . hence the fairy
tales of giants (fathers) killed by little Jacks.  In later life Willie
takes to drink or identifies himself with the hero of a cinema drama.

The extreme form of phantasy is insanity, where the patient completely
goes over to the unreal world and becomes the Queen of the World.  And
it might be objected that phantasying is the first stage of insanity.
Yes, but it is the last stage of poetry.  Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_, one
of the most glorious poems in the language, is pure phantasy.  I rather
fear that one day a grown-up Montessori child will prove conclusively
that the feet of Maud did not, when they touched the meadows, leave the
daisies rosy.

No, the Montessori world is too scientific for me; it is too orderly,
too didactic.  The name "didactic apparatus" frightens me.

I quote a sentence from _The New Children_, by Mrs. Radice.

"'Per carita!  Get up at once!' she (Montessori) has exclaimed before
now to a conscientious teacher found dishevelled on the ground with a
class of little Bolshevists sitting on top of her."

In heaven's name, I ask, why get up?  Life is more than meat, and
education is more than matching colours and fitting cylinders into
holes.

Montessori was thinking of the conscious mind of the child when she
evolved her system, and the apparatus does not satisfy the whole of the
child's unconscious mind.  Noise is suppressed in a Montessori school,
but every child should be allowed to make a noise, for noise means
power to him, and he will use it only as long as it means power to him.
I have watched Norman MacMunn's war orphans at Tiptree Hall at work.
MacMunn, the author of _A Path to Freedom in the School_, did not say
"Hush!"; his boys filled the room with noisy talk as they worked, and
never have I seen children do more work with so much joy.

The Montessori teacher, when she finds that Jimmy is interfering with
the work of Alice, segregates the bad Jimmy, and treats him as a sick
person.  But the right thing to do is to solve Jimmy's problem as well
as Alice's.  What is behind Jimmy's aggressiveness?  Jimmy does not
know, nor does the Montessori teacher, because she has been trained in
the psychology of the conscious only.

Another reason why I am not wholly on the side of Montessori is, I
fancy, that her religious attitude repels me.  She is a church woman;
she has a definite idea of right and wrong.  Thus, although she allows
children freedom to choose their own occupations, she allows them no
freedom to challenge adult morality.  But for a child to accept a
ready-made code of morals is dangerous; education in morality is a
thousand times more important than intellectual education with a
didactic apparatus.

      *      *      *      *      *

To-night Duncan came in, and as usual we talked education.  I took up
the subject of punishment, and condemned it on the ground that it
treats effect instead of cause.  After a little persuasion Duncan
seemed inclined to agree with me.

"I see what you mean," he said, "but what I say is that if you abolish
punishment you must also abolish reward."

"Why not?" I said.  "The case against rewards is just as simple.  A
child should do a lesson for the joy of doing it.  Milton certainly did
not write _Paradise Lost_ for the five pounds he got for it."

"Yes, I see that," said Duncan thoughtfully, "but what about
competition?  The prize at the end introduces a breezy struggle for
place."

I shook my head.

"No competition!  I won't have it.  It makes the chap at the top of the
class a prig, and gives the poor chap at the bottom an inferiority
complex.  No, we want to encourage not competition but co-operation.
Competition leads naturally to another world war, as competition
between British and American capital is doing now."

Then Duncan floored me.

"And would you discourage football because it introduces the idea of
competition?" he asked.

"Of course not," I replied

"Then why discourage it in arithmetic?" he asked.

It was an arresting question, and I had to grope for an answer that
would convince not only Duncan but myself.  That every healthy boy
likes to try his strength against his fellows is a fact that we cannot
ignore.  Mr. Arthur Balfour's desire to beat his golfing partner and
Jock Broon's desire to spit farther than Jake Tosh are fundamentally
the same desire, the desire for self-assertion.  And I see that the man
who comes in last in the quarter-mile race is in the same position of
inferiority as the boy who is always at the bottom of the class.  Yet I
condemn competition in school-work while I appreciate competition in
games.  Why?

I think I should leave it to the children.  Obviously they like to
compete in games and races, but they have no natural desire to compete
in lessons.  It appears that some things naturally lend themselves to
competition--racing, boxing, billiards, jumping, football and so on.
Other things do not encourage competition.  Bernard Shaw and G. K.
Chesterton do not compete in the output of books; Freud and Jung do not
struggle to publish the record number of analysis cases; George Robey
and Little Tich do not appear together on the stage of the Palladium
and try to prove which is the funnier.  Rivalry there always is, but it
remains only rivalry until _The Daily Mail_ offers a prize for the
biggest cabbage or sweet-pea, and then competition seizes suburbia.

I should therefore leave the children to discover for themselves what
interests lend themselves to competition, and what interests do not.  I
know beforehand that of their own accord they will not introduce it
into school subjects.  This is in accord with my views on the authority
question.  I insist that the teacher will impose nothing; that his task
is to watch the children find their own solution.

      *      *      *      *      *

I must write down a wise saying that came from Dauvit.  A rambling and
ill-informed discussion of Bolshevism arose in his shop to-night.
Dauvit took no part in it, but when we rose to go he said: "Tak' my
word for it, Bolshevism is wrong."

"How do you make that out, Dauvit?" I asked.

"Because it's a success," he said shortly.

      *      *      *      *      *

To-night the Rev. Mr. Smith, the U.F. minister, came in.  He is one of
the unco' guid, and to him all pleasures are sinful.  It happened that
I was telling Macdonald the Freudian theory of dreams when he entered,
and when Mac told him what the conversation had been about, he begged
me to continue.  It was evident that he had never heard of dream
interpretation, and he was surprised.

"And every dream has a meaning?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"I had a dream last night," he began, but I held up a warning hand.

"You shouldn't tell your dreams in public," I said hastily; "they may
give things away that you don't want others to know."

He laughed.

"I don't mind that," he said, "I'll take the risk.  Last night I dreamt
that I was in a public-house among a lot of men who were telling most
obscene stories.  According to Freud every dream is the fulfilment of a
wish.  Do you mean to tell me that I wish to be in such a company?"

I explained that the dream as told is not the dream in reality, the
meaning lies behind the symbolism, and it can be got at by the method
of free association.  I also explained that I did not believe the Freud
theory, that the dream is always a wish, and suggested that Jung was a
surer guide.

"According to Jung," I said, "the dream is often compensatory.  In your
own case you are consciously living the higher life, but there is
another side of life that you are ignoring, and that is the vulgar pub
side.  Your dream is a hint that the vulgar side of life cannot be
ignored.  You may ignore it consciously, but your unconscious will seek
the other side in your dreams."

This seemed to make him think.

"But the saints and martyrs!" he cried.  "Think of the thousands who
crucified the flesh so that they might win the everlasting crown!  Do
you tell me that they were all wrong?"

I lit my pipe.

"I think they were," I said, "for they merely repressed their animal
life.  They thought that they had conquered it, but they only buried
it.  The real saint is the man who faces his flesh boldly and loves it
too, just as much as he loves his God."

Then the minister fled.

The interpretation of dreams is one of the most fascinating studies in
the world.  The method as evolved by Freud is simple, although the
interpretation is anything but simple.  Obviously the average dream has
no meaning.  You dream that a horse speaks to you, and then it turns
into your brother.  It is all nonsense, yet behind the nonsense is a
serious meaning.  Not long ago I was analysing a girl of sixteen.
About a week after the analysis began she brought a dream which began
thus: "I am invisible, and I have a tail that I can take off or put on."

Following the method of free association I said to her: "What comes
into your mind about being invisible?"

"Oh, I've often wanted to be invisible, for then I could do what I
liked; then I would be free."

Being invisible therefore meant being free.

Then I asked her associations to the tail part.

"Tail . . . monkeys at the Zoo; they are poor things always kept behind
bars.  Just like me.  I forgot to say that my tail wasn't on in the
dream."

Tail therefore meant something associated with confinement and
restriction.  It is significant that her tail was unattached.  I took
it to mean a wish-fulfilment dream; in it she got free from her
neurosis.

The following night she dreamt that she was being driven in a motor car
by a swanky chauffeur.  They came to the bottom of a hill, and the car
stopped, and she got out and walked.  Her first association was: "The
chauffeur had a big green coat on, one just like the coat you wear."

"So I was the chauffeur?" I asked.

She brightened at once.

"I see it!" she cried.  "The car is the analysis; you are driving me
away from my old life!"

"Excellent!" I said, "but don't forget that the car stopped at the
bottom of the hill.  What does the word hill give you?"

"Something difficult to climb.  I hated climbing it and thought it a
shame that the motor didn't take me up."

"Well?"

"I've got to climb to get better, haven't I?"

"That's right," I said.  "I told you the other night that no analyst
should give advice, and I refused when you asked me for it.  In your
unconscious you realise that the chauffeur is not going to take you up
the hill; in other words you've got to do most of the work."

Freud holds that there is a censor standing between the conscious and
the unconscious.  Primitive wishes seek to come from the unconscious,
but the censor holds up his hand.  "No," he says, "that's too
disgusting; the conscious mind couldn't stand that; it would be
shocked.  You must disguise yourself in harmless form!"  And so the
infantile sex wish is changed into a harmless dog or cycle.  But if
this is the case why should my little girl dream of me as a chauffeur?
There was nothing disgusting about me, nothing that her conscious mind
could not face.

I prefer Jung's theory.  He says that we dream in symbols because
symbolism is the oldest language in the world, and, as the unconscious
is primitive it uses this language.  We all dream of shocking things,
and if the endopsychic censor were really on duty he would never allow
these disgusting dreams to get through.

If I dream that my father is dead the Freudians declare that I either
wish or, in the past, have wished unconsciously for my father's death.
But surely so alarming a wish would be changed into a harmless form if
there were a censor.  One night I dreamt that an acquaintance, Murray,
was dead.  The first association to Murray was: "He's a lazy sort of
chap."  I think that all he stood for was laziness, and he was merely
my own laziness symbolised.  The dream was a hint to me to be up and
doing, for I had been neglecting a task that I should have undertaken.

There is what might be called the cheese-and-tripe supper theory of the
dream held by many people.

"There's nothing in dreams," they say, "nothing but the disorders
following late supper."

A cheese-and-tripe supper will cause queer dreams, but the advocates of
this theory cannot explain why a tripe supper should make me dream
of--say--a tiger.  Why not a lion or a mouse?

It is an accepted fact now in psychology that the dream is the working
of the unconscious.  Some theosophists claim that during sleep your
spirit leaves your body and seeks the astral plane, but I have never
seen anything resembling evidence of this.  It may be a fact for all
that.

Concerning the prophetic aspect of dreams I know nothing.  I have heard
that the night before the Tay Bridge disaster a woman dreamt that it
was to take place, and she persuaded her husband not to travel by that
ill-fated train, but I cannot vouch for the story.  I believe, however,
that the dream is prophetic in that the unconscious during the night is
working out the problems of the next day.  The popular saying about
sleeping over a problem shows that there is a real belief in this
aspect.  I know a lady who was undergoing analysis.  She was suffering
from a father complex, that is, her infantile fixation on the father
had remained with her, and unconsciously she was approving or
disapproving of every man she met according as he did or did not in
some way resemble her father.

For a few weeks after the analysis began she was always dreaming that
she was back in her childhood home, and in her dreams she was always
trying to get away from home and her father was always restraining her
from going.  Often the figure in the dream was not the father, but the
associations always showed that the figure was standing for the father.
One night the figure was the King, and her first association was: "The
King's name is George. . . .  That's father's name too."

This seems to be a case where the unconscious is striving to find a
solution.

The way the unconscious does things is wonderful.  I remember one night
listening to a lecture by Homer Lane.  He brought forward a new theory
about education, and it was so deep that I did not quite grasp its
meaning.  At the time Alan, Homer Lane's youngest child, was one of the
pupils in the school in which I taught.  That night I dreamt that I was
standing before a class.  Alan was sitting in the front seat, and
behind him was a boy whom in the dream I called "Homer Lane's youngest
child."  The new theory had become in the language of symbolism Alan's
younger brother . . . in short, Lane's latest.  Here again I cannot see
why any censor should change a theory into a child.

      *      *      *      *      *
In my _Log_ I make a very, very poor statement about sex instruction.
I say that children should be encouraged to believe in the stork theory
of birth until the age of nine.  That was a wrong belief, but then at
that time I had not read Freud or Bloch or Moll.  I see now that the
child should be told the truth about sex whenever he asks for
information.  But I fear, that many modern mothers think that they have
sexually educated their child when they tell him where babies come
from.  The physiological side of sex is the less important; you can
take a child through all the usual stages--pollination of plants,
fertilisation of eggs, right up to human birth, but the child will find
no help in these informations when he faces his sex instinct at
adolescence.  Sex instruction should be psychological; it should deal
with the sex instinct as one form of life force or libido.  The child
should be led to face it openly.  It should be entirely dissociated
from sin, and moral lectures should not be given.

Who is to give the instruction?  That is the difficulty.  Most parents
and teachers cannot do it because their own sex instinct is all wrong.
Make a remark about sex in the company of adults, and it will be
reacted to in two ways; some will grin and laugh; others will be
shocked.  I hasten to add that the shocked ones are worse than the
laughers.  The laugh is a release of sex repressions; the shocked
appearance is a compensation for an unconscious over-interest in sex.
Anyway neither type is capable of talking about sex to children, and
since humanity is roughly divided into prudes and sinners (not saints
and sinners), there is little hope of a frank sex education for kiddies.

Many people say: "Oh, leave it to the doctors," but personally I
haven't enough faith in doctors.  Their attitude to sex is usually no
better than the attitude of the layman.  I know doctors who could give
excellent instruction to children on the physiology of sex, but the
only doctors of my acquaintance who could teach the psychological side
are psycho-analysts or psycho-therapists of some sort.

Teachers can tackle the sex problem negatively.  Sex activity is a form
of life force or interest, and if a child is not finding life
interesting enough there is a danger that he will regress to what is
called auto-eroticism.  When we remember that the sexual instinct is
the creative instinct, and that creation in dancing or music or poetry
or art of any kind is sublimated sex, that is sex raised to a higher
power, we can readily see that one of the most important parts of a
teacher's job is to provide ways and means for creation.  I realise
that this is not enough, but, as I say, I cannot see the way to a good
sex education, until every teacher and parent has discovered his or her
own sex complexes.  Co-education helps, for then the commingling of the
sexes affords a harmless and unconscious outlet for sex interest.  But
co-education is no panacea, for the sex problems of the individual
child in a co-educational school are almost as immediate as those of
the child from the segregated school.




IX.

This morning I was setting off for Dundee when Willie Marshall entered
the compartment.  He was dressed in his Sunday best, and I wondered why
he was going to Dundee on a Wednesday.

"Hullo, Willie!" I cried, "what's on to-day?"

He looked troubled and angry.

"I've been summoned to serve on the jury that's tryin' that dawmed rat
that stailt ten pund frae the minister," he said viciously, "and I had
little need to lose a day, for I hae far mair work than I can dae.
Mossbank's twa cairts cam in yestreen, and he's swearin' like onything
that he maun hae them by the nicht."  Willie is a joiner, and most of
his work is building and repairing carts.

"So you think that Nosie Broon is guilty?" I said with a smile.

"Of coorse he is," he cried with emphasis.

"But," I said seriously, "you'll maybe alter your mind when you hear
the evidence."

He grunted.

"Dawn nae fear!  I'll show him that he's no to drag me awa frae ma work
for nothing!"

He opened his _Dundee Courier_, and I sat and thought of the trial by
jury method.  I would not condemn it on the strength of Willie's
dangerous misunderstanding of what it means, but I do condemn it on
other grounds.  Weighing evidence is a difficult enough business even
for the specialist, for it is almost impossible to eliminate emotion in
forming a judgment.  With a jury of citizens, some of them possibly
illiterate, too much depends on the advocates, or on outside causes.

During the war there was a glaring instance of this.  A soldier shot
the man who had been trying to steal his wife's love . . . and the
verdict of the jury was Not Guilty.  The emotional factor in this case
was that the dead man was a German.  I am not arguing that the prisoner
should have been hanged or imprisoned, for I think both procedures are
bad; I merely point out that in the eyes of legalism the soldier was
guilty, yet the jury threw legalism overboard.

Another instance of the emotional factor over-ruling legalism is seen
in the trial of the man who shot Jaures.  He was acquitted. . . .  Not
Guilty . . . the man who slew one of the best men in Europe.  On the
other hand the youth who attempted to assassinate Clemenceau was
sentenced to death, pardoned, and sent to penal servitude.  In France
therefore it is a crime to kill a politician of the right, but a virtue
to kill one of the Socialist left.

Abstract justice is a figment.  No jury and no judge can be impartial.
The other day a man was charged with striking a Socialist orator with
an ice-pick.  The judge lectured the orator on his Bolshevism, and then
gave the accused imprisonment for a short term in the second division.
Suppose that the Bolshevist had used an ice-pick on a Cabinet Minister!

I do not think that our judges and magistrates ever consciously show
partiality.  They are an upright class of men, men above suspicion.  It
is their unconscious that shows partiality just as mine does.  The army
colonels who tried Conscientious Objectors were upright men, but it was
wrong to imagine that they could possibly see the C.O.'s point of view.
So it was with the regular R.A.M.C. doctors.  To some of them the
neurotic patient was a swinger of the lead, a malingerer.  They had
never heard of the new psychiatry, and the neurotic was a strange
creature to them.  Their ignorance supplemented their prejudice, and
they could not possibly have treated these men with justice.

The truth is that we all make up our minds according as our buried
complexes impel us.  If I saw a Frenchman fighting a Scot I should take
the Scot's side, because I have a Scot complex.  Occasionally our
complexes work in the opposite way.  I fancy that the few people who
sided with the Germans in the war were suffering from an "agin the
government" complex, which, if you trace it deep enough is usually
found to be an infantile rebellion against the father.  In this case
the State represented the father, and Germany was the outside helper
who should conquer the father (or mother) country.  Had Germany won,
the unpatriotic man would immediately have turned his hate against
Prussia, for then Prussia would have been the father substitute.

Our loves and hates and fears are within ourselves.  I know a man who
has a nagging wife; she has a constant wish for new things.  He bought
her a hat, and for two days she was happy; then she nagged, and he
bought her a dress.  Three days later she demanded a necklace, and he
gave her a necklace.  He may continue giving her everything she asks
for, but if he buys her a Rolls Royce and a house in Park Lane she will
be a dissatisfied woman, for "the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our
stars but in ourselves."  I advised him to spend his money on having
her psycho-analysed.

      *      *      *      *      *

To-night Tammas Lownie the joiner came into Dauvit's shop.  He is an
infrequent attender at Dauvit's parliament, and Dauvit seemed slightly
surprised at his entry.

"Weel, Tammas," he said, "it's no often that we see you here.  What's
brocht ye here the nicht?"

Tammas spat in the grate.

"Oh, it was a fine nicht, and I thought I'd just tak a daunder yont,"
he said easily.

Dauvit looked at him searchingly.

"Na, na, Tammas, it winna dae!  It wasna the fine nicht that brocht ye
yont.  Ye've got some news I'm thinkin'."

Tammas laughed loudly.

"Dauvit, ye're oncanny!" he cried.  "Ye seem to read what's at the back
o' a man's held.  But I have nae news to gie ye."

Dauvit chuckled.

"I wudna wonder if ye didna come yont to tell me aboot the eldership,"
he said slowly.

The expression on Tammas's face showed that he _had_ come to tell us
that the minister had asked him to become an elder.

"'Od, Dauvit, noo that ye come to mention it I wud like to hear yer
advice aboot the matter.  I dinna see how I can tak an eldership,
Dauvit."

"How no?" asked Dauvit in surprise.

Then he added: "But maybe ye ken whether ye've got a sinfu' heart or
no."

"It's no that," said Tammas hastily, "I'm nae worse than some other
elders I ken," and he glanced at Jake Tosh.  "No, it's no the sin I'm
thinkin' o'; it's my trade."

"But," I put in, "why shouldn't a joiner be an elder?"

Tammas bit off a chunk of Bogie Roll.

"That may as may be, dominie, but I'm mair than a joiner; I'm an
undertakker."

"Weel," said Dauvit, "what aboot that?"

Tammas shook his head sadly.

"An undertakker canna be an elder, Dauvit.  Suppose the minister was
awa preachin' or at the Assembly, and ane o' his congregation was
deein', me as an elder micht hae to ging to the bedside and offer up a
bit prayer."

"There's nothing in that," said Jake proudly; "I've offered up a bit
prayer afore noo when the minister was awa."

"Aye, Jake," said Tammas, "but ye see you're a roadman.  But an
undertakker is a different matter.  Goad, lads, I canna gie a man a bit
prayer at sax o'clock and syne measure him for his coffin at acht.
That wud look like mixin' religion wi' business."

The assembly thought over this aspect.

"All the same," said the smith, "Dr. Hall is an elder, and naebody ever
thinks o' accusin' him o' mixin' religion wi' his business."

We all considered this statement.

"Tammas," said Dauvit, "if ye want to be an elder tak it, and never
mind the undertakkin'.  But if ever ye have to gie a prayer just get
Jake here to tak on the job."

He began to laugh here.

"I mind o' Jeemie Ritchie when he got his eldership.  The minister gaed
awa to the Assembly in Edinbro, and as it happened auld Jess Tosh was
deein', so Jeemie was asked to come up and gie her a prayer.  Jeemie
was in my shop when the lassie Tosh cam for him, and I never saw a man
in sic a state.

"'Dauvit,' he cries, 'I canna dae it!  I never offered up a prayer in
my life!'

"'Hoots, Jeemie,' says I, 'it's easy; just bring in a few bitties frae
the Bible.'

"Auld Jeemie he scarted his heid.

"'Man, Dauvit,' says he, 'I cudna say twa words o' the Bible.'

"Weel-a-weel, I had to shove him oot o' the shop, and I tell ye, boys,
he was shakin' like a shakky-trummly.

"Weel, in aboot half-an-hour Jeemie cam back, and he was smilin' like
onything.

"'Hoo did ye get on?' I speered.

"'Graund!' he cried, '. . . she was deid afore I got there!'"

      *      *      *      *      *

When I published my _Log_ a correspondent wrote accusing me of being
disloyal to my colleagues in the teaching profession.

"Where is your professional etiquette?" he wrote.

I had lots of letters from teachers, some flattering, some not.  One
man wrote me from Croydon:--

"Dear Sir,--Are you a fool or merely a silly ass?"

"Both," I replied, "else I should not have paid 2d. for your letter."

In haste the poor man hastened to forward two penny stamps, and to
apologise for not having stamped the letter he sent me.

"I really thought that I had stamped it," he wrote.

Then I wrote him a nice letter telling him that the mistake was mine,
for his first letter had had a stamp on it after all.  He never replied
to that, and I suppose that now he goes about telling his friends that
I am a fool, a silly ass, and a typical Scot.

Authors hear queer things about themselves.  The other day a friend of
mine asked for my _Log_ in a West End library.  As the librarian handed
over the book she shook her head sadly.

"Isn't it sad about the man who wrote that book?" she said.

My friend was startled.

"Sad!  What do you mean?"

"Oh, haven't you heard?" asked the librarian in surprise; "he's a
confirmed drunkard now."

"Impossible!" cried my friend, "with whisky at ten and six a bottle!"

But I meant to write about colleagues.  One day a class was holding a
self-government meeting, and they sent for me.  I was annoyed because I
was having my after-dinner smoke in the staff-room.  However I went up.

"Hullo!" I said as I entered, "what do you want?"

Eglantine the chairman said: "A member of this class has insulted you."

"Impossible!" I cried.

Then Mary got up.

"I did," she blurted out nervously; "I said you were just a silly ass."

"That's all right!" I said cheerfully, "I am," and I made for the door.
Then the class got excited.

"Aren't you going to do anything?" asked Ian in surprise.

"Good Lord, no!" I cried.  "Why should I?"

"You're on the staff," said Ian.

"Look here," I said impatiently, "I hereby authorise the crowd of you
to call me any name you like."

The class became indignant.

"You can't criticise the staff," said one.

"Why not?" I asked, and they looked at each other in alarm.  This was
carrying self-government too far.

Suddenly Mary jumped up.

"Then if we can criticise the staff here goes!  I accuse Miss Brown of
favouritism."

It was a bombshell.  Everyone jumped up, and some cried: "Shame!
Withdraw!"  The chairman appealed to me.

"I have nothing to do with it," I protested.

Then bitter words flew.  They told me that I, as a member of the staff,
should squash Mary.  Voices became louder, but then the bell rang and
the class had to go to its own class-room to work.

My colleagues when they heard the story agreed with the children; they
held that I acted wrongly in listening to an accusation against a
colleague.  My argument was that I was a guest at a meeting; I had no
vote, nor would I have interfered had I been a member of the meeting.
I was quite sure that if the bell had not broken up the meeting
somebody would have made the discovery that Miss Brown was the proper
person to make the accusation to.  When they thought that Mary insulted
me they sent for me, and I fully expected they would send for Miss
Brown.  Again I argued that if Miss Brown had favourites the class had
a right to criticise her.  If she had no favourites let her arraign the
class before a meeting of the whole school and accuse them of libel.

Looking back I still think my attitude was right, for unless the staff
can lay aside all dignity and become members of the gang education is
not free.  Yet I see now that I was secretly exulting in the
discomfiture of a colleague . . . a common human failing which none of
us care to recognise in ourselves.  It is a sad fact but a true one
that however much Dr. A. protests when a patient tells him that Dr. B.
is a clumsy fool, unconsciously at least Dr. A. is gratified at the
criticism of his rival.  Psycho-analysts, that is people who are
supposed to know the contents of their unconscious, are just as guilty
in this respect as other doctors, and if anyone doubts this let him ask
a Freudian what he thinks of the Jungian in the next street.

My earliest memory of professional jealousy goes back to the age of
seven.  I lived next door to a dentist, a real qualified L.D.S.  Across
the street lived a quack dental surgeon.  When trade was dull these two
used to come to their respective doors and converse with each other in
the good old simple way of putting the fingers to the nose.  They never
spoke to each other.  Life in a northern town was simple in these days.

      *      *      *      *      *

Helen Macdonald is four years old, and her mother and I have some
breezy discussions about her upbringing.  Mrs. Mac has a great
admiration for her own mother, and she is bent on bringing up her
daughter in the way that she was brought up.

"Mother made me obey and I'll make Helen obey," she said to-day with
decision.

"It's dangerous," I said.

"No it isn't; it worked well enough in my case anyway."

"Don't blow your own trumpet, madam!"

She smiled.

"I don't think I am a bad product of the good old way," she said with a
self-satisfied air.

"Madam, shall I tell you the truth about yourself?"

She bubbled and drew her chair closer to mine.

"Do!" she cried, and then added: "But I won't believe the nasty bits."

Mac chuckled.

"To begin with," I said pompously, "you are an awful example of a bad
education."

She bowed mockingly and Mac guffawed.  He is a wee bit afraid of his
wife and he marvels at my courage in ragging her.

"You," I continued, "were made to obey as a child, and as a result you
became dependent on your mother.  In short you are your own mother."

"Don't be silly," she said with a frown; "I want your serious opinion."

"And you are getting it," I replied.  "Because you had to obey you
never lived your own life, and naturally you never had a mind of your
own.  To this day you act as your mother acted.  She made her daughter
obey; you follow her example; she made scones in such and such a way;
you make scones in exactly the same way."

"That's right!" laughed Mac.

Mrs. Mac looked thoughtful.

"Anyway," she said quickly, "they are excellent scones."

"Most excellent scones," I hastened to add, "but my point is that if we
all follow our parents there will be no progress."

"Progress will never bring better scones," said Mac and he patted his
wife's cheek.

"Mac," I said gallantly, "your wife has brought scones to their perfect
and utmost evolution.  She has made the super-scone.  Only, Helen isn't
a scone you know."

At this point Helen was found trying to pull the marble clock down from
the mantlepiece.  Her mother rescued the clock as it was falling, and
she scolded the fair Helen.

"You are all theory," she cried to me.  "What would you do in a case
like this?"

"Same as you did," I answered hastily, and then added: "Only I would
try to give her so many interesting things to play with that she'd
forget to want the clock."

Then Mrs. Mac indignantly dragged out Helen's toys from a cupboard.

"Dozens of them!" she cried, "and she is tired of every one."

Then I discoursed on toys.  The toys of the world are ne

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/25306