Such are a few of the essentials of the great Headmaster, and to the glory of our system be it said that there are still many in the land. But the type is changing. The autocratic Titan of the past has been shorn of his locks by two Delilahs--Modern Sides and Government Interference.
Time was when A Sound Classical Education, Lady Matron, and Meat for Breakfast formed the alpha and omega of a public school prospectus. But times have changed, at least in so far as the Sound Classical Education is concerned. The Headmaster of the old school, who looks upon the classics as the foundation of all education, and regards modern sides as a sop to the parental Cerberus, finds himself called upon to cope with new and strange monsters.
[Illustration: THE HEADMASTER OF FICTION]
First of all, the members of that once despised race, the teachers of Science. Formerly these maintained a servile and apologetic existence, supervising a turbulent collection of young gentlemen whose sole appreciation of this branch of knowledge was derived from the unrivalled opportunities which its pursuit afforded for the creation of horrible stenches and untimely explosions. Now they have uprisen, and, asseverating that classical education is a pricked bubble, ask boldly for expensive apparatus and a larger tract of space in the time-table.
Then the parent. He has got quite out of hand lately. In days past things were different. Usually an old public-school boy himself, and proudly conscious that Classics had made him "what he was," the parent deferred entirely to the Headmaster's judgment, and entrusted his son to his care without question or stipulation. But a new race of parents has arisen, men who avow, modestly but firmly, that they have been made not by the Classics but by themselves, and who demand, with a great assumption of you-can't-put-_me_-off-with-last-season's-goods, that their offspring shall be taught something up-to-date--something which will be "useful" in an office.
Again, there is our old friend the Man in the Street, who, through the medium of his favourite mouthpiece, the halfpenny press, asks the Headmaster very sternly what he means by turning out "scholars" who are incapable of writing an invoice in commercial Spanish, and to whom double entry is Double Dutch.