"Well, Macdonald, your ways are not my ways, and candidly I wouldn't teach quite a lot of the stuff you mean to teach. Grammar for instance. What's the use of knowing the parts of a sentence? I don't suppose that Shakespeare knew them. If education is meant to make people think, your Evening School would be much better employed reading books. If you read a lot your grammar takes care of itself.
"The Stuart Period is all right if you don't emphasise the importance of battles and plots. I haven't the faintest notion whether Cromwell[Pg 99] won the battle of Marston Moor or lost it, but I have a fair idea of what the constitutional battle meant to England. The political war was over before the first shot was fired; the Civil War was a religious war. If I were you I should take the broad principles of the whole thing and skip all the battles and plots and executions.
"As for the British Colonies and their agriculture you can turn emigration officer if you fancy the job. The idea is good enough. My own personal predilection in geography is the problem of race. I used to tell my pupils about the different 'niggers' I met at the university, and of of the colonials to these men."
Macdonald shook his head.
"No, no," he said, "a black man isn't as good as a white man."