22 THOMPSON YATES LABORATORIES REPORT 
vanishing before our efforts in education, before the Schoolmaster. The Schoolmaster, and his 
visitors and inspectors, his examinations and his organizations, was, I suppose, in some form or 
other inevitable ; but we have killed, and are killing, much by our cramming, our red-tapism, and 
our endless examinations. I wonder sometimes how the poor schoolmasters themselves can suffer 
them all. Only State tyranny dating from London would make them do so. However, we go 
on adding inspector to inspector, official to official, in order to give them all something to do, by 
at least inspecting each other, until sometimes I think a caste will be formed of official families, of 
which we shall be the harvest and the slaves. Yet sometimes, like Mr. Morris, I also have 
dreams — a vision of an era of real freedom, when, after the present tyranny be overpast, we shall 
all have discovered by painful experience that the only way to make the world better is by 
increasing, not by killing, individual responsibility. 
A great Bishop once said, and got much abuse for saying it, 'that it was better that England 
should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.' 'I would distinctly prefer,' he 
said, 'Freedom to Sobriety, because with Freedom we might in the end obtain Sobriety ; but in 
the other alternative we should eventually lose both Freedom and Sobriety.' I would myself go 
even farther than the Bishop, and hold that it is better to be an ordinary faulty human being, and 
a free ?nan, than to be an angel in chains. There is always hope for the free man : he can aspire, 
A chained angel is a hopeless paradox ; he is compulsorily condemned to hang useless wings ; he 
cannot fly. And many old women, I use the words metaphorically, nowadays are wishing to 
make us all chained Angels. Yet I have dreams of a time when our Freedom will have taught 
us duties which we shall all be eager to perform on our own account, not because we are 
expecting an Lispector, himself inspected, but because our Freedom has taught us that we ought 
to do them. Why, I ask, should youor I be compelled by a majority, very often by a mere 
majority, very often by a mere party majority, to be rated or taxed against our consciences, or what 
we believe to be our better knowledge, because some good people with a fad and tongues have 
persuaded a Parliament or a County Council to pass an Act, or a By-law, which enables them to 
force our money from us ? We happily abolished compulsory Church Rates ; we ought, were we 
just, to abolish a great many more. 
This poor world of ours has been ridden by many riders, who have been one after the other 
unhorsed. We have had on our backs Kings, and Marshals, Priests, Puritans, some of whom 
have fallen asleep, but some remain with us to-day, for is it not true that ladies have taken lately 
to riding ? I hope we may get rid of some of them, say of Inspectors ; I will not add the word 
medical, for it cannot be possible, can it ? that we shall ever be doctor-ridden. They surely are 
the healers of the world ! And yet even they, I think (for they have great power now over 
opinion and purse) may be careful, not, for instance, to profess to know more than they have 
knowledge of ; not to call assumptions or fads. Science ; not to think that they have fathomed 
creation when they have mastered the Text-books. We shall all think the more of them if they 
are perfectly truthful with us and are ready sometimes to say, 'I don't know.' 
There is more danger from haste than from patience. There are more things in Heaven 
and Earth — we may all acknowledge it — than our very limited Philosophy dreams of, or than we 
