It was a lazy summer afternoon during my last term at Nottsgrove. The day's classes had ended and I was busily engaged in deciding what news to pen in my obligatory letter home (no excuses for the absence of such an epistle were ever allowed), when Doctor White entered the hallowed portals of the prefects' common room to pin up a notice of forthcoming sports fixtures upon the wall board.

After a moment or two my old friend Pelham Forbes-Mackenzie asked the good doctor some trifling question about a paper on modern philosophy that he was preparing for the summer examination-and of course, this was more than enough to set our much loved and respected old pedagogue on course for yet another lecture about the faults of present-day civilisation.

'My dear old chap,' he boomed, 'never forget how we are unchained in body yet still shackled mentally to grossly outdated ideas that make our lives unnecessarily worrisome. But soon, Forbes-Mackenzie, very soon we shall face a climax in this continual struggle between, upon one hand, established authority with its clutch of beliefs and rituals and, upon the other, the soon-to-be-awakened intelligence of the until now uninformed, ignorant masses!'

All conversation in the room ceased, as we knew that the Doctor always enjoyed as large an audience as possible for his little speeches, and I sat back to hear him continue.

'To deflect the attack on these taboos which will be made when the general education of the common people is completed,' he announced, 'I believe that our so-called masters and betters will attempt to reinforce all those rules and regulations (which they themselves often ignore!) in an attempt to hold back the natural flow of self-understanding and enlightenment that mass education will surely bring.

'It is up to you all, the new leaders of the Empire, to resist these oppressive inroads before they are firmly established as the laws of the land, as unchangeable as those of the Medes and Persians!' he thundered.