Remarkable Speech.
Owing to the ruthless condensation of the Parliamentary Reports in the
daily Press, no mention was made of Mr. Alfred Dunstanley's motion last
Thursday, under the ten-minutes rule, for leave to bring in his Bill for
the Reform of Public Schools. That omission we are now able to make
good, thanks to the enterprise of a correspondent who was present during
the debate in the Strangers' Gallery.
Mr. Dunstanley remarked that he was not prompted by any animosity to our
public schools and did not propose to exterminate or annihilate them.
But he was convinced that in the best interests of the nation they ought
to be purged of the excrescences and anomalies which militated against
their utility. The Bill accordingly provided that, pending the
extinction of the hereditary peerage, peers or peers' sons, if they
insisted on going to public schools, should be carefully segregated and
kept in a state of perpetual coventry. It was not advisable that the
healthy sons of our democracy should associate with those effete and
tainted aristocrats. The Bill stopped short of sending them to the
lethal chamber, but recommended that they should pay triple fees.
Mr. Dunstanley explained that he had no feeling against titled persons
as individuals. But the facts were against them. Thus the word viscount
was in Latin vice-comes, in itself a terrible admission. Again, baronets
were almost invariably depicted in lurid colours by the best novelists.
In short their presence at our public schools could not be safely
tolerated, as even the children of good Radicals were not immune to the
danger of snobbery and sycophancy. The Bill also provided for compulsory
vegetarian diet and the abolition of all cadet corps, rifle-shooting and
caning.
Mr. Dunstanley concluded by observing that it pained him to bring
forward this motion, as he had many friends who had been born in the
purple, and some had survived the demoralising influences involved in
their birth, but he felt it his solemn duty to lodge a practical protest
against the fetish worship of rank and wealth and war, which, in the
opinion of his great-headed colleague, Mr. John Ward, was ruining the
country.
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