waxed enthusiastic over educational progress since the Victorian times. "We have conquered Cram," he said, "completely conquered Cram—there is not an examination left in the world. Aren't you glad?"
"How do you get the work done?" asked Graham.
"We make it attractive—as attractive as possible. And if it does not attract then—we let it go. We cover an immense field."
He proceeded to details, and they had a lengthy conversation. Graham learnt that University Extension still existed in a modified form. "There is a certain type of girl, for example," said the Surveyor-General, dilating with a sense of his usefulness, "with a perfect passion for severe studies—when they are not too difficult, you know. We cater for them by the thousand. At this moment," he said with a Napoleonic touch, "nearly five hundred phonographs are lecturing in different parts of London on the influence exercised by Plato and Swift on the love affairs of Shelley, Hazlitt, and Burns. And afterwards they write essays on the lectures, and their names in order of merit are put in conspicuous places. You see how your little germ has grown? The illiterate middleclass of your days has quite passed away."
"About the public elementary schools," said Graham. "Do you control them?"
The Surveyor-General did, "entirely." Now Graham in his later democratic days had taken a keen interest in these, and his questioning quickened. Certain casual phrases that had fallen from the old man with whom he had talked in the darkness recurred to him. The Surveyor-General in effect endorsed the
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