At no English public school is it even suggested,
except by accident, that it is a man's duty to tell the truth. What is
suggested is something entirely different: that it is a man's duty not
to tell lies. So completely does this mistake soak through all
civilisation that we hardly ever think even of the difference between
the two things. When we say to a child, "You must tell the truth," we do
merely mean that he must refrain from verbal inaccuracies. But the thing
we never teach at all is the general duty of telling the truth, of
giving a complete and fair picture of anything we are talking about, of
not misrepresenting, not evading, not suppressing, not using plausible
arguments that we know to be unfair, not selecting unscrupulously to
prove an _ex parte_ case, not telling all the nice stories about the
Scotch, and all the nasty stories about the Irish, not pretending to be
disinterested when you are really angry, not pretending to be angry when
you are really only avaricious. The one thing that is never taught by
any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is exactly that--that
there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it
we are happy.
If any one has the smallest doubt of this neglect of truth in public
schools he can kill his doubt with one plain question.
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