Chapter I: Front Matter

HUMBUG

A STUDY IN EDUCATION

BY E. M. DELAFIELD

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922

_All rights reserved_

COPYRIGHT, 1921 and 1922,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and Printed. Published February, 1922.

TO PAUL
HUSBAND and COMRADE

_For the friendship of our days,
For your very pleasant ways,
For the many times we've laughed,
For your kindness to my craft,
Let me dedicate to you
The book of mine I hold most true._

"If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence."

SAMUEL BUTLER.

"I think the Church Catechism has a good deal to do with the unhappy relations that commonly even now exist between parents and children. That work was written too exclusively from the parental point of view; the person who composed it did not get a few children to come in and help him....

"If a new edition of the work is ever required I should like to introduce a few words insisting on the duty of seeking all reasonable pleasure and avoiding all pain that can be honourably avoided. I should like to see children taught that they should not say they like things which they do not like merely because certain other people say they like them, and how foolish it is to say they believe this or that when they understand nothing about it."

SAMUEL BUTLER.

"Education, as deliberate moulding of people into set forms, is sterile, illegitimate, and impossible."

TOLSTOI.

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

_Few novelists, if any, can have escaped the sprightly idiocy of a reproach couched in somewhat the following terms:_

_"Aha! I recognized the people in your last book. You can't deceive_ ME! _The minute I came to that part about the old lady feeding the cat, I saw at once that you meant it for poor Aunt Jane."_

_And also, spoken several semi-tones lower:_

_"All the same, it seems rather a shame to have put poor old_ GRANDPAPA _into a book, now that he's dead."_

_In an endeavour to forestall these intelligent criticisms, I wish to point out that Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe, Miss Melody, Aunt Clotilde, the Hardinges, etc., merely represent types--that I fear to be far from extinct--of amateur educationalists._

_There are no individual indictments in_ HUMBUG, _the book is not an autobiography, and Lily Stellenthorpe is not an attempt at foisting upon the reader a portrait of the writer as she would fain have herself considered, and as she is not._

E. M. DELAFIELD.

HUMBUG