We can now see what the answer to this question is likely to be.

For a third of a century--from 1862 to 1895--self-expression on the part of the child may be said to have been formally prohibited by all who were responsible for the elementary education of the children of England, and also to have been prohibited _de facto_ by all the unformulated conditions under which the elementary school was conducted.

In 1895 the formal prohibition of self-expression ceased, but the _de facto_ prohibition of it in the ordinary school is scarcely less effective to-day than it was in the darkest days of the old _regime_.

For "The evil that men do lives after them," and the old _regime_, though nominally abrogated, overshadows us still.

When I say this I do not merely mean that many teachers who were brought up under the old _regime_ have been unable to emancipate themselves from its influence.