I grew up tacitly accepting, without much thought, certain old maxims: honesty is the best policy; when you have given your word, you must keep it; you should treat the other fellow as you would, yourself, be treated. Forty-four years of schoolmastering with some responsibility for bringing up and training boys, plus the business experience involved in operating an institution, have given me plenty of time and opportunity to appraise the validity of these maxims; plenty of opportunity, also, to form some opinion as to the number of people who not only believe them, but act, in general, accordingly.
In retrospect, the appraisal is more than encouraging. One cannot measure the extent to which a schoolmaster, or even a parent, can