Both Confucian education and the Victorian-Edwardian Public Schools helped to maintain the identity and political power of an elite, promoting the publio service traditions of gentry families which formed the nucleus of that elite. A hinge between traditional loyalties and rationalist organization, Imperial Chinese education, no less than its English counterpart, absorbed and indoctrinated non-elite individuals, and strengthened a two-way link between public leadership and high social status. This paper describes how the two education systems aohieved their effects by promoting an amateur, ideal, by morally downgrading commeroe and by playing on aesthetic emotion-the good taste of the gentleman. The paper develops Joseph Schumpeter's thesis that bourgeois classes do not easily become governing classes.