philosophy was little required at Westminster: provided that he incurred no suspicion of "side", there was so general a disposition to help the strange newcomer that he suffered little; and even his service was made easy for him. The "shadow", in Westminster language, was instructed at once in the rules and customs of the house by a senior fag, his "substance", who shouldered his sins for the first fortnight and was theoretically liable to suffer vicariously for his shortcomings; after the days of grace a new boy could be fagged, though this involved little more than fetching and carrying, washing cups, filling saucepans and preparing call-over lists; he could also be "tanned", with an instrument appropriately designated a "pole"; but, though this was less agreeable, corporal punishment was not employed with undue frequency. There was always a right of appeal, too, with the menace of two extra strokes if the appeal was dismissed; but, as it was a point of honour never to appeal, the sufferer could only comfort himself with the thought that a tanning was over more quickly than "lines" or "drill" and with the hope that he might fall into weak or inexpert hands. Of bullying there was little; of systematic oppression and torture of the weak by the strong there was none at all, though the small boys of that generation (as of every other) believed that, if a companion was offensive, their right and duty impelled them to drum the offensiveness out of him.

The war has caused the English people to examine searchingly its scheme of education and especially that public-school system which trains the sons of the well-to-do for future eminence in government, the public services and the learned professions. There have been many books and much discussion: the English love of finding fault with cherished institutions while approving the result has led to a hazy belief that the English public-schoolboy is the finest raw material in the world, but that only his inborn superiority has saved him from destruction by a burthen of useless learning, devastating ignorance, insane athleticism and vicious associations. It is more than time to suggest that his excellence is a delicate bloom nurtured and saved by the public school from the criminal neglect of his parents and that most critics, failing to distinguish between the phases through which every boy passes, have written down as chronic disease what was but temporary green-sickness.

Few men can speak with knowledge of more than one school, but there is little risk in the assertion that the natural history of the public-schoolboy is broadly the same at all times and places. Withdrawn at an early age from the dry-nursing of his natural guardians, he is flung into a vast adolescent society and left to struggle through as best he may: his parents commonly escape the embarrassment of explaining to him the elements of physiology, preferring that he should learn them from the gloating confidences of other boys hardly less ignorant than himself. Native chastity of soul keeps some unsmirched, but most go through an ugly period of foul tongues, foul minds and sometimes foul propensities which the school seeks to circumvent by vigilance and hard physical discipline. During the middle phase, this blind, misunderstood groping towards maturity comes to be gradually controlled; and, in the last, the adult boy is seen as a clean-living, clean-speaking, rather solemn blend of scholar, sportsman and despot, very conscious of his responsibilities and zealous to repress the primitive exuberance by which he himself was afflicted two or three years earlier.

Before public schools are denounced for making boys licentious of habit and obscene of tongue, parents might ask themselves what preventive measures they themselves have taken. And, before any one attacks the insistence on athletics in public schools, he might ask himself what better physical discipline he can propose and whether this derided love of sport is inculcated at school or at home. If a boy were not compelled by fear of punishment to take part in games, he would be coerced by the opinion of parents who would not understand nor tolerate a son without the Englishman's normal and natural preoccupation with sport; and, though compulsory games are easy to ridicule, they do not kill the chivalry of good sportsmanship: an early Westminster memory is of a football shield passing, after long and honourable contest, from one house to another; while the head and captain of the winning house fetched away the trophy, the losing house lined up to cheer their victors and, if possible, to drown the cheers of the winning house for the one that had lost.

A defence of the public-school system would deserve at least as much space as the critics have given to attacking it. This is neither the place nor time to engage in the endless controversy; it was not the place nor time, fifteen years ago, for any who sat thinking of their own school and of the days that they had spent there.

III

Many of those who were leaving must have wondered where the outgoing draft would be in another six years' time. Westminster contains about three hundred boys, drawn chiefly from the professional classes, and in turn sends a steady stream of recruits to the civil service and the learned professions. Barristers and doctors abound; government servants are to be discovered richly distributed through Whitehall, India and the colonies; the school has its share of clergymen and more than its share of soldiers. In less than six years all would have come down from Oxford and Cambridge, unless any had had the good fortune to secure a fellowship; and, while those who were destined for a profession had already decided on their careers, those who dreamed of public life and looked, perhaps, towards the north transept where, in white marble and late-won peace, Beaconsfield and Gladstone stood side by side, may have preferred to keep locked in their own hearts the ideals which they had diffidently set before themselves.

The changing and strengthening aspirations of a boy have won as little space in all the crop of analytical school literature as have the vagaries of his religious faith or the evolution of his civic morals. The Victorians, indeed, in strict accordance with formula, loaded their hero with vague disquiet which was only relieved when he recalled that he had ceased to receive the sacraments; a later generation arrested him in full flight to perdition by intervening opportunely with a soul-steadying preparation for confirmation; the Catholic propagandists habitually threw a sympathetic priest across his path in the course of a holiday ramble; and, if there be a school literature of dissent, I doubt not but that some harassed hero found peace in the practice of Congregationalism. It was recognised, therefore, that the faith of childhood is not infrequently discarded at school; it was assumed with less justification that boys undergo spiritual distress at such a time; and, as the hero of a novel is not expected to suffer as long or as acutely as any one in life, one or other of the conventional escapes could always be chosen. It is hard to remember a book in which the hero sheds his belief in super-natural religion as lightheartedly as once he outgrew his faith in Santa Claus; and, even if it be assumed from private knowledge and experience that many schoolboy heroes have passed through this spiritual transformation, it is harder to recall even one who has been described as constructing a new system to take the place of that which has been overthrown.

This reconstruction, nevertheless, was being attempted twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the higher criticism, by all boys with a speculative bent of mind; they were