in spite of their boasted progress in sciences and arts, my countrymen are still practically ignorant of the real kinship which exists between mankind and the other races, and of the duties which this kinship implies. They are still the victims of that old anthropocentric superstition which pictures Man as the centre of the universe, and separated from the inferior animals—mere playthings made for his august pleasure and amusement—by a deep intervening gulf; and it is probable enough that if any one of these unthinking savages who “break up” a hare, or baptize their children in the blood of a butchered fox, were reminded that he himself is in very truth an “animal,” he would resent such statement of an established fact as a slight on his religious convictions and on his personal self-respect. For, as the author of Hudibras discovered:

The very scientists themselves, who have in theory renounced the old-fashioned idea of a universe created for mankind, are inclined in practice to belie their own biological faith, for they claim the moral right to devote large numbers of the lower animals, without scruple or remorse, to the tortures of “research,” just as if the fact of a close kinship between the vivisector who wields the scalpel and the dog who lies in the trough were a notion of which Science is unaware!

Is it surprising that, to those of us who have gradually realized that we are dwelling in a wild land among savages such as these, the consciousness of the discovery should at times bring with it a sense of unutterable loneliness and desolation—that we should feel cut off, as it were, by interminable leagues of misunderstanding from all human intercourse, and from all possibility of expressing ourselves? What appeal can be made to people whose first instinct, on seeing a beautiful animal, full of joyousness and vitality, is to hunt or eat it? One can only marvel how such sheer, untempered barbarism has come down to us from the past.

But the facts, though so terrible in their first impression, are capable of being more hopefully regarded; there is a consolatory, as well as a discomforting, way of interpreting them. For if these countrymen of ours are indeed savages (as who can doubt?), have we not at least reason to rejoice that, being savages, they in many ways conduct themselves so discreetly, and that, as far as their sense of relationship extends, they are so civil, so kindly, so law-abiding? Instead, therefore, of too loudly upbraiding them for hunting or eating their little brethren, the animals, ought we not, perhaps, to feel and express some gratitude to them that they do not hunt each other—that they have not eaten us? Their self-restraint in many directions is, perhaps, quite as remarkable as their self-abandonment in others; and the mere fact of one’s having lived for many years among savages is in itself a testimony to their good nature. Looked at in this light, the trouble is not so much that they are in reality savage, as that they suppose themselves to be civilized; for it is from the false garb of civilization that the misapprehension has sprung.

But, however that may be, they are, when the worst is said of them, a quaint and interesting people, and it is my earnest wish that, by the publication of this story, I may be the means of drawing to the habits of my fellow-islanders the closer attention of anthropologists. Surely, in an age when many wild tribes have been the subject of learned discourse and of missionary enterprise, it is desirable that a race which has carried into the twentieth century the primitive customs which I have described should be critically and exhaustively studied. If such should indeed be the result of this book, I shall be more than compensated for whatever pain I may have felt in the writing of these strange but faithfully recorded experiences.

II

WHERE IGNORANCE WAS BLISS

IF it be true, as scientists tell us, that the period of boyhood corresponds, in human development, with an early phase of savagery, and that the individual boy is himself an epitome of the uncivilized tribe, it may be said with still greater confidence that an English public school, or “boy-farm,” where life is mostly so ordered as to foster the more primitive habits of mind, is essentially a nursery of barbarism—a microcosm of that predatory class whose members, like the hunters of old, toil not, neither do they spin, but ever seek their ideal in the twofold cult of sport and soldiership. Certainly the Eton of the ’sixties and ’seventies, whatever superficial show it might make of learning and refinement, was at heart a stronghold of savagery—a most graceful, easy-going savagery, be it granted; for savages, as we know, are often a very pleasant people.

In some reminiscences, Eton under Hornby, published in 1910, I gave a description of the public-school education of fifty years ago, a system probably not much worse than that of to-day; and the conclusion reached was that as Eton never really changes, it is best to regard her, as she regards other institutions, in a mood of good-natured unconcern, and as a subject less for argument than for anecdote. Eton has been pre-eminently the school “where ignorance is bliss,” and in a much wider sense than that intended by the poet Gray in his famous ode “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” For, if it be true of schoolboys that “thought would destroy their paradise”—that is, the thought merely of the personal ailments of mature age—how much more disturbing would be the contemplation of the vast social wrongs that fill the world with suffering! Of such sombre thought Eton knew nothing, but basked content in the warmth of her own supreme self-satisfaction; and the Eton life was probably the most enjoyable of all hitherto invented forms of heedless existence. It is, then, of the pleasures of Eton that I would speak, and of some of the more distinguished of her sons with whom it was my privilege to be acquainted.

Long before I was admitted to Eton as a King’s Scholar, I had a personal link with the school in the fact that John Moultrie, the friend of Praed, and contributor to that most noteworthy of school magazines, the Etonian—himself a Colleger at Eton from 1811 to 1819—was my great-uncle. At Eton and Cambridge, Moultrie’s career had been a brilliant one; he was the “Gerard Montgomery” of the Etonian—in Praed’s words “the humorous Moultrie, and the pathetic Moultrie, the Moultrie of ‘Godiva,’ and the Moultrie of ‘My Brother’s Grave,’ ”—but his later career did not fulfil the promise of his youth. The vivid and extravagant fancy of his early poems was succeeded by a more homely and sober style, and the pastor-poet in his “Dream of Life” even referred apologetically to the levities of his youthful muse.