It is true that some splendid men are turned out by public schools. The system is a good one, but it has been carried to a dangerous extreme. The fine fellows who have emerged unharmed are fine fellows in spite of all that was dangerous, not because of it. How many fine fellows has it ruined? Such treatment is destructive of candour, sincerity, frankness, generosity, simplicity, and often of truthfulness itself. The principle that might is right is dead against the law of the land, but it seems to rule in our public schools, where the big bully—usually a coward at heart—makes the lives of young boys wretched. The love of cruelty innate in such despotic natures is developed to the utmost degree by such favourable circumstances, and those over whom he tyrannises become sly, secretive, and hypocritical.

The shadow that mat not pass.

The old adage says that if there were no women in the world the men would all be brutes; and if there were no men the women would all be fools. The mother’s ideal school might be very far indeed from a perfect one, but, as things are, one of the bitterest of her griefs is when she has to send her gentle, affectionate, pure-minded and open-souled little lad to school. She knows well that he will have to struggle alone through the dark days of initiation into school life, its cheap and shallow cynicism, its endless injustices, and its darker shadows than any that have been referred to. The mother knows she is losing her boy. She will never again read his thoughts as an open book. She casts her bread upon the waters, and may, or may not, receive it after many days. Her boy may never again be the candid, gentle, bright- spirited being whose companionship was delightful to her. His confidence may never again be hers, and she knows better than to force it, or even invite it with loving insistence. If he ever again opens his mind to her it will be as naturally as the dove returned to the ark. But the cloud of school life must come between them first. And it is often a black one.

The spiritual life

This is supposed to be a Christian land; but at how many public schools in England does a small boy dare to kneel and say his nightly prayer as he did at home? Sometimes a strong and earnest spirit among the bigger boys succeeds in living the higher life, even at school, where all traditions are dead against active religion, as the small boy who essays such a course soon finds to his cost. The mother’s ideal school would be one in which the young spirit might be free to lay some of the burden of school life at the feet of the Great Friend. But “cant,” as any sign of religious feeling is called at school, is regarded as a thing to be driven out by sneers and gibes, flickings with a damp towel, and—worse than all—hideous references to holy things and to the mother who taught them. Everything that is pure and true seems to be sullied and robbed of truth and goodness, and there appears to be nothing left for the boy to cling to while his universe is in a whirl, the things he held sacred desecrated, and a stream of lurid light thrown upon the seamy side of life so carefully concealed from him at home.