Here, as everywhere else, the only safe guidance as to the practice of the future must be sought in the tendencies of the present. The tendency most forcibly in evidence during recent times is that in favour of softening the former acerbities of education. Whereas the schoolhouse of half a century ago was something like a penitentiary in the way it was conducted, the schoolhouse of to-day is managed as much like a place of recreation as it possibly can be. At all events, recreation is at least as assiduously cultivated as study, and the candidate for an under-mastership who has a good cricket record will find employment a good deal more easily than one with a double-first. If there be any complaint of public and other upper-class schools at the present time--and there is room for plenty of complaint--it is more often that games are too much insisted upon than that brains are overtaxed. There is a visible reaction in regard to this; but it is not to be regarded as a reaction in favour of the old draconic methods. On the contrary, "the growing sentimentality of the age" steadily demands amenity of treatment for the fortunate offspring of the twentieth century. The late James Payn, sanest and kindliest of men, was never tired of denouncing what he called the barbarous and indecent corporal punishments of Eton. He used to say that if a picture of an Eton boy being birched were published in the Illustrated London News no boy would ever be birched again, and I believe that he tried to get either Mr Latey or Mr Shorter to insert such a picture. Be this as it may, what he said was perfectly true. I shall have something to say presently on this same question of school discipline: meantime it may with perfect safety be predicted of the master's cane a hundred years hence that it will be found only in museums, and (whether rightly or wrongly) be regarded as a relic of degrading barbarism. One reason why corporal punishment will have to be abolished is that boys and girls will certainly be educated together instead of apart. As we could hardly cane girls (and it would be of very little use if we could) we shall assuredly have to get on without caning their masculine schoolmates.