You may adopt what might with equal propriety be called the foreign School, or the Private School, system. You may create a body of Ushers; Masters of a lower order, whose business it shall be to follow Boys into their hours of recreation and rest, avowedly as spies, coercing freedom of speech and action, or reporting to their superior what such observation has gleaned. This is consistent and intelligible. Ruinous to that which has been regarded as the great glory of an English Public School—its free developement of character, its social expansiveness, in short its _liberty_: but yet, in itself, intelligible enough, and in theory perhaps preferable to the other. If not this, then the alternative must be some form or other of the Monitorial principle. Ten, or twenty, or thirty, of those Boys who are (generally speaking) the elder, at all events the abler, the more diligent, the more meritorious,—selected by no favour, exempted from none of the rules and restraints of School, but yet brought by their position into a more intimate intercourse with their Master, and largely influenced (if he be what a Master ought to be) by his principles of judgment and discipline,—are empowered to exercise over their juniors a legalized and carefully regulated authority, while at the same time they are left to mix with them on terms of perfect freedom at times and in places to which no Master’s inspection could by possibility extend. But this system is capable of at least two modifications. The Monitors may be desired to act as the Master’s deputies; to observe for him, and to report to him. They may be charged to see nothing wrong done, to hear nothing wrong said, without hastening to his presence and invoking his interposition. They may be taught to regard themselves as the Master’s spies, informers, and creatures. Such has been made, sometimes, the theory of their office. They have been solemnly warned of the responsibility attaching to their office, as the Master’s eyes and the Master’s ears. No real _power_ was entrusted to them. The terms of their commission were large, its tone was solemn: but the power to enforce obedience either did not exist, or existed only on sufferance and by stealth.