At a very typical and honoured old Public School, he to whom you are listening passed on the whole a happy time; but what an odd life educationally speaking! We lived rather like young Spartans; and were not encouraged to think, imagine, or see anything we learned, in relation to life at large. It’s very difficult to teach boys, because their chief object is not to be taught anything; but I should say we were crammed, not taught. Living as we did the herd-life of boys with little or no intrusion from our elders, and they men who had been brought up in the same way as ourselves, we were debarred from any real interest in philosophy, history, art, literature, and music, or any advancing notions in social life or politics. We were reactionaries almost to a boy. I remember one summer term Gladstone came down to speak to us, and we repaired to the Speech Room with white collars and dark hearts, muttering what we would do to that Grand Old Man if we could have our way. But, after all, he contrived to charm us. Boys are not difficult to charm. In that queer life we had all sorts of unwritten rules of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must not go out with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted forward; you must not walk more than two abreast till you reached a certain form; nor be enthusiastic about anything, except such a supreme matter as a drive over the pavilion at cricket, or a run the whole length of the ground at football. You must not talk about yourself or your home people; and for any punishment you must assume complete indifference. I dwell on these trivialities, because every year thousands of British boys enter these mills which grind exceeding small; and because these boys constitute in after life the great majority of the official, military, academic, professional, and a considerable proportion of the business classes of Great Britain. They become the Englishmen who say: “Really!” and they are for the most part the Englishmen who travel and reach America. The great defence I have always heard put up for our Public Schools is that they form character. As oatmeal is supposed to form bone in the bodies of Scotsmen, so our Public Schools are supposed to form good sound moral fibre in British boys. And there is much in this plea. The life does make boys enduring, self-reliant, good-tempered, and honourable, but it most carefully endeavours to destroy all original sin of individuality, spontaneity, and engaging freakishness. It implants, moreover, in the great majority of those who have lived it the mental attitude of that swell, who when asked where he went for his hats, replied: “Blank’s; is there another fellow’s?”