It is true that the general softening of manners, which is the one clear gain that the world seems to make as it grows older, has in some degree affected even schoolboys. Public school life is not what it was in the days of ‘Tom Brown.’ Thirty years ago, at the epoch of this story, a boy who entered a public school was sure to suffer a certain number of annoyances, if not of positive hardships. To-day, it is probable that the only boys who are actual sufferers are those shy, delicate, sensitive creatures who do not understand the rough give-and-take of life, who imagine injuries and brood upon them, who have no sense of humour nor any such companionableness as is necessary in a society of human beings. Public school life is milder than it was. The sum of happiness in it is increasing, the sum of misery is diminishing or disappearing. But this story relates to thirty years ago; things were rougher then than they are now. Still it is not difficult even now to discuss the traces of what may be called the uncivilised or unsoftened spirit in public school life. It is seen in the homage paid among public school boys to physical faculties and performances. Of the achievements of the intellect, if they stand alone, public school opinion is still, as it has always been, slightly contemptuous. But strength, speed, athletic skill, quickness of eye and hand, still command universal applause among schoolboys as among savages. It is this uncivilised character of the young which accounts for the lack of sympathy--nay, the positive indignation and contempt--with which they regard anything like eccentricity or individualism. Science teaches that the progress of the species depends upon the preservation and improvement of varieties. Perhaps the reason why schools have made so little progress is that they have never encouraged variation, but have suppressed it. The bed of Procrustes is not favourable to varieties. Individualism among the young is looked upon as a form of conceit. Far stricter, and enforced by far more terrible penalties than the rules which masters make for boys, are the rules which boys make for themselves and for each other. Woe to him who consciously or unconsciously transgresses them! Their absurdity is itself the measure of their severity. It is not long since a mother, walking with her boy through the muddy streets of St. Anselm’s after a thaw in mid-winter, suggested to him that it would be a good thing to turn up his trousers at the bottom, and he told her with a biting scorn (which was provoked not by the rule but by her ignorance in needing to be informed of it), that the turning up of trousers was a privilege reserved to the select mysterious beings who are known as ‘swells.’