This great theory comprehends all English boys from top to bottom of the social ladder: in details there are points of similarity and of the opposite between the old Public Schools and the 15,000 Public Elementary Schools. The theory of periodicity is common to both, but in the former the principle which allots the summer months to cricket (or the cult of the lesser ball), and the winter to football (or the cult of the greater ball), is climatic. The “little, wee, wee” balls used for fives, racquets, and tennis, are perennial. In our elementary schools, also, there is a law of seasons, but I have never been able to formulate it, and I know of no reason for the alternations. At one time all the boys play tip-cat, which Shakespeare would call “a dreadful trade”: a crusty old bachelor says “it counts fifty if you break a window, and it is game if you put out one eye of a passer-by”: this apocryphal Rule I. is the only one promulgated. At another season hoops are _de rigueur_: at another marbles: these recreations are little known “in the playing fields of Eton, where the battle of Waterloo was won.” The girls have skipping-ropes, less deadly than tip-cat, but very injurious to the bridge of the nose, or the best hat of the peaceful passenger: and they have Jacks, _alias_ skip-jacks, knuckle bones, astragaloi. I think hop-scotch, which drives the passer-by on to the high-road to be juggernauted by motors, is common to both sexes. The pursuit of a football, or any cheap spheroidal substitute, is perennial for boys. In this rotation of games, then, there is resemblance of a sort. But there is a lamentable dissimilarity in the spirit of the gamesters. Our elementary boy has hardly the most elementary idea of schoolboy honour. He begins with the loathsome practice of telling tales, not to be named among Christians; A. tells tales of B., not because he hates wrong or loves rules, but to raise his own value in the eyes of the common enemy. This is to put self above the common good. From this beginning he easily arrives at the deadly vice of the working class, the incapacity for playing fair, and for playing without quarrelling. When they are boys, their cricket and football are one long wrangle; when they grow up, they not only buy and sell contests, they even attempt the life of the umpire, who should be sacrosanct as the herald. And from this blunted sense of honour comes another abominable habit, first among boys: they ask a boon--some special indulgence, perhaps--and obtain it on special terms of doing or abstaining from doing something else; but when the boon is granted they have no scruple whatever about breaking the condition precedent. Hence comes one of the ugliest features of trade disputes, the incapacity for keeping a bargain.