"I have adverted already to the system of fagging at our public schools. The law is established immemorially at Eton that the upper boys, those of the fifth and sixth class, have an authority to command those below them. This law, though understood and allowed by the masters, is not enforced by them. They will interfere to check and punish any great abuse of the power of the upper boys; but the only power by which the commands of these masters are to be enforced is their own hands; so that a boy, though by rank in the school a fag, may escape the burdens to be imposed if he have but age and strength and spirit to {13} maintain his independence. Each upper boy may impose his commands on any number of inferiors he may please at any time and in any place, so that an unhappy lower boy is never safe. Nothing exempts him from the necessity of immediately quitting his own pursuits and waiting on the pleasure of an unexpected master, but being under orders to attend his tutor, or a certain number of privileged excuses in matters about which those potentates condescend to consider the feelings of the subalterns, and where public opinion would condemn them if they did not--such as being actually fagging for some one else, being engaged to play a match at cricket which his absence would spoil. It was this sort of out-of-door casual service which alone I had to dread as long as I was in Mr. Godley's house. When I went to Mr. ***, I had to serve my apprenticeship in domestic fagging, which consisted in performing to one or more of the fifth or sixth form boys in the house almost all the duties of a footman or a waiter at an inn. The burden of this kind of servitude of course depended, in the first place, on the temper of one's master, and then on the comparative number of upper and lower boys in a house. During the time I had to fag at Mr. ***'s, but especially in the latter part of it, the number of fags was dismally small, and sometimes heavy was my yoke.