_Punch_ clearly admitted that all was not well with a system in which undue prominence was attached to the athletic prowess, and in 1909 he pilloried an advertisement for a schoolmaster which had appeared in the _Spectator_: "Rugby Blue required. Football is the chief subject, but elementary Latin, English and Mathematics are also looked for." On the other hand, _Punch_ was no believer in the commercializing of our public schools. When Lord Rosebery in 1896 had said that "an inquiry by Chambers of Commerce into the progress of technical and commercial education in Germany would make our hair stand on end," _Punch_ showed him as the Fat Boy in _Pickwick_ saying, "I wants to make yer flesh creep." And when, in the fateful year 1914, a "Commercial Side," on lines already laid down in many secondary schools of a different type, was started at Bradfield College, _Punch_ sought to reduce the plan to an absurdity by an imaginative account of its working. [Sidenote: _School Diet_] [Illustration: The Headmaster of Rugby is reported to have said at the recent Conference on School Diet that "while adults should rise from the table hungry, children should reach a sense of repletion before rising." HOUSE-MASTER (with pride, to Parent): "Then with regard to food: we feed our boys to repletion five times a day, and our chef's puddings have no equal in any school in the kingdom."] As regards the feeding of boys at school, the change from the Spartan _régime_ of the previous generation can be vividly illustrated from the pages of _Punch_. Down to the close of the Victorian age, hampers were, if not an absolute necessity, at any rate a welcome supplement to the frugal diet provided at most schools. In 1899 _Punch_ supported the continuance of hampers in some ironical verses inspired by a letter in the _Daily Chronicle_ from a schoolmaster's wife. The good lady had complained of the effect of Tuck upon the ethics of schoolboys, and advocated ordinary school diet. _Punch_ at the time regarded this as a counsel of stoical perfection utterly wasted on the ordinary human boy. A very different note was sounded by the Headmaster of Rugby in 1912, who was reported to have said at the Conference on School Diet that "while adults should rise from the table hungry, children should reach a sense of repletion before rising." Accordingly _Punch_ published a picture of a mother with an alarmingly obese small boy interviewing a house-master who proudly remarks: "Then as to food, we feed our boys to repletion five times a day, and our chef's puddings have no equal in any school in the Kingdom." This was an exaggeration so far as the public schools were concerned, but it was fair satire of the sumptuousness of the fashionable and expensive preparatory school of pre-war days. _There_ the pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme from the meagre diet of the 'seventies, when there was no luxury at preparatory schools and at many of the public schools the feeding was a scandal.