The trouble is that school life lasts too long and is far too jolly. Six years is a long time. A boy of thirteen can hardly be expected to realise that it is only a prelude. The years pass so happily, the pursuit of ambition is so engrossing that he has no time to consider whether the prizes he is winning have any lasting value. As the new boy he longs to be captain of the school: and, having set himself a task, he does not shrink from the contest. School life is so vast, so varied, so many-coloured that it would be difficult for a boy to relinquish his hold upon the ambition that lies close to him in favour of the shadowy ambitions of the life that lies beyond it. School life is too big a pedestal for the statue that is to be placed on it. It dwarfs what it should present. The boy finds on leaving school that an entirely different technique is required. It is not that the standards are changed, but the whole manner of life is altered. His school career was divided neatly into stages. He could at any moment consult a house list and see how he was progressing on the road to authority. At such a period he should have reached the Fifth table. If he were one day to get into the Fifteen, he should by his sixteenth birthday have got his house cap. Everything was mapped out. The rungs of the ladder were labelled. Colt's Cap, House Cap, Seconds, Firsts, Fourth Form, Fifth Form, Sixth. In business he finds no such ladder. His abilities are placed upon the open market. He is fighting an intangible foe. He has to come to terms with himself. He feels that he is driving into the void. He also finds that he has to rearrange his scale of values. Athletic distinction is not greatly prized in Wall Street, and the young man who, when asked to present his qualifications, remarks that his batting average was over thirty, without a single not-out score to help it, is likely to receive a rude shock. I spent a few months before I went to Sandhurst in the Inns of Court O.T.C. (a corps that had, by that time, ceased to be composed of ex-public school men), and it was a blow to discover that the fact that I had been in my school eleven and fifteen made not the slightest impression on any of the N.C.O.'s.