Mr. Oscar Browning has said that when he went to Eton in 1851 only five schools could lay claim to the dignity of being called a Public School. There must be at least fifty first-class Public Schools to-day; they are nearly all boarding schools, and every few years a comparatively unknown school proves itself a worthy competitor to older foundations. It is not the slightest use to say, even if we believed it, that day schools are better than boarding schools and leave the matter there. A politician might with equal ability draw up an elaborate defence of the feudal system. It may very well be that we should be all more happy if we could reconstruct society on a feudal basis: we might just as well express a belief that our efficiency would be increased were a kindly providence to dower us with wings. It may be, though I doubt it, that the advocates of the day school are in the right, that under such a system of education immorality and the blood system would pass. But it is for us to discover some method by which the existing system may be so modified as to produce of itself the required change. Now it is very tempting for a controversialist, when he has completed the arraignment of his enemies, to slip hastily over the policy he himself proposes to adopt. I wonder how many letters have been addressed to the press during the last seven years in which the writer, having stated in strong terms the calamities to which a certain line of thought or policy has reduced the country, has demanded in a final paragraph that 'something should be done before it is too late.' He suggests perhaps a 'change of spirit.' It is a good weapon that 'change of spirit.' We can all of us, when occasion demands, indulge in spirited invective; we can all detect numberless flaws and inequalities in the existing social system. Why, for instance, does our income run to three instead of to four figures. Why are we paying away a third of that small sum in income-tax? The flow of indignation is swift, and by the time we have written our 950 words, it is not hard to devote the remaining '50' to a general appeal for 'some one to do something before it is too late.' Every contributor to the press has saved his argument like that some time or another. And, in the case of Public Schools, the trouble is that we can do little save repeat the parrot cry of 'a change of spirit.' For it is 'a change of spirit' more than anything else that is needed.