The public school code of honour, the majority of the standards, indeed, of school life are dependent on the athletic worship, and the athletic worship is in its turn largely dependent, not so much on the moral question, as on the official attitude to the moral question. Too much energy has been devoted to the damming of trickles, while on another side of the hill the main stream has passed into the valley, laying waste the plains. Greater honesty between boys, parents, and masters would undoubtedly achieve much. But more than a change of spirit is required. If no boy was allowed to stay on at school after the term in which he became seventeen years old, I believe that the moral question would, to a large extent, simplify itself. CHAPTER XIII THE LEAVING AGE WITH REGARD TO ATHLETICS But it is not only on account of the moral question that I would advocate the lowering of the age limit. Such a reform would, I believe, make its influence felt on every side of school life. It would not alter, but it would modify certain conditions. The blood system would still exist, but less acutely. The gap between the junior and senior would be small. At present a man of nineteen who has been tried for his county eleven appears to the junior as a gorgeous giant. He and his friends live in a world apart, and they know it. A good three years separates him from the anxieties and indignities of the day room. No one, save his actual contemporaries, remember him as being anything but a blood. He is, and has been, a prince among mankind. He idles through his last two years, a very splendid, a very attractive figure; but, as we have already seen, his is hardly the ideal apprenticeship for life.