A great many boys do undoubtedly leave between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, but by doing so they lose the most valuable lessons they should learn at school. A boy who leaves before he has been a house prefect fails to put the coping stone to his education. The responsibilities of prefectship are an invaluable experience. And when the house master begs the parent to let 'Arthur stop on another year,' the parent naturally gives way. And it is, of course, always the wrong type of person who stays on that extra year. It is the clever, the brilliant, the athletic boy, the boy who already stands out above his contemporaries and in the course of the next year will be even more prominent, that is encouraged to remain. It would not matter if the dull boy stayed on another year. His natural talents would not be sufficient to lift him to the rarefied atmosphere of Olympus. It is the second eleven colour who is urged to stay on to get his firsts. The fast bowler who is asked to captain the side next year, the exhibitioner who hopes that another year's work will win him a scholarship at Balliol. The great become more great, and, as their undistinguished contemporaries fall out of the race, the gap between the prefect and the fag grows more pronounced. The intermediate steps are few and dimly seen. It is not surprising that the blood system should gloriously flourish. It would not so flourish were the leaving age to be fixed at seventeen. We have the proof of this in the knowledge of what happened during the war, when the big men left suddenly in August, 1914, when boys of sixteen sat at the Sixth Form table, and when no one stayed on at school after his eighteenth birthday.