Systematic cribbing will not disappear till popular opinion regards as important success or failure in the class-room. Success at games is considered important; games are, in consequence played fairly. But, as popular opinion sets no value on school work, it does not seem to matter much what happens in school hours. Success in form needs to be brought into some sort of relationship with success at football. Athletic prowess will always, naturally, and perhaps rightly, be rated more highly than intellectual achievement. But that is no reason why intellectual achievement should be disparaged in the case of all save the brilliant few whose feats are received with a mild enthusiasm. At Sandhurst we used to have weekly examinations, and, as far as I remember, there was no cribbing at all in these exams. To a certain extent promotion depended on one's performance in them, and each G. C. was anxious to work out the problems for himself so as to be able to judge how much, or how little, progress he had made. This did not mean that we were more interested in topography than late cuts, but that we realised that, at this stage of our career proficiency in topography would be of service to us. I believe that a similar state of affairs would exist at a Public School were the social values to be readjusted. Cribbing, like so much else in public school life, is a side-shoot of athleticism. CHAPTER VII MORALITY AND THE ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIP It is at this period, also, of a boy's development that the moral question assumes a definite significance. There is no phase of school life that is more generally misunderstood and misrepresented, and there is no phase that a writer tackles with greater misgiving and disinclination. He is confronted with the barricaded prejudices of a vested interest, with the tremulous ignorance of mothers who seek to be deceived, with the conspiracy of silence that exists between boys, parents, and masters, and, last of all, with the wilful jealousy of the yellow press that is only too ready to decry the value of what it is pleased to call the 'trades union of snobbery.' There are times, indeed, when it seems better to acquiesce in that conspiracy of silence rather than to give those speculators in contention another opportunity of mud-slinging. There are times when it seems hopeless to attempt to explain the nature of public school morality to those who have not themselves been to a Public School. It is like looking at a stained-glass window from the outside. One reminds oneself that for many years, without, perhaps, any very disastrous results, we have muddled along in contented ignorance and self-deceit. Why not leave things where they are? Why stir up trouble? And yet the moral question is such an essential part of school life, it exercises such an influence on the development of the boy; indirectly it colours so considerably the attitude of the master to every other phase of school life, that it is