The groundwork of ideas upon which education at St. Nicholas was based was shallow, but it was brilliant upon the surface, and the elevation of feeling which pervaded the whole system was another notable feature. I have said that no kind of punishment was administered; or, to speak more accurately, there was only one, expulsion. Except in cases where some grave offence had been committed, there was nothing degrading in being dismissed. No particular reason was alleged, the superior saying to the student who was sent away: "You are a very worthy young man, but your intelligence is not of the turn we require. Let us part friends. Is there any service I can do you?" The favour of being allowed to share in an education considered to be so exceptionally good was thought so much of that we dreaded an announcement of this kind like a sentence of death. This is one of the secrets of the superiority of ecclesiastical over state colleges; their _régime_ is much more liberal, for none of the students are there by right, and coercion must inevitably lead to separation. There is something cold and hard about the schools and colleges of the state, while the fact of a student having secured by a competitive examination an inalienable right to his place in them, is an infallible source of weakness. For my own part I have never been able to understand how the master of a normal school, for instance, manages, inasmuch as he is unable to say, without further explanation, to the pupils who are unsuited for their vocation: "You have not the bent of intelligence for our calling, but I have no doubt that you are a very good lad, and that you will get on better elsewhere. Good-bye." Even the most trifling punishment implies a servile principle of obedience from fear. So far as I am myself concerned, I do not think that at any period of my life I have been obedient. I have, I know, been docile and submissive, but it has been to a spiritual principle, not to a material force wielding the dread of punishment. My mother never ordered me to do a thing. The relations between my ecclesiastical teachers and myself were entirely free and spontaneous. Whoever has had experience of this _rationabile obsequium_ cannot put up with any other. An order is a humiliation whosoever has to obey is a _capitis minor_ sullied on the very threshold of the higher life. Ecclesiastical obedience has nothing lowering about it; for it is voluntary, and those who do not get on together can separate. In one of my Utopian dreams of an aristocratic society, I have provided that there should only be one penalty, death; or rather, that all serious offences should be visited by a reprimand from the recognised authorities which no man of honour would survive. I should never have done to be a soldier, for I should either have deserted or committed suicide. I am afraid that the new military institutions which do not leave a place for any exceptions or equivalents will have a very lowering moral effect.