I was at school when some of the most stirring acts of that drama were being played. All schoolboys are, of course, “Conservatives,” and our schoolmaster was a fanatical Tory. The mere mention of Mr. Gladstone’s name maddened him, and I remember one day his telling the boys that he had received a circular from some political Liberal association, and that he intended to send it back to the secretary with a penny inside it, so that the sender should have to pay eightpence. This was a good civic lesson for the young! All the boys professed to be staunch Tories; but if it was discovered that one’s parents were Liberals, one was labelled Liberal. This was my unfortunate predicament. The general election of 1885 took place when I was at school. The Head Master addressed the school when it began, and he prefaced his speech by saying, “There are only seven Liberals in the school.” This was nice for the Liberals. On the 5th of November an effigy of Chamberlain was burned in the garden. The effigy bore a large cardboard cow with the words “Three Acres” written on it. Years afterwards I described this incident in an article for a London daily. In mentioning Chamberlain I added the words, “who was at that time a radical.” The editor crossed out these words. The Conservative readers of this daily were not to be reminded that Chamberlain had ever been a radical. It seemed almost like blasphemy to hint at such a thing. And yet it was true. Unless history be suppressed altogether, the fact will have to go down to posterity that in 1885 Chamberlain was a radical. It seemed a terrible shame in those days that one’s parents should be on what, in the opinion of one’s world, was obviously the wrong side. English private schools are, or were, the most curious institutions in the world. The parents of to-day say they are entirely changed and altered. They may be; but one thing is quite certain, the parents don’t know. The only people who know are the boys, and they don’t reveal the secrets of the fortress until they are grown up; but, judging by what grown-up boys of twenty now tell one, they do not seem to me to be greatly changed. My school was totally unlike the schools depicted in fiction and pictured by the boyish imagination. There were no bullies--at least, not among the boys; the masters did the bullying. They exercised a reign of terror; they ruled by mysterious hints and vague threats, so that one moved perpetually under the shadow of an impending but unknown doom. The sense of guilt for some crime which one didn’t know the nature of was perpetually being brought home to one. And the boys used to catch the tone of mystery, and act as if they formed part of the conspiracy, which, of course, they didn’t. They were all equally in the dark.