It is strange to reflect that between thirty and forty years ago the mere mention of Socialism should have suggested desperate acts of violence: the term was then the bugbear, for the time being, of the respectable classes, who always keep on hand some convenient scare-word, for the purpose of making an alarm. “Anarchism” has since served its turn; “Bolshevism” is the latest. Something to fear, something to hate, seems to be an indispensable requirement; hence the periodical outbreak of war-cries and flogging-crazes; it matters little what the bogey is, so long as there is a vendetta of some kind, even if it be only, for a diversion, a campaign against the sparrow or the rat. There is no surer token of the barbaric mind than this capricious state of panic, described by George Meredith as “all stormy nightcap and fingers starving for the bell-rope.” My one irreparable loss in leaving Eton was not that of culture or scholarship or social position, but of the game of Fives; for I used to think that the evolution of the Eton fives-court, the original of which was a flagged space between two buttresses of the Chapel (“Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense”), was the most valuable contribution ever made by the school to the well-being of mankind. Fives is a great game; and to have played it with such master-hands as A. C. Ainger, E. C. Austen-Leigh, Edward Lyttelton, or C. T. Studd, was a privilege neither to be forgotten nor to be replaced. I used afterwards to dream at times that I was again engaged in the game--“serving,” perhaps, or taking the service, or enjoying a duel of long sweeping strokes on the outer court, or mixed up in one of those close-fought rallies that centred round the “pepper-box”; until a perfect shot from one side or the other had sent the ball to its resting-place in “dead man’s hole.” My parting gift to the school was an article entitled “Confessions of an Eton Master,” which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ in January, 1885, and led to a good deal of discussion on the Eton system of education. V CANNIBAL’S CONSCIENCE If any one should be educated from his infancy in a dark cave till he were of full age, and then should of a sudden be brought into broad daylight ... no doubt but many strange and absurd fancies would arise in his mind.--From BACON’S _Advancement of Learning_.