This is fine and manly perhaps, in the Anglo-Saxon sense, but does it not seem just a little brutal? Are we well-to-do Americans prepared to give up to others, however exemplary, the conduct of our children’s lives? Granting that the American private boarding-school is a delightful institution, where bullying and fags and cocks are not known, can it ever take the place of home, or supply the stimulus to individual life which is exercised by wise parental love and precept? Of course, it is easier, in a certain sense, to send one’s boy to a select boarding-school, where the conditions are known to be highly satisfactory. It shifts the responsibility on to other shoulders, and yet leaves one who is not sensitive, in the pleasing frame of mind that the very best thing has been done for the young idea. In our busy American life--more feverish than that of our English kinsfolk whose institution we have copied--many doubtless are induced to seek this solution of a perplexing problem by the consciousness of their own lack of efficiency, and their own lack of leisure to provide a continuous home influence superior or equal to what can be supplied by headmasters and their assistants, who are both churchmen and athletes. Many, too, especially fathers, are firm believers in that other English doctrine, that most boys need to have the nonsense knocked out of them, and that the best means of accomplishing this result is to cut them loose from their mothers’ apron-strings. It is to be borne in mind in this connection that the great English public schools are a national cult. That is, everybody above a certain class sends his sons to one of them. On the other hand, the private boarding-schools on this side of the water, fashioned after them, have thus far attracted the patronage of a very small element of the population. It is their misfortune, rather than their fault, that they are chiefly the resort of the sons of rich or fashionable people, and consequently are the most conspicuously class schools in the country. Doubtless the earnest men who conduct most of them regret that this is so, but it is one of the factors of the case which the American parent with sons must face at present. It may be that this is to be the type of school which is to become predominant here, and that, as in England, the nation will recognize it as a national force, even though here, as there, only the sons of the upper classes enjoy its advantages. That will depend partly on the extent to which we shall decide, as a society, to promote further class education. At present these schools are essentially private institutions. They are small; they do not, like our American colleges, offer scholarships, and thus invite the attendance of ambitious students without means. Moreover, they are almost universally conducted on a sectarian basis, or with a sectarian leaning, which is apt to proselytize, at least indirectly.