Thirty or forty years ago such a system as this did very well for our governing classes; well or ill educated, the Houses of Lords and Commons, the Army, and the Civil Service, received with open arms the children of the powerful and the rich; eldest sons, after a couple of years’ additional idleness as gentlemen commoners at Oxbridge, went into parliament and voted all the more steadily with their party, because they were confirmed and incurable dunces; whilst younger sons obtained commissions in crack regiments, or stools in the Treasury and Foreign Office, and rose through the money and the parliamentary influence their fathers could command, rather than through their own merits and exertions. From such causes, and for such reasons, did Harchester College prosper, and set an example which was followed by most of the upper-class schools in England. But in the present day, circumstances have arisen which must ere long shake the time-honoured Harchester system to its very foundations. The improvements which have of late years taken place in English education, have, indeed, been first made manifest in the schools of the poor; but they are swiftly surging upwards, and if Harchester, and our other great public schools, are to maintain the position which they have hitherto held, the sooner they call in the government inspector the better for them. Middle-class schools are rising around them—in London, in Liverpool, at Cheltenham, at Bradley, at Marlborough, at Bradfield, and elsewhere—which are readily adapting themselves to the altered requirements of the age; and unless Harchester means to be left in the lurch, that venerable establishment must conform also.