this happens because our old public school system is too deeply rooted in vested interests to accommodate itself readily to the altered habits and requirements of the age. I know very well that I shall be told that our public school system is not what it used to be, and that what I have here written refers rather to what _was_ than to what _is_. I am prepared to test the justice of this reproof in the manner most disadvantageous to my argument. I have before me the statistics of half-a-dozen of our largest upper-class schools; I will take up those of the most costly, the most renowned, the largest. They are those of Eton. I find that that school lately contained between 800 and 900 boys. To teach them everything, save mathematics and French, there were twenty-one masters. But of those, one, the head master, takes no pupils: nor does the assistant master in college teach any of the boys. Upwards of 800 boys, therefore, are taught by nineteen masters. Now much economy of scholastic labour may undoubtedly be effected by teaching boys in large droves; but I am assured that the system of instruction at Eton is rather wasteful than economical of scholastic labour. All the teaching is done out of school, in the private houses of the tutors, and the boys only go into school to repeat what they have previously learnt, and to exhibit exercises that have been already examined and corrected. Therefore, as each master has a few pupils in every class in the school, each master is compelled every day to go through the entire business of every class in the school; and some of them undertake single-handed the private tuition of as many as seventy boys! It seems absolutely impossible, under such conditions, that nineteen masters can do justice to 800 or 900 boys; and the questions naturally arise,—Do they do justice to them? Can they do justice to them? And if they do not, and cannot, why are their numbers not doubled or trebled at once? Ought not the liberal sum paid for the education of an Eton boy to ensure to him the fullest educational advantages? Ought any “crammer” to be required to prepare him for his appearance before the Civil Service Commissioners or the Board of Military Education? Of late years we have been told that the study of modern languages has been much more attended to at our public schools than formerly; and H.R.H. the Prince Consort has kindly and thoughtfully encouraged it by offering prizes for the best scholars in that branch of knowledge at Eton. But the authorities at that school do not appear, from their published statistics, to be sensible of the importance of such acquirements, although they absolutely constitute the only current coin which will be received at the educational turnpike which the government has recently erected, and through which every boy entering on public life as a soldier or a civil servant must now pass. At that turnpike Greek and Roman money is no longer exclusively taken.