“Confinement, and disability to fill certain offices, are our severest punishments;—public disgrace, which is painful in exact proportion to the good feeling of the offender, is not employed, and every measure is avoided which would destroy self-respect. Expulsion has been resorted to, rather than a boy should be submitted to treatment which might lead himself and his schoolfellows to forget that he was a gentleman.” A few months later on he gave his pupils—what many a ruler has since given his people—a Constitution:— “I have long thought that the system of representation might be introduced with advantage into the government of a school; and soon after Christmas (1816), with my father’s approbation, I drew up a set of resolutions, which were unanimously passed at a general meeting of the school, appointing a mode of electing a committee for the management of the school. They have the direction of everything except the school hours and the quantity of work to be done. We were afraid then of entrusting them with the regulation of these things, but the committees have acted so very properly, and have showed so decidedly that they are fit to be entrusted with power, that I think no inconvenience would arise from their having the power to appoint the school hours and the work to be done in the school; however, they show no wish to be entrusted with such power. The committee is chosen monthly in the following manner:—We have a list of all the boys, which is arranged once per month according to general superiority.... The boy who stands at the top of this list names a committee-man; the two next boys name another; the three next a third, and so on. If there is not the exact number of boys at the end of the list to form a division, they are reckoned with that above. The election is by ballot. By a resolution passed at the first general meeting, all the teachers, with the exception of my father, are to be members of the committee _ex officio_; but I am the only teacher who ever attends the meetings of the committee, as we do not wish to mix too much aristocracy in the government of our little community. After a bill has passed the committee, it is presented to Mr. Hill for his approbation, without which it is not considered as a law. It is then read aloud in the school-room by the president of the committee, between certain hours of the day, and posted up against the wall for at least three days. My father has never yet found it necessary to refuse his approbation to a single law. The committee is obliged by the laws to meet at least once per week; sometimes it assembles oftener than that. They appoint the officers of the Court of Justice, who were before appointed by the whole school. We derive many advantages from this form of government in the school.