“About two months ago I persuaded the teachers to agree to devote one evening in the week to the consideration of improvements to be introduced into the proceedings of the school. We meet every Saturday, from seven till ten in the evening, and great benefit has already been derived from the regulation. My principal object in effecting this was to have an opportunity of operating on the minds of the teachers themselves; and I find that this has been done to the advantage of us all.” “No chance visitor,” I have been informed by one who knew the school well, “had on that evening the slightest chance of seeing any of the family. The boys,” he added, “dreaded the conference of teachers, from the effect it had on them. It kept everything in such excessive rigidity.” “_March 10th, 1823._—I find the conference a most powerful engine. It is true that I have given up to it much power which I previously possessed, but this, perhaps, is more a nominal than a real sacrifice, and I believe myself to be so true a friend to liberty, as to like to see others exercise power as well as myself; and this, I think, few liberty men can say.” The Journal affords, however, but an imperfect record of this active little commonwealth. It is in “Public Education” that the constitution and its working are described at length. Their chief aims are thus briefly summed-up in the following passage:— “The great features of the object we have in view will have been already appreciated, we hope, by the intelligent reader. We shall be disappointed if he have not already discovered that by the establishment of a system of legislation and jurisprudence, wherein the power of the master is bounded by general rules, and the duties of the scholar accurately defined, and where the boys themselves are called upon to examine and decide upon the conduct of their fellows, we have provided a course of instruction in the great code of morality which is likely to produce far more powerful and lasting effects than any quantity of mere precept.” Undoubtedly the part of the system that would at first sight most strike an outsider was the power that was placed in the hands of the boys. Arnold and his government through the sixth form were, as I have said, still unknown. His sixth-form boys, moreover, were not elected by their schoolfellows, as they would have been on Rowland Hill’s plan. He was, indeed, to no small extent, bound down by the traditions—the _lex non scripta_—of Rugby. But it was by an unwritten law—a law that was nowhere strictly defined—that his power was limited. The boys of Hill Top and Hazelwood had a constitution that had not grown, but had been deliberately made. A few years after it had been promulgated, a Code of Laws was published, which filled more than a hundred pages of a closely-printed volume. It opens thus:— “ORIGIN OF THE CONSTITUTION.