That was at the end of the August. Three weeks later the schools went back and half the housemasters in the country found their desks littered with letters from anxious parents demanding an assurance that their Bobbie was not subject to the temptations described in this alarming book. In self-defence the schoolmasters hit back and by mid-November the book had become the centre of violent controversy. In many schools the book was banned and several boys were caned for reading it. Canon Edward Lyttleton, the ex-headmaster of Eton, wrote a ten-page article in _The Contemporary_--then an influential monthly--explaining how biased and partial a picture the school gave. _The Spectator_ ran for ten weeks and _The Nation_ for six a correspondence filling three or four pages an issue in which schoolmaster after schoolmaster asserted that whatever might be true of "Fernhurst", at his school it was all very different. Grant Richards adeptly fanned the conflagration. He had initiated that summer an original style of advertising. He inserted each week in the _Times Literary Supplement_ a half column of gossip about his books and authors. It was set in small heavy black type, and caught the eye. Richards was a good writer and it was very readable. He was, I think, the first publisher to exploit the publicity value of unfavourable comment. Richard Hughes, at that time in the sixth form at Charterhouse, wrote, as his weekly essay, an attack on _The Loom of Youth_. His form master, Dames Longworth, a fine old Tory, sent it up to _The Spectator_, as a counterblast to such "pernicious stuff". Next week Grant Richards quoted him. Mr Dames Longworth called the book "pernicious stuff", but Clement Shorter prophesied in _The Sphere_ that it would prove "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Public School system". By Christmas the book was a best seller. A modern reader will wonder what all this fuss and indignation was about. Two points are to be remembered. First that before World War I Britain's imperial destiny was never questioned, and the Public School system as a bulwark of Empire was held sacrosanct. Second that no book before _The Loom of Youth_ had accepted as part of the fabric of School life the inevitable emotional consequences of a monastic herding together for eight months of the year of thirteen year old children and eighteen year old adolescents. On that issue such a complete conspiracy of silence had been maintained that when fathers were asked by their wives, and schoolmasters by parents who had not themselves been at public schools whether "such things really could take place", the only defence was a grudging admission, "Perhaps in a bad house, in a bad school, in a bad time."