Few men can speak with knowledge of more than one school, but there is little risk in the assertion that the natural history of the public-schoolboy is broadly the same at all times and places. Withdrawn at an early age from the dry-nursing of his natural guardians, he is flung into a vast adolescent society and left to struggle through as best he may: his parents commonly escape the embarrassment of explaining to him the elements of physiology, preferring that he should learn them from the gloating confidences of other boys hardly less ignorant than himself. Native chastity of soul keeps some unsmirched, but most go through an ugly period of foul tongues, foul minds and sometimes foul propensities which the school seeks to circumvent by vigilance and hard physical discipline. During the middle phase, this blind, misunderstood groping towards maturity comes to be gradually controlled; and, in the last, the adult boy is seen as a clean-living, clean-speaking, rather solemn blend of scholar, sportsman and despot, very conscious of his responsibilities and zealous to repress the primitive exuberance by which he himself was afflicted two or three years earlier. Before public schools are denounced for making boys licentious of habit and obscene of tongue, parents might ask themselves what preventive measures they themselves have taken. And, before any one attacks the insistence on athletics in public schools, he might ask himself what better physical discipline he can propose and whether this derided love of sport is inculcated at school or at home. If a boy were not compelled by fear of punishment to take part in games, he would be coerced by the opinion of parents who would not understand nor tolerate a son without the Englishman's normal and natural preoccupation with sport; and, though compulsory games are easy to ridicule, they do not kill the chivalry of good sportsmanship: an early Westminster memory is of a football shield passing, after long and honourable contest, from one house to another; while the head and captain of the winning house fetched away the trophy, the losing house lined up to cheer their victors and, if possible, to drown the cheers of the winning house for the one that had lost. A defence of the public-school system would deserve at least as much space as the critics have given to attacking it. This is neither the place nor time to engage in the endless controversy; it was not the place nor time, fifteen years ago, for any who sat thinking of their own school and of the days that they had spent there. III