dred and fifty years ago Steele devoted one of his masterly essays in the Spectator to an attack on Flogging and its allied abominations. As a mere literary production, the paper is one of the ablest in the English language.1 Smollett, the

"I must confess I have very often, with much sorrow, bewailed the misfortune of the children of Great Britain, when I consider the ignorance and undiscerning of the generality of schoolmasters. The boasted liberty we talk of is but a mean reward for the long servitude, the many heart-aches and terrors, to which our childhood is exposed in going through a Grammar School. Many of these stupid tyrants exercise their cruelty without any manner of distinction of the capacities of children, or the intention of parents in their behalf. There are many excellent tempers which are worthy to be nourished and cultivated with all possible diligence and care, that were never designed to be acquainted with Aristotle, Tully, or Virgil; and there are as many who have capacities for understanding every word those great persons have writ, and yet were not born to have any relish of their writings.

"For want of this common and obvious discerning in those who have the care of youth, we have so many hundred unaccountable creatures every age whipped up into great scholars, that are for ever near a right understanding, and will never arrive at it. These are the scandal of letters, and these are generally the men who are to teach others. The sense of shame and honour is enough to keep the world itself in order without corporal punishment, much more to train the minds of uncorrupted and innocent children. It happens, I doubt not, more than once in a year, that a lad is chastised for a blockhead, when it is good apprehension that makes him incapable of knowing what his teacher means. A brisk imagination very often may suggest an error, which a lad could not have fallen into, if he had been as heavy in conjecturing as his master in explaining. But there is no mercy even towards a wrong interpretation of his meaning: the sufferings of the scholar's body are to rectify the mistakes of his mind.

"I am confident that no boy, who will not be allured to letters without blows, will ever be brought to anything with them. A great or good mind must necessarily be the worse for such indignities, and it is a sad change to lose of its virtue for the improvement of its knowledge. No one who has gone through what they call a great school, but must remember to have seen children of excellent and ingenuous natures, as has afterward appeared in their manhood-I say no man who has passed through this way of education but must have seen an ingenuous creature, expiring with shame, with pale looks, beseeching sorrow, and silent tears, throw up its honest eyes, and kneel on its tender knees to an inexorable blockhead to be forgiven the false quantity of a word in making a Latin verse. The child is punished, and the next day he commits a like crime, and so a third with the same consequence.

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brilliancy of whose genius was not more conspicuous than the generosity of his character, has strongly reprobated flogging, both in Roderick Random and in Peregrine Pickle. Again and again, in treatises on Education, and in periodicals, it has been condemned; but from dread lest England should be ruined, lest ancient traditions and old world customs should perish, the administrators of Public Schools as passionately fight for flogging, as if it were a kind of sacrament, to be added to the other seven.

Of Fagging, it is true that enlightened men like Dr. Arnold

consequence. I would fain ask any reasonable man whether this lad, in the simplicity of his native innocence, full of shame, and capable of any impression from that grace of soul, was not fitter for any purpose in this life, than after that spark of virtue is extinguished in him, though he is able to write twenty verses in an evening?..

"It is wholly to this dreadful practice that we may attribute a certain hardiness and ferocity which some men, though liberally educated, carry about them in all their behaviour. To be bred like a gentleman, and punished like a malefactor, must, as we see it does, produce that illiberal sauciness which we see sometimes in men of letters. . . .

"It is, methinks, a very melancholy consideration, that a little negligence can spoil us, but great industry is necessary to improve us; the most excellent natures are soon depreciated, but evil tempers are long before they are exalted into good habits. To help this by punishments, is the same thing as killing a man to cure him of a distemper. When he comes to suffer punishment in that one circumstance, he is brought below the existence of a rational creature, and is in the state of a brute that moves only by the admonition of stripes. But since this custom of educating by the lash is suffered by the gentry of Great Britain, I would prevail only that honest, heavy lads may be dismissed from slavery sooner than they are at present, and not whipped on to their fourteenth or fifteenth year, whether they expect any progress from them or not. Let the child's capacity be forthwith examined, and he sent to some mechanic way of life, without respect to his birth, if nature designed him for nothing higher: let him go before he has innocently suffered and is debased into a dereliction of mind, for being what it is no guilt to be-a plain man. I would not here be supposed to have said, that our learned men of either robe, who have been whipped at school, are not still men of noble and liberal minds; but I am sure they would have been much more so than they are, had they never suffered that infamy."

have been the advocates, but surely rather from the effect of early habit and opinion than from calm reflection. The fruits of fagging are likely to be the most savage, most capricious bullying on the one hand, and the most craven apprehension on the other. We have daily proof that the best of men become tyrannical if trusted with irresponsible authority. Are we to believe that boys of sixteen or eighteen can defy temptations which to men of mature years are irresistible? It is well known that Cowper's melancholy and madness may be traced to the cruelties he suffered at the hands of his schoolfellows; and Southey, and still greater writers than he, have dwelt on the anguish, and insults, and humiliating labours heaped on poor children by tyrants sometimes no older than themselves.

It is to be lamented that the members of the Public Schools' Commission should have abstained from out-spoken denunciation of this monstrous anachronism. But fagging is intrinsically so absurd and execrable, so opposed to the entire scheme of an exalted education-an education for the gentlemen, the peers, and the prelates of England-that the most zealous and unscrupulous, and the most delicate and diplomatic defence of it will be unavailing to uphold it much longer. After the fullest discussion in the press we may expect the fullest discussion in Parliament of the reforms required in our great Public Schools. To such reforms we need not anticipate any factious opposition. There are themes too sacred for the strife of politicians, and this before us is surely one of them. What is wanted in these institutions is less that we should give them new life and new organization, than that we should aid them in their own development.

Too much legislation often hinders growth and it may be well, therefore, that the great Public Schools should be allowed in the main to be their own redeemers. But they must never be permitted to sink back into their ancient lethargy. When

tenderly dealt with, they should not consider their errors condoned; rather let them through contrition be more progressive the more forbearance and reverence they encounter.

To those, and they are numerous, who think the defects of these ancient institutions are such as disentitle them to the tenderness and respect here claimed for them, we recommend the wise and temperate and eloquent passage in which the late Commission winds up its exhaustive Report :-"Among the services which they (the Public Schools) have rendered is undoubtedly to be reckoned the maintenance of classical literature as the staple of English education, a service which far outweighs the error of having clung to these studies too exclusively. A second, and a greater still, is the creation of a system of government and discipline for boys, the excellence of which has been universally recognised, and which is admitted to have been most important in its effects on national character and social life. It is not easy to estimate the degree in which the English people are indebted to these schools for the qualities on which they pique themselves most-for their capacity to govern others and control themselves, their aptitude for combining freedom with order, their public spirit, their vigour and manliness of character, their strong but not slavish respect for public opinion, their love of healthy sports and exercise. These schools have been the chief nurseries of our statesmen ; in them, and in schools modelled after them, men of all the various classes that make up English society, destined for every profession and career, have been brought up on a footing of social equality, and have contracted the most enduring friendships, and some of the ruling habits of their lives; and they have had perhaps the largest share in moulding the character of an English gentleman. The system, like other systems, has had its blots and imperfections; there have been times when it was at once too lax and too severe-severe in its punish

ments, but lax in superintendence and prevention; it has permitted, if not encouraged, some roughness, tyranny, and licence; but these defects have not seriously marred its wholesome operation, and it appears to have gradually purged itself from them in a remarkable degree. Its growth, no doubt, is largely due to those very qualities in our national character which it has itself contributed to form ; but justice bids us add that it is due likewise to the wise munificence which founded the institutions under whose shelter it has been enabled to take root, and to the good sense, temper, and ability of the men by whom during successive generations they have been governed."