WESTMINSTER

"A man, whom the fond imagination of his worshippers invested with the attributes of a god, gave his life for the life of the world; after infusing from his own body a fresh current of vital energy into the stagnant veins of nature, he was cut off from among the living before his failing strength should initiate a universal decay, and his place was taken by another who played, like all his predecessors, the ever-recurring drama of the divine resurrection and death.... The sceptic ... will reduce Jesus of Nazareth to the level of a multitude of other victims of a barbarous superstition, and will see in him no more than a moral teacher, whom the fortunate accident of his execution invested with the crown, not merely of a martyr, but of a god...."

J. G. Frazer: The Golden Bough.

I

On the last Sunday of July, in the year 1906, Little Dean's Yard filled slowly with sixty or seventy boys in evening dress. All but about ten wore the black gown, which is one mark of the Westminster Scholar, and, over the gown, a white surplice open or buttoned according to the seniority of the wearer. It was not yet ten o'clock in the morning; but on Election Sunday all King's Scholars and Major Candidates appear in evening clothes, the Major Candidates distinguished by carnations of the prized Westminster pink which has been worn since the day, nearly a hundred years ago, when the school rowed against Eton and settled that colour question by trial of strength: the victors were to have pink, the vanquished blue; and the deeper pink of Leander derives from the Westminster founders of the club.

These were the last few flying moments of the last scene. Six years ago the seniors in the swelling group, escaping from the thunder of traffic in Victoria Street and Broad Sanctuary, had entered the silent backwater of Little Dean's Yard as Minor Candidates; their parents or the masters of their preparatory schools led them under the arch and past the fives' courts; they turned shyly wondering eyes at Home Boarders, Rigaud's, Grant's, College and Ashburnham, at the Bursary and the head master's house; then they were shepherded through the Inigo Jones doorway and up the steps into School. It was the first day of the Challenge, wherein the candidates of other days met all-comers in a disputation—lasting a week or more—on the elements of learning and those who outlasted their opponents were elected to scholarships. Now, after six years, they were competing for the close scholarships and exhibitions at Christ Church and at Trinity, Cambridge. The written work was over; on Election Monday would come the viva voce, then the annual cricket match between the King's Scholars and the Town Boys on Vincent Square, then Election dinner in College Hall enlivened by the Greek, Latin and English epigrams which Westminster subsidises; then on Election Tuesday, still in evening dress, they would attend the school service in Abbey for the last time and for the last time answer "Adsum" at roll-call; the results of Election would be read out, the prizes distributed, the office-holders would divest themselves of office and they would walk down School for the last time, into their houses, out of them again and into the world.

The Captain of the King's Scholars came out of College; the Head Town Boy joined him at the entrance to the cloisters; next to them were the other two School Monitors. The involuntary began; and the procession passed through the nave and under the organ loft: first the choir, then the Abbey clergy and the Dean of Westminster; the Dean of Christ Church and the Master of Trinity; the examiners from Oxford and Cambridge; the Head Master of Westminster; the assistant masters in gowns and hoods; the King's Scholars in surplices, gowns and evening dress, those of them who were leaving chastened by the thought that, after the Election Tuesday service two days later, they would enter the Abbey as members of the public only.

Westminster is so much the embodiment and shrine of English history that even the alien and the iconoclast cannot spend six years in the shadow of the Abbey without becoming steeped in the spirit and associations of the place. It is the influence of such foundations that makes of English life its present compromise between the rational and the traditional. From their places in the stalls could be seen the arches of the triforium which are filled at coronations by the Westminster Scholars: no king, they assert, can be duly crowned unless he is acclaimed by their triple shout of "Vivat Rex". It is their privilege to be present in Palace Yard when the soveran opens Parliament; Scholars and Town Boys walk, of unchallenged right, into the gallery of the House of Commons, Scholars—in cap and gown—into the gallery of the House of Lords and, on Sundays, on to the Terrace; when the Courts of Justice were at Westminster, they could wander unchecked into Westminster Hall. Their daily service takes place in the Poets' Corner; they are present at State funerals, their confirmation is held in Henry VII's chapel; and the whole Abbey is their heritage. Is not the school descended lineally from that group of lay scholars whom the monks of Westminster taught? Is not the monks' dormitory their Great School? Among the documents discovered of late years in the Abbey Muniment Room is a record, under the year 1284, of expensÆ, being provision for the teaching of scholars, and a further record, under the year 1339, of payments for "Westminster School." Already old when Winchester and Eton were founded, with its roots struck deep in the Abbey's earliest history and with its life immemorially intertwined with the life of the Abbey, the two have remained side by side until Westminster is the last of the London schools to resist the pressure which has already urged younger rivals from their seats. Changing slowly with the slow unfolding of English history, the school was refounded by Queen Elizabeth on a secular footing; and the monitor of the week, kneeling with his back to Busby's birch-table[1] and facing the school, returns thanks "pro fundatrice nostra Regina Elizabetha" on the spot where Robert South prayed "pro rege Carolo" on the 30th of January, 1649. It retains, by the Act of Uniformity, its "almost unique privilege of using Latin in religious offices", though—as a concession to the Reformers—the monkish pronunciation was abandoned for that which was the universal English form until misguided empiricists set up confusion where none existed before by introducing a "modern" method.

Since that new Tower of Babel was erected, Westminster has watched other foundations arguing and striving to discover the correct pronunciation of classical Latin. Despite the periodical rebukes of its rivals, it has held stubbornly to its course, knowing that there is no sure means of recreating the speech of Cicero and that Westminster at least is too deeply bedded in the past to bend before each new breeze of educational fashion. A hundred customs are preserved to teach new generations that progress need not be divorced from the historic sense: when the bell rings for prayers at the end of afternoon school, a Second Election knocks with his cap at the doors of the form-rooms adjoining school and calls out, "Instat quinta", or, on "plays" (half-holidays), "Instat sesquiduodecima", although the actual hour is now nearly one o'clock; a Second Election has knocked thus since the time was told from a single clock and shouted through the school by a junior; before prayers begin, the doors are locked, and, when they are opened, one of the School Monitors[2] mounts guard outside to repel a chance raid by the "sci's"[3] of the neighbourhood who in less orderly days carried on a town-and-gown warfare against the school. At the lowest, such customs are a picturesque survival, like the Latin play acted in College Dormitory, the Pancake Greeze on Shrove Tuesday, the countless phrases and customs which only a Westminster understands and which all Westminsters love; perhaps, too, they foster, in the alien and the iconoclast, a sense of the past. Abbey and School are a monument to continuity and ordered progress; in 1906, they were a monument at which the leaving seniors had been involuntarily staring for half a dozen years.

II

It is probable that few of them had much attention to spare for the sermon on that Election Sunday. At eighteen they had spent a third of their life at Westminster; it is a foundation in which son succeeds father and brother follows brother, as witness the carved and painted names of Madans and Waterfields, Goodenoughs and Phillimores up School, and on a September night of 1900 tradition had set them in the footsteps of their families and had sought a place for them in the old houses, there to serve and perhaps to suffer, to learn and, later, to rule.

"You will sometimes be punished when you do not deserve it", was the wise parting advice of one preparatory-school headmaster; "before giving vent to your indignation, reflect how much oftener you have deserved punishment without receiving it."

It is but fair to say that this consoling philosophy was little required at Westminster: provided that he incurred no suspicion of "side", there was so general a disposition to help the strange newcomer that he suffered little; and even his service was made easy for him. The "shadow", in Westminster language, was instructed at once in the rules and customs of the house by a senior fag, his "substance", who shouldered his sins for the first fortnight and was theoretically liable to suffer vicariously for his shortcomings; after the days of grace a new boy could be fagged, though this involved little more than fetching and carrying, washing cups, filling saucepans and preparing call-over lists; he could also be "tanned", with an instrument appropriately designated a "pole"; but, though this was less agreeable, corporal punishment was not employed with undue frequency. There was always a right of appeal, too, with the menace of two extra strokes if the appeal was dismissed; but, as it was a point of honour never to appeal, the sufferer could only comfort himself with the thought that a tanning was over more quickly than "lines" or "drill" and with the hope that he might fall into weak or inexpert hands. Of bullying there was little; of systematic oppression and torture of the weak by the strong there was none at all, though the small boys of that generation (as of every other) believed that, if a companion was offensive, their right and duty impelled them to drum the offensiveness out of him.

The war has caused the English people to examine searchingly its scheme of education and especially that public-school system which trains the sons of the well-to-do for future eminence in government, the public services and the learned professions. There have been many books and much discussion: the English love of finding fault with cherished institutions while approving the result has led to a hazy belief that the English public-schoolboy is the finest raw material in the world, but that only his inborn superiority has saved him from destruction by a burthen of useless learning, devastating ignorance, insane athleticism and vicious associations. It is more than time to suggest that his excellence is a delicate bloom nurtured and saved by the public school from the criminal neglect of his parents and that most critics, failing to distinguish between the phases through which every boy passes, have written down as chronic disease what was but temporary green-sickness.

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

Many of those who were leaving must have wondered where the outgoing draft would be in another six years' time. Westminster contains about three hundred boys, drawn chiefly from the professional classes, and in turn sends a steady stream of recruits to the civil service and the learned professions. Barristers and doctors abound; government servants are to be discovered richly distributed through Whitehall, India and the colonies; the school has its share of clergymen and more than its share of soldiers. In less than six years all would have come down from Oxford and Cambridge, unless any had had the good fortune to secure a fellowship; and, while those who were destined for a profession had already decided on their careers, those who dreamed of public life and looked, perhaps, towards the north transept where, in white marble and late-won peace, Beaconsfield and Gladstone stood side by side, may have preferred to keep locked in their own hearts the ideals which they had diffidently set before themselves.

The changing and strengthening aspirations of a boy have won as little space in all the crop of analytical school literature as have the vagaries of his religious faith or the evolution of his civic morals. The Victorians, indeed, in strict accordance with formula, loaded their hero with vague disquiet which was only relieved when he recalled that he had ceased to receive the sacraments; a later generation arrested him in full flight to perdition by intervening opportunely with a soul-steadying preparation for confirmation; the Catholic propagandists habitually threw a sympathetic priest across his path in the course of a holiday ramble; and, if there be a school literature of dissent, I doubt not but that some harassed hero found peace in the practice of Congregationalism. It was recognised, therefore, that the faith of childhood is not infrequently discarded at school; it was assumed with less justification that boys undergo spiritual distress at such a time; and, as the hero of a novel is not expected to suffer as long or as acutely as any one in life, one or other of the conventional escapes could always be chosen. It is hard to remember a book in which the hero sheds his belief in super-natural religion as lightheartedly as once he outgrew his faith in Santa Claus; and, even if it be assumed from private knowledge and experience that many schoolboy heroes have passed through this spiritual transformation, it is harder to recall even one who has been described as constructing a new system to take the place of that which has been overthrown.

This reconstruction, nevertheless, was being attempted twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the higher criticism, by all boys with a speculative bent of mind; they were distinguished from their predecessors by inherited scepticism; and their natural history, to venture once more on a generalization from admittedly incomplete data, was roughly the same everywhere in England. Were it reasonable to fancy for a moment that modern boys were distressed when their faith left them, severe blame would attach to the timorous, indolent or dishonest parents who shirk the burden of explaining and who teach as truth what they themselves believe to be untrue, hoping that, when their children are older, they will somehow have learned better at the hands of masters, who are debarred from religious controversy, or of boys, who can only contribute an equal ignorance. In fact, the boy who lost his faith in revealed religion lost it more slowly, but no whit more painfully than his belief in fairies; he no longer wrote to his fellows, as Gladstone and Manning would write, to discuss the state of his soul; he sought no spiritual director and asked no one to pray for him, though he may have wondered why his parents preserved a grotesque imposture for so long. In reading and in discussion he had absorbed ideas of biological evolution, of geological testimony and of religion studied comparatively; he applied to historical Christianity the tests which he had been taught to use on the history of Greece and Rome, accepting nothing that could not be proved by evidence and rejecting the pretensions of faith as he rejected the statements of a secular historian that his history was literally inspired. Already he had heard that the Old Testament was no longer accepted as heretofore; he may even have learned that, for thousands of years before Christ, countless gods were sacrificed annually by crucifixion or other means and that a Barabbas was annually released to the people; the distillation continued until he was left with the residuum that a man named Jesus Christ, claiming or having claimed for him a divine fatherhood, was crucified after a short life of healing and teaching; there were, he found, no independent contemporary documents, and the fullest accounts, written many years after the events they described, were inspired by the devotion of his followers, whose critical judgement, however, was on a level of education to be expected in one harassed and turbulent corner of the Roman Empire.

The concluding passage from The Golden Bough, of which a few words have been quoted at the beginning of this chapter, defines, in prose of rare beauty, the attitude of an agnostic towards Christianity. "A man," wrote Sir James Frazer, "whom the fond imagination of his worshippers invested with the attributes of a god, gave his life for the life of the world; after infusing from his own body a fresh current of vital energy into the stagnant veins of nature, he was cut off from among the living before his failing strength should initiate a universal decay, and his place was taken by another who played, like all his predecessors, the ever-recurring drama of the divine resurrection and death.... It was played in Babylonia, and from Babylonia the returning captives brought it to JudÆa, where it was acted, rather as an historical than a mythical piece, by players who, having to die in grim earnest on a cross or gallows, were naturally drawn rather from the gaol than the green-room. A chain of causes which, because we cannot follow them, might in the loose language of daily life be called an accident, determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play should be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the enemies he had made in high places by his outspoken strictures were resolved to put out of the way. They succeeded in ridding themselves of the popular and troublesome preacher; but the very step by which they fancied they had simultaneously stamped out his revolutionary doctrines contributed more than anything else they could have done to scatter them broadcast not only over JudÆa but over Asia; for it impressed upon what had been hitherto mainly an ethical mission the character of a divine revelation culminating in the passion and death of the incarnate Son of a heavenly Father. In this form the story of the life and death of Jesus exerted an influence which it could never have had if the great teacher had died, as is commonly supposed, the death of a vulgar malefactor. It shed round the cross on Calvary a halo of divinity which multitudes saw and worshipped afar off; the blow struck on Golgotha set a thousand expectant strings vibrating in unison wherever men had heard the old, old story of the dying and risen god. Every year, as another spring bloomed and another autumn faded across the earth, the field had been ploughed and sown and borne fruit of a kind till it received that seed which was destined to spring up and overshadow the world. In the great army of martyrs who in many ages and in many lands, not in Asia only, have died a cruel death in the character of gods, the devout Christian will doubtless discern types and forerunners of the coming Saviour—stars that heralded in the morning sky the advent of the Sun of Righteousness—earthen vessels wherein it pleased the divine wisdom to set before hungering souls the bread of heaven. The sceptic, on the other hand, with equal confidence, will reduce Jesus of Nazareth to the level of a multitude of other victims of a barbarous superstition, and will see in him no more than a moral teacher whom the fortunate accident of his execution invested with the crown, not merely of a martyr, but of a god. The divergence between these views is wide and deep. Which of them is the truer and will in the end prevail? Time will decide the question of prevalence, if not of truth. Yet we would fain believe that in this and in all things the old maxim will hold good—Magna est veritas et prÆvalebit."

The sceptics of the last Victorian decade left school as agnostics; of their number, the more reflective set themselves to fill the vacuum. As a boy, with a prospect of life too long to measure, has an equal distaste for the sentimentality of heaven and for the melodrama of hell, he probably concerned himself little with the condition that he could only attain eternal life by believing in the divinity of Christ. Scepticism may have forced him to doubt whether eternity was intelligible and to be certain that it was undesirable; but his knowledge of history and his taste for speculative enquiry suggested that eternity in another existence might be less important than the conditions on which his present existence was carried on: the ethics of Christianity were more valuable, in his eyes, than its dogma.

It is here that the reconstruction commonly began, with the question: "If there be no God, no eternal life, no reward for virtue, nor punishment for evil, why should any one strive after godliness? The policeman, indeed, watches for a breach of the civil law, but only a fool would clothe the naked or feed the hungry without thought of reward. Hitherto this was said to be 'right', 'charitable', 'kind'; but why should any one be kind or charitable?"

The answer of history was that every member of every community gained in security and comfort by the comfort and security of the community and that none was tolerable in which fear and injustice, want and cruelty were permitted; in his own interest every man must strive to eradicate them, for the other members were his daily neighbours. Side by side with the teaching of the biologists, who destroyed with their theory of evolution the belief in a special creation, there came into the common stock of ideas the teaching of the utilitarians, who offered a new criterion for private and public conduct. While Christian dogma might be an obsolete shortcut to an eternity which few desired and fewer still could contemplate, Christian ethics remained the noblest and gentlest counsel to perfection. At length reconstruction found itself back at the injunction that a man should love his neighbour as himself.

Each with his own formula, the young agnostics of the last generation worked by discussion, reading and reflection to a new imperative; and those who found satisfaction in Christian ethics as a guide to conduct found also that the Christianity which they had fashioned for themselves was a militant faith. Injustice and fear, suffering and cruelty are not to be eradicated by private renunciations and protests; those who care enough for beauty to wish the world beautiful have to make the world beautiful. And the machine in which the form of the world is changed seemed in those days to be politics.[4]

Vast as had been the progress of recorded history, vaster progress remained to be accomplished if civilisation was not to be judged an hypocrisy or a failure; and, though the saddest limitation of youth be its utter misunderstanding of the obstacles in the way of any change, its most glorious endowment is surely its impulsive desire to realise its ideals. Impatient of muddle, intolerant of laziness, sensitive to beauty and fiercely sympathetic with suffering, youth glances with disgust at the meanness and squalor that desecrate every part of its world and offers the generous ardour of a world-builder to set it right. Childhood with its wooden blocks and sand-castles, boyhood with its tools and engines, youth with its instruments and diagrams are the constructive times of life: there is little that lusty youth will not make, nothing that impatient youth is afraid to reform; its heroes are the great conquerors and builders who tidied some corner of a dilapidated world, the explorers who sought new worlds to tidy, even the prophets and lawyers who tried to bring uniformity into religion and society.

In a thousand hours of meditation or wrangling the boys of that generation hammered out each his own formula of political change. The ethics of private property and communism, of war and peace, of equal democracy and paternal despotism, of the national ideal and the ideal of internationalism were argued at school from the standpoint which had been taken up at home and at home from a standpoint which had been startlingly occupied at school. Whatever had been the inherited preconceptions, every political doctrine was now required to justify itself: the party which had enjoyed almost unbroken tenure of office for nearly a fifth of a century fell from power in 1905, to be succeeded by one which brought up for settlement or readjustment all the old problems of domestic controversy and many that were new.

IV

It is easy to guess the political path chosen by an Irish boy brought up in England and sent to a tory stronghold by a father who had reared him on the pure milk of late-Victorian radicalism; it is not difficult to imagine what lions beset that path. The way of the minority politician in a public school is hard but stimulating: while the Boer war continued, any doubts of British wisdom or justice in South Africa were ill-received and answered by violence; for two years more, since free trade had been abandoned by Mr. Chamberlain, a solitary free-trader would be beaten to his knees by phrases about dying industries, dumping and unfair competition; and, all the while, there was little chance of agreement between those who would have solved the Irish difficulty by holding Ireland under the sea for five minutes and any one who was never able to forget the sailing of crowded emigrant ships from Queenstown and the keening which rose to Heaven in acknowledgment of British rule.

Only in the dignified atmosphere of the Debating Society, when a general election had sent hundreds of radicals to Parliament and proved that radicals existed, in hundreds of thousands, outside it, did radical policy get a hearing. Political interest revived sharply in 1905 and 1906: more than ever did the rising politicians use their privilege of attending debates in the House of Commons. It has been said that politics are made tolerable in England by the fact that hardly any one takes them seriously except the politicians, who are for the most part not English; but they are dangerous food for the young in the expectations that they arouse and in the disillusionment that they entail. After nearly twenty years of tory rule, the liberals in 1905 were healed of their long domestic dissensions and assured of a majority; the ministry so judiciously chosen by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was overwhelming in its varied strength; with the pacification of South Africa and the repatriation of the indentured Chinese labourers, the dark infamy of the Boer war and of a calamitous plunge into Rand politics were to be forgotten; social reform was sketched with a bold hand; a message of peace and good-will was sent to the other powers.

So vast was the ministerial majority after the election of 1906 that a liberal prime minister, for the first time since 1880, seemed able to fulfil his promises without having to balance the claims of ill-assorted groups or to consider the vague menace of the House of Lords; the ambitions of the Liberal League had been defeated, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had survived the efforts of his more spirited colleagues to kick him upstairs. In 1906, for those who cared to see the world beautiful and would spend their ardour to make it beautiful, there was still a sufficient part of the population illiterate, hungry and diseased, rendered miserable by fear and savage by injustice to keep the social reformers employed; Ireland, Egypt and India all demanded a change of administrative system. Those were days in which it seemed good to be a liberal.

V

It would have been a meagre tribute to the spell of Westminster if some of those who, in passing out of Abbey on that last Sunday of Election Term, passed also out of their pupilage, did not look forward from the threshold of manhood in a spirit of dedication; it would have been an admission of dubious gratitude if, in bidding farewell that afternoon under the trees of College Garden, they had not confessed their debt to the school. In six years some few of them had developed into fair scholars along lines of education which had not then been so bitterly attacked as they have been since: no one, indeed, aimed to make them proficient in preparing a manifest and detecting an escape of sewer gas; in their curriculum the financial possibilities of Spanish and Russian were ignored, like all other adjuncts to a sound commercial training; and, though the art of Asia and the letters of Ethiopia have since been urged as an alternative to Greek and Latin, they stuck insularly to the literature and history of the civilisation from which all the great modern civilisations of Europe derive. Those who cared to work contrived to cover a wide field even in that English literature which is popularly thought to be excluded from public-school study; for the rest, it should be recognised that a point is quickly reached at which those who do not wish to work can no longer be compelled. At the lowest computation, all had received at least a grounding in the humanities and an equipment for profounder study of subjects that by pressure of time could not be exhausted at school.

In addition, they were for five or six years disciplined to a system, yielding obedience as unquestioningly as afterwards they exacted it.

"This we learned from famous men,

Knowing not its uses,

When they showed, in daily work,
Man must finish off his work—
Right or wrong, his daily work—

And without excuses....

This we learned from famous men

Teaching in our borders,

Who declared it was best,
Safest, easiest, and best—
Expeditious, wise and best—

To obey your orders.

Some beneath the further stars

Bear the greater burden:

Set to serve the lands they rule,
(Save he serve no man may rule),
Serve and love the lands they rule;

Seeking praise nor guerdon...."

They learned initiative and responsibility; they were trained to subordinate the individual to the community; and they acquired a code which at its worst was limited and foolish, at its best exalted and honourable. If the panorama of a public school has its ugly patches, so has the panorama of life; if the prejudices were many, they were fewer than the prejudices encountered on leaving school; if the honour was circumscribed, its boundaries were reached perhaps less quickly than the boundaries of honour in later life. The convention that there is at best an armed neutrality between boy and master leads the boy to a diplomatic economy of truth not always distinguishable from disingenuousness; in his dealings with seniors, contemporaries and juniors he is honest, truthful and substantially just. As he is taught to accept undeserved punishment without complaining, so he learns to avow the undetected misdeeds by which a fellow might suffer; never to fail the team, the house, the school or a single friend, always to hide emotion and to be in hard physical condition may be crude social ethics, but they are neither unworthy nor fruitless in their effect on public life. Twenty years ago it would have been unnecessary to put forward these claims, but the querulous aftermath of the war has involved the public schools in ill-defined suspicion; yet the leader of a crusade would find no more ardent, generous and upright spirits than in old British public-schoolboys of seventeen to twenty-two; and, before the worldling discharges his gibes at their honour and their code, he might stay to reflect whether the administration of empire, as carried out in two hemispheres by the sons of these long-suffering schools, must yield pride of place, for integrity and devotion, to the public services of Germany and France, Italy and Spain, America and Japan, whether, too, the scandals and treacheries which have broken the monotony of English public life in the last ten years are due to excess of these derided qualities or to want of them.

If, on the last Sunday, many lacked the detachment to set out in detail their debt to Westminster, all could acknowledge their love and treasure their last moments. Next morning the Major Candidates were imprisoned in a form-room leading to School and summoned one by one to stand before a long table for the viva voce examination. There followed the match between the King's Scholars and the Town Boys. Next morning those who were leaving rose and for the last time put on dress clothes and a gown for their last day at Westminster.

After the breaking-up service in the Abbey, they assembled in School for call-over. The results of Election and the removes were read out, the prizes distributed, the prize epigrams recited by their authors and rewarded with one of the silver pennies that come to Westminster in the distribution of the Maundy. Armed with a birch ("rod"), one of the School Monitors was despatched down the gangway between the lower forms to find and escort to the head master's dais a young offender who paid for his too frequent presence in penal drill by being publicly flicked across the back of the hand. Then the Captain and three School Monitors stood up and in turn were handed the birch which they reversed and gave back to the head master; as soon as they had been discharged of their dignity and duties, the new School Monitors were handed the birch in token of office. At the "Oremus" the new Captain knelt facing the school and read the Latin prayers; with the "Ire licet" was born a new generation of Old Westminsters.

In an interview with the Dean of Christ Church, those who had been elected to the House were told the day on which they had to present themselves in Oxford.