Be it the keen wind, be it excess of laughter, the tears are running down my face, but I whisk them off and run to the scene of battle. It would appear that Dorothy and Anna, having met with terrific impact, stooped simultaneously and grabbed the ball, for which they fought like wild-cats, while the others stood by and gabbled like fishwives. Having sorted out this entanglement, I kick off anew, and amid the excited cheers of nine Indians the teams go streaking up the pitch.

And here emerges a star, for a certain long-legged child named Janet has gained possession of the ball, and is off with it at an incredible speed, her too-tight skirt kilted up in either hand, her feet twinkling among the gravel. The defenders rush forward; she dodges them, launches a majestic kick which carries the ball past a spread-eagled and shrieking goalkeeper, scores a glorious goal and is acclaimed by a cheer which informs me that the Indians are now about fifteen in number and are waving their towels in obvious delight.

(Not one of us knows anything about the thing called 'off-side '.)

The other team is aching for revenge. Alix's left stocking has fallen down, but she barges across the pitch with an expression of almost masculine truculency. Emily's black curls are spread around her head like the wool of a Fuzzywuzzy, and Chrissie's long, fair plaits have discarded a pair of blue ribbons now wafting carelessly among the flying feet. Faces are red and radiant, eyes sparkle with lively fun; red lips are parted in joyous laughter as the ball soars out of the playground or scatters the now retreating hens into a squawking rout. Everybody is anxious to shine, but nobody's feet will behave as desired, and at every grotesque blunder the wind carries us a gust of Hindu laughter.

Terrible football! But what fun!

The defeated side is desperate. It suddenly learns the value of passing the ball one to another, and goes swinging towards the opposing goal in all the triumph of its new tactics. The defenders are puzzled, as the ball zigzags up the pitch and is finally sent flying between the boulders.

The Indians go wild. They huzza and whistle and shake hands with each other until the smith pokes his black face out of the smithy and sundry nervous old villagers appear at their doors.

But the janitor's whistle blows.

P.T. is over, and we troop back into school, dishevelled as witches, happy as larks.

Over the playground, the dust settles slowly. The cock leads his dames back to the scratching-grounds; the sparrows whirr to earth; the wagtails land and resume their trotting; the gulls wheel and swoop; and the turbaned spectators return regretfully to their barrack-room chores.

Postscript at 4.30 p.m.

Be it known that when I let the girls play football, I "started something". The Head has just been here, and (as my Cockney landlady used to say)" from what I gleans there has been a mêlée after school, in which girls fought with boys for possession of the playground ball. At all events the cookery-room window is broken, a boy is off home with a bleeding nose, the fence around the cabbage-patch is halfflattened .. and the football has been commandeered by the girls. Even though it is burst.

I think I shall have to revise some of my ideas about the "naturally submissive nature" of the fair sex.

VERY

ERY soon after the war began the camp-followers were queueing up for action. The Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes (N.A.A.F.I.) rolled out the barrel on a big scale, the Entertainment National Service Association (E.N.S.A.) mobilized scores of concert parties, Comforts Schemes were rapidly promoted, and the Army Welfare Department made its plans for helping the troops in their personal and domestic difficulties. But at that same critical and urgent moment Army Education packed up and went home.

Plans had been devised, before the war began, to create an educational service for the militia, and in the preparation of this scheme all the providing bodies of adult education had agreed to pool their resources and to organize a full service of educational facilities for the new citizen army. The responsibility for shelving that plan when war broke out is a divided one, but it can be largely assigned—as can so many of the educational calamities of this war-to the indifferent leadership of the Board of Education.

Under the pressure of educational opinion, however, the Fighting Services soon recognized the need for educational facilities, and there was shortly improvised that elaborate machine called the Central Council for Adult Education in H.M. Forces (At Home)—a machine equipped with the usual regional committees. The aggregate of lectures and courses provided through that machinery in the last year is not impressive. In some regions, Birmingham, for example, the programme has been a full and thriving one; but in many other regions the results have been paltry. The reason, to some extent, has been the delay in the Treasury provision of funds for the work. But a more fundamental reason was that, even in massed formation, the Providing Bodies were not capable of dealing with this immense new potential demand. Adult educational bodies between them have a

modest membership which has been reckoned as not more than one in 240 of the adult population; and neither in lecturing staff nor in organizing personnel could they cope with a new constituency of more than a million men. But it was not mere lack of resources which made Adult Education unsuited for this great task. It was also a certain limitation of outlook. Adult education still shows a tendency to think in academic terms, still exaggerates the value of such advanced facilities as the University Tutorial Class or the University Extension Course at the expense of more elementary modes of further education; and such powerful and historic sections of the movement as the W.E.A. are still divided in their estimate of the value of such forms of education as music, play-producing and the practice of the arts. The local education authorities, of course, do not maintain that Sadducean attitude, nor do such young auxiliaries of adult education as the Councils of Social Service and the Women's Institutes. But the Central Council for Adult Education in H.M. Forces is dominated in its outlook and its policy-making by those same narrow but tenacious academic traditions which seem to hold the balance of power on every 'representative' Committee which is ever set up in the adult education movement. That liability will no doubt prevail until the Board of Education sets up, on a truly representative basis, a parliament of adult education, which will not be limited to the Old England of an Upper House, but will give a place and a voice to those numerous unacademic varieties of adult education which have developed in the last decade or two.

For want of such a Parliament adult education has failed to make full use of the opportunity to provide for the army the wide array of facilities, simple as well as advanced, 'practical' as well as literary, which this great cross-section of the community ought to have. One consequence—and

a very good one, too-is that the Army has now decided to look after its educational needs off its own bat. The Central Council and its regional Committees will continue to function, and the Army will take some of its custom to the Central Council-whenever the Council has the goods which the Army needs. But the bulk of army education will now be provided from its own ranks.

The principles on which this provision is to be based are simple. There are in the fighting forces to-day many thousands of officers and men who, either by training, experience, temperament, or potential capacity, are capable of conducting educational courses in anything from Greek history to model-making. The recruitment of these tutors and instructors is mainly a matter of routine inquiry-and, of course, of subsequent sifting. To whatever duties these men normally have will be added the additional duty-and usually a pleasurable one-of giving a small amount of time to teaching their comrades.

The discovery of the needs of the troops is an equally simple matter, for it is now being conducted not merely by announcements on parade but also by the expert evangelizing work of the suitable officer who, in each battalion is to be charged with looking after the educational interests' of the men. It is his job to discover what the men want, to satisfy that want so far as he can from Army resources, and to supplement those resources with such facilities as, within his area, may be made available through the Regional Committee of the Central Council.

That is the procedure embodied in the latest War Office memorandum on the subject, and one which is now beginning to operate. Its common sense and its feasibility are obvious. Army education must be, so to speak, a portable apparatus : the troops must carry their own supply with them rather than depend on the facilities which a university town can supply only as long as the troops stay put there. In the second place, the factor of self-sufficiency is a curiously important one from the point of view of morale. The troops are all the better for the knowledge that they can edify or amuse themselves from their own resources and with their own leadership. And in this connexion it deserves to be mentioned that the War Office is now encouraging the troops to provide their own amusements rather than lean entirely on the provision of E.N.S.A.

In the third place, the War Office recognizes that education for non-military ends is an important factor in the making of a keen and contented soldier, and that he must be provided in the army with other facilities than those which make him a good fighting man. The idea behind this scheme is not the negative one of keeping boredom at bay'; it is the positive one of maintaining and in many cases creating a wider range of interests than military training tends to promote. It is a matter of exercising facilities which, although not a primary necessity for a soldier, help to give a richer content to his daily life.

One promising feature of this new scheme of Army Education is that it appears to be finding favour with commanding officers. Upon them falls the selection of a part-time education officer for each unit, and the choice they make in these appointments will determine the whole scheme for better or worse. If they pick the right type of man for this evangelizing and organizing service, the rest is comparatively level going. If they pick misfits, the scheme is damned in that unit from the start. There is, happily, abundant evidence that these crucial selections are being wisely and imaginatively made.

The scheme has potentialities for evil as well as good. One evil, for instance, would be to interpret the purpose of Army education as being merely the provision of lectures in any kind of order and without any sense of continuity. Despite the difficulties of army organization, troop movements, &c., a determined effort must be made to provide, as often as possible, discussion groups which meet regularly and have a regular syllabus of study. It is in the emphasis of this value that the Central Council and the Regional Committees can be a particular source of strength

to the new scheme. Another potential danger is the risk of bringing any kind of parade-pressure to bear to get the men into classes; but the Army Council has pronounced so resolutely on this point that not even the worst martinet is likely to make education a bore by making it a duty.

Although the scheme is to be devoted mainly to nonvocational training, the Army Council is anxious to do what it can for the thousands of young professional men who have been cut off from opportunities of studying for their diplomas and certificates in such trades as banking, accountancy, and so on. In this field an attempt is to be made to provide correspondence courses at nominal fees; and, although the tuition must inevitably be more sketchy than it would be in civil life, the young soldier-bank-clerk will at least be able to keep his professional studies tickingover until peace-time comes again.

The army wishes to give full scope in its new scheme to the 'practical' modes of adult education, including music, public speaking, sketching and handicrafts; for, although it is perfectly true to say that the educational standards of this army are far higher than those of a quarter of a century ago, yet it still remains true that large numbers of men will be more readily reached through these practical interests than through the academic approach. In fact the army is willing to realize, as the adult education movement as a whole has begun to realize, that in the world of education there is a wide variety of interest and of aptitudes to be satisfied.

There are certain other factors on which the success or failure of army education will be largely based. One of them is the availability of the right kind of physical setting for educational purposes. Unless the right kind of room, properly equipped, agreeably warmed and properly lighted, can be found for this work, most men in the unit will prefer -and reasonably prefer-to spend their leisure in the canteen or in the nearest cinema. How far the right kind of room will be available no one can yet see; but those in whose hands the organization of this scheme rests are certainly aware of the importance of this primary need. Another decisive factor will be the extent to which the army will supply books for educational purposes. siderable quantities of books have already found their way into the army, but hitherto there has been no organized supply of books for educational purposes. Here again one of the first obligations upon the Directorate of Army Education will be to see that all reasonable demands for educational books are adequately and rapidly met.

Con

It must be borne in mind that this army education scheme has only just been put on its feet. Even now the process of selecting the officers who will administer the scheme is not yet complete, and hundreds of the part-time Unit Education Officers have still to be selected. A job of such scope and magnitude as this will take time to get going; but what is beyond dispute is the zeal of the Army Council to establish the most liberal and diverse provision for the troops. Their zeal, indeed, for this job is far more striking than that of the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force, each of which services are perhaps making too much of the alibi that "service conditions leave no time for such extras ". The experience of the last war proved over and over again that the fighting-man, however much occupied in his professional duties, still has both the time and the inclination to take his mind off the business of fighting.

One other section of the nation-in-arms whose interests do not appear so far to have been fully considered or provided for is the Auxiliary Territorial Service and the other Women's Auxiliaries. To some extent the women have already shared in the lecture courses arranged by the Central Council, and it may be possible for them to share equally in the new scheme. But some one should keep a watchful eye on their needs so that, if necessary, separate education services could be established for the women in the Forces. On the whole the omens for this vast new project are good; and it may be possible in a later article to report progress and to record other developments.

write with humility, not so much because at half his age I have had only four years' experience of being a headmaster as against his thirty or more, but because that experience has profoundly changed many of the ideas with which I began. If what follows does not reveal humility, it will be partly due to the great pride that I have come to have during those four years in the school which I have the honour to serve, and where I have watched numbers of boys being formed into reasonable and lively men by what Sir Frank calls the "individuality, almost personality" of the school. His insistence on the importance of this in any definition of the phrase 'public school,' is indeed almost the only point where I agree with him.

His own preference, were he a parent of limited means, (and they all think they are now), would be to put his son as a day-boy to a boarding school which accepted such. As a headmaster of what is entirely a day school, I find the relating one to another of the various essential activities of the school, and in a large sense the discipline of the community, must be based on the unalterable facts that day-boys have but limited time, and a day school (probably for economic reasons) has somewhat limited space; conversely the boarding school has often unlimited space, and the boarder a greater amount of time; therefore the discipline of a boarding school must be different, and may, as I shall suggest later, be inferior; and certainly, in whatever proportion the two are mixed, one section must suffer for the apparently overriding necessities of the other in organization and arrangements. But, anyhow, Sir Frank's choice would be impossible if it were universal, and perhaps he is skating round a difficulty which seems fundamental, but which has never, as far as I know, been stated and answered. However mistaken some of us feel it to be, the recent discussions on the future of public schools seem to confuse the two problems " how can the existing schools be maintained" and "how can boys from a class hitherto not admitted to the public schools be enabled to enjoy the benefits of them ", into one, how can the admission of such boys be best managed to bolster up schools thought to be in a shaky condition ". The difficulty is, supposing all the problems of selecting the boys and the financial responsibility for them were solved, would their parents consent in sufficient number to send them to the schools, assuming that 'public school' means in its conventional but incorrect use, 'boarding school'. I have found frequently that parents who are not of the class which takes it for granted that a boy goes away from home to school, will not dream of allowing their boys, even if they could win scholarships, to go to a residential university, and their reluctance is based so deeply on social habit as to be not amenable to reason. And I do not believe that many boys from the elementary schools will be allowed by their parents to go as boarders to public schools. It has to be remembered, too, that a boy's home and home background are an important part of his social life at school. Even at a day school, where the 'clinging' tendency of the parent of the socalled lower classes is satisfied by the large amount of time which the boy does in fact spend under the family roof every day, boys feel their comparative poverty most by being unable to invite their friends home and entertain them in a style to which they are accustomed, and they will probably refuse invitations which they cannot return. So, despite what it may do by encouraging camping and theatrical societies and other means of social intercourse, even a day school may easily be a place where a poor boy feels acutely out of it'. The same is true as much if

not more of a boarding school, where conversation often turns on what one does in the holidays, and leads naturally to exchange of visits and meetings for various mutual interests. All these cost money, and parents will all agree that the modern school-child requires a great deal of money to keep him occupied during the holidays. I remember myself feeling slightly embarrassed at times because the habits in the holidays of my friends and acquaintances at school seemed very different from the occupations natural to a boy brought up in the spacious garden and rambling house of a country parsonage, which to me seemed almost the ideal existence, but which they were most unwilling to sample, or, if they did, voted frightfully dull. I can see no way by which a boy of the type suggested could avoid feeling out of it'. Such a boy having no mansion ' either at school or at home, might easily develop into a soured and unintegrated personality, however distinguished he became at scholarship or athletics.

If this is so, the development of large day-boy sections at all boarding schools is the only possible way of including in these schools boys of this type, and 'large' they must be, because the danger of the day-boy sections being to a considerable extent or preponderately of this type is too obvious to need pointing out. But as I have already said, I believe that the mixture of day-boys and boarders is inherently unsound, though it is practically convenient for a day school to have a house where boys whose parents have to move from the district can stay without breaking continuity. So the problem for discussion is ultimately, "is the boarding school any longer a necessary part of the social structure, and if not, is it at the least so desirable for its monopoly of virtues that it has a strong claim to survival?" Certainly any one who lives in London in normal times is wasting his money if he does not take advantage of the big day schools of public school status, one or more conveniently accessible from any part of the metropolis and from a large area of the home counties as well. They are all schools of such antiquity as to have, in however modern buildings they may be housed, the continuity of personality of which Sir Frank Fletcher speaks. The close touch which parents can have with the school is in my experience most salutary as a guarantee against complacency, and a stimulus to efficiency, and the daily contact with the busy life of the city helps to give both masters and boys a proper sense of values and a wide outlook. But the impressive size and importance of these schools are but recently attained, and have depended on the extension of suburban transport, by train and omnibus and private car. The same increase in size has resulted from the same cause in the schools of many big provincial towns, and we may ask later why they have not all increased as well in importance. As the day schools seem now to have increased in response to changed habits of the population, so the era of boarding schools may well have corresponded to a set of habits and circumstances which have already changed sufficiently to threaten their existence. It is not often remembered that very few boarding schools are a century old, and most of them came into being at a stage of the Victorian age marked by certain obvious features. No doubt it was always the custom for the masters of endowed foundations to make a little extra by taking into their own houses for education the sons of small country gentlemen who could not afford private tutors for their sons, and were out of reach of respectable day schools, and this tendency must have appeared more profitable as the cost of living rose through the Napoleonic Wars. Eton took the place of Westminster in educating the nobility for reasons which are well understood but do not generally apply. The new

or enlarged boarding schools which filled up in the next few decades drew their boys mainly from the new class created by the industrial revolution, who copied the example of the country gentlemen in sending their sons away to school, and indeed had such large families as to make such a course desirable. The development of railways made the sending of them possible and convenient even to schools long distant, while attendance at a local or near-by day school was not yet practicable. The success of the system was perhaps due to Arnold's influence in a different way from what is popularly supposed, for I find it difficult to believe that boys were in his day much more responsive to moralising than they are now. They instinctively follow character, whether good or bad, and unerringly discern and ignore lack of character. The boys who came to the boarding schools were mostly from homes where a very solid practical piety held sway, and the tone of Arnold's school merely reflected the tone of the class which was attracted by what it knew of Arnold's ideas. His own insistence on getting rid of undesirable boys-he called it a headmaster's first, second and third duty-did the rest, by ensuring as far as possible that the influences at work in a community of boys living together without much direction by masters should be sound. In later times the standard was kept up by the leaven of sons of professional men, clergymen, doctors, and civil servants, and the like, who were brought up at home to take the duty of service for granted, and they unconsciously set the tone of the schools by their attitude there.

The weaknesses of the present boarding schools come from a change in many of these things which originally conditioned their success. Above all, the middle-class parent has almost abandoned the moral training of his children, and the schools can no longer count on receiving the necessary leaven of boys with a firm sense of values derived from early parental and family training. The result is that, as boys still influence each other in a boarding school far more than they are influenced by grown-ups, despite the freer association of master and boy, it is a matter of chance, not to be discovered in advance but only too late, whether the tone of a house is good or bad, and it may change from one to the other with surprising rapidity. The professional man finds it harder and harder to afford the fees of a boarding school, and the men who made their money out of the last war did not always do it so scrupulously that their sons had much to contribute in standards of value. The smaller family of modern times affects the boarding school unfavourably in two ways: the boy is used to a higher standard of comfort at home, so the schools have felt obliged to spend their money on improving their schools as hotels to meet parental criticism, and having far more interests and being more used to the society of grown-ups, he is apt to be critical and resentful of the restrictions and the perpetual herding together. Dozens of small boys suffer mentally at boarding schools because there is no place available for them to be alone in, for they are just reaching the age when it is natural and healthy for a boy to feel that he has a private life and affairs of his own, which should be free from intrusion by even his best friend at school as well as, more obviously, by his parents at home. Enlightened headmasters have done much to improve matters, even in the time since I was at school, but it remains true that the feeling of perpetual responsibility they and their housemasters have leads to restrictions on freedom which the intelligent boy feels to be arbitrary. The less intelligent majority accept them without trouble, but it cannot be a sound moral training where severe penalties are attached to artificially created offences, and breaking the rules does not mean perceived loss or damage to the community. The discipline cannot be based, as at a day school, on the appeal to reason. There a boy can see that the activities of the community are bounded by limits of space and time, and his failure to fall in with rules and conventions interferes unjustifiably with the interests of others, who want to get on with the job.

The surplus energy of the day-boy is conveniently dissipated in the process of travel to and from school-I am now convinced that strap-hanging and fighting to get out of crowded tube trains do boys good in this way, and they certainly enjoy it—whereas a boarding house often becomes like a crew under hatches with housemaster or housecaptain seeking to relax the tension in the emotions of inter-house rivalry. The critics of the boarding school who say that the system produces class exclusiveness and a distorted code of values have a case which they could go far to justify by an accurate analysis of boarding-school discipline. Usually they prefer to be abusive, and reveal their motive to be jealousy. And this should always encourage us in the belief that the public schools have at least up to the present given their boys something worth having.

My own conclusion is that, as the boarding schools owed their extension to the social and economic trends of the Victorian age, they are bound to decline as these change. They do not have a monopoly of educational virtues, and are liable to vary much in quality. If politics do not interfere, on economic grounds it seems likely that there will always be enough boys of the middle classes who live too far from day schools to fill a number of boarding schools, but not the present number, with material suitable for the system. How little suitable some of it is now may be inferred from the fact that some schools are prepared to take any boy whose parents can pay, with little inquiry as to his character, and less as to his intelligence. The decline of the boarding school would have been more speedy if the day schools in large towns, aided or maintained by local authorities, had a better standing, and if it were felt that the training they give the ordinary boy is as good as their scholarship records often are. I know of no explanation but that local government, especially in towns, does not often attract men of very high ideals or even standards of personal morality, and as governors of schools they interfere but do not inspire. Headmasters who get little encouragement from this source are further limited by the type of master who is prepared to work in these schools.

Finally I suggest a few points where boarding schools might help themselves instead of calling in effect for state subsidies. 1. The headmaster should have less sense of his importance in the outside world as e.g. itinerant preacher or casual journalist. He will then be constantly on the spot and keep the school at a high level of activity because he will have time for everything and everybody.

2. Governing bodies should attend to their business better than some of them must have done in the past, and not leave it all to the bursar. Their function is to keep bursars always, and headmasters sometimes, up to the mark by asking "why?" It is understood that they know little about the work, but may be assumed to be intelligent men, and if they ask “ why?" and no one can explain to their satisfaction, they have probably discovered an abuse or slackness beginning.

3. Assistant masters have acquired a conventional security much like the 'parson's freehold ', and the effect of the Burnham scales has been, like the rise in salaries of curates, to draw into the profession men who think of it as a career and not a vocation. Much higher professional standards and less solidarity' are needed. The training departments of the universities might well be more critical in selecting candidates for the training courses. Salaries are either too little or too big, and I fancy that better schoolmasters were often produced by the old system of underpayment which gave the schools passionate lovers of scholarship for its own sake, and men with private means who had a liking and a natural ability for teaching boys.

4. Something should be done to prevent legitimate pride in one's own school involving a contempt for almost any other. A boy is by nature no respecter of persons, and has a fine instinctive judgment of real worth in those he meets. Cannot the schools make this power the key to sidetracking inevitable class distinctions and removing social abuses ?

II

"

Between an educated and an uneducated man " writes Sir Frank there is a real barrier." "There is a freemasonry between those who have learnt the same subjects, before which minor differences of birth or wealth disappear." Do not these statements suggest precisely that exaggerated distinction between the public-school boy and the rest of the world which arouses so many protests to-day? Is it not a truer line of approach to regard all life as in some sense a process of education, and the differences in formal education between individuals as a matter of degree? Those who have spent the greater part of their lives in receiving or giving instruction in certain subjects and under similar conditions undoubtedly share a kind of freemasonry --and a very delightful kind-with one another, but the very defect of this life is that it interposes a real barrier between them and those whose education has largely been gained in farm or factory and club; and the chief defect of our boarding school system springs from the idea that to train boys to play their part in the world you must remove them out of the world and isolate them from its living interests.

For this reason I, as headmaster of a school where boarders and day boys meet, welcome very heartily Sir Frank Fletcher's proposal that the day-boy element in our public schools should be increased and encouraged. Modern transport facilities have made this far easier than it would have been a few years ago. I welcome also his suggestion that the doors of the public schools should be thrown open to boys from elementary schools; but I should prefer that such boys should be selected from those who have gone with scholarships to secondary schools, rather than from those who remain at elementary schools to the age of thirteen. These latter will be handicapped by the delay in starting those subjects (such as Latin, French, Algebra, and Geometry) which are not taught in elementary schools; already under the scholarship system some boys are sent to secondary schools who are not suited for the more academic

type of education, and I doubt whether among those who fail to win scholarships enough boys of real academic ability could be found to make the experiment a success.

Sir Frank Fletcher values the non-local character of the great public schools. Here again I am disposed (with some diffidence) to disagree with him. The nation has lost a great potential source of local patriotism by turning citizens of Wigan and Pudsey (any other names would do as well) into Rugbeians or Carthusians. To develop this theme would take up too much of your valuable space; but my conclusion is that for many (perhaps not all) of our public schools the most hopeful and the most useful course is to become centres of higher secondary education for their own districts; to cooperate in some new form of grouping with existing secondary schools; to receive from them, either as boarders (financed by the local authorities), or as day-boys, those pupils who are most likely to benefit by the peculiar advantages which they offer; to afford opportunities of varied experience to members of the staffs of such schools; to join with them in games, concerts, debates, and other out-of-school activities; and, without relinquishing their independence or their traditions, to make the fullest possible contribution towards meeting local educational needs.

The working out of the details of such co-operation is a task requiring great tact and wisdom. The public schools must not be placed directly under any existing local education authority; the local secondary schools must not be drained of all their most able pupils nor made to feel that they are treated as inferior. A new form of partnership must be evolved, and here our national genius for producing workable arrangements in defiance of abstract logic should find ample scope.

I have in preceding paragraphs suggested some of the defects of a boarding-school education. I believe them to be real, but I am no less conscious of the advantages which many, perhaps most, boys gain from the experience of communal life. At some time in the course of his education I believe that nearly every boy ought to leave his home and learn, first to hold his own among strangers, and then to live and work for common ends among his companions. A system by which secondary-school boys were drafted at special times and varying ages into the public schools would give scope for most interesting experiments and would impart new life and variety of experience to all the schools concerned.

We have thought too much in the past of imparting learning and training character without relation to the world in which learning is to be a lamp and character a staff. Our public schools have much to give and much to gain through closer contact with the life of the nation as a whole.

indeed be interesting to know what proportion of boys in Headmasters' Conference schools at present obtained admission through the common-entrance examination or its equivalent.

Sir Frank hits the nail on the head when he says that the primary difficulty is financial, not social. The problem has arisen not because of an outcry against the social exclusiveness of the public schools, but because certain important developments in our social life have brought serious financial embarrassment to many of them, and it has been suggested that they can be saved only by help from the public purse. The war has gravely accentuated the problem. It is no exaggeration to say that the outlook for quite a number of these schools is desperate. The real question therefore is whether they are to be left to sink or swim, or whether it is in the public interest to save them.