Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/695

Rh this occasion, rebelled, rescued the victim, and fell upon the prefects, and cuffed and kicked them out of the Commons' Hall. After the boy had sufficiently recovered, he was publicly flogged by Dr. Williams for having resented a prefect! "An Old Winchester Prefect" gives similar testimony, and adds that the system is "an indefensible and barbarous practice," which should be ended at once and forever."

The system is as vigorously defended. "An Old School Disciplinarian" believes tunding to be infinitely better than caning by a master and less dangerous than knuckle-hitting on the head; "save me from sly kicks and boxes." The system creates good feeling between the seniors and juniors—gives the former responsibility; the latter protection from bullies—and is "a good training for the world." Instead of making boys "weak milksops," it makes them "Englishmen like their ancestors." "A Wykehamist" is proud of the old school, and believes that prefects are high-minded, deliberate, and just. His family had been connected with Winchester for fifty years, and he had never before heard a complaint.

"W." thinks the less a master "thrashes" the better—it takes a rare man to counterbalance the mischief done by "perpetual lickings." When the boys do the flogging, the result is very different. They know each other's tricks and ways, and can be more just. The system protects boys from brutality. When in school he was brutally kicked by a big bully whenever sent above him in class. Such treatment was not possible at Winchester. "The great distinguishing character of every judiciously managed English school is, that the boys are sure of being properly kicked! . . . By all means let the masters control the system and effectually punish its abuse, but as 'kicking' will go on in every big school, let my boys go where it is reduced to a system, in the hands of a recognized class."

"A Civilian," one of Dr. Arnold's Rugby boys, is gratified that, while many see no cure for the abuse of the system but its abolition, others see a good use in the government of the public schools through prefects. He was six and a half years at Rugby, and only knew two or three cases of gross injustice or cruelty, but remembers scores of cases of sharp caning of "fags" for impertinence, neglect of duty, etc. "This punishment was infinitely preferred to one hundred lines of Homer or Virgil." Under this system, hundreds of boys govern themselves "without the continued interference of the eminent man at the head of the school."

"Expertus" contrasts, at length, the monitorial or prefectorial system with the "system of lock and key, usher and spy, and Jesuitical surveillance." While the former is liable to abuse and needs to be carefully guarded, it is "wonderfully strong in the argument from general success, from the characters which it has helped to train, and from the qualities it has naturalized in Englishmen."

A former "Acting Head-Master at Rugby," Sir Bonamy Brice,