Page:The Fight at Dame Europa's School.djvu/35

 seen how you are content to sacrifice everything—duty, and influence, and honor—for the sake of putting by a few paltry shillings. You have been badly advised. You have chosen to have about you a set of fags who are no credit to anybody, simply because they make better bargains for you in the things you sell to the other Boys; and now you see the consequences. If such fellows as Ben and Hugh had been your fags, you know very well that this disgraceful scene would never have taken place at all. You would have been sufficiently well trained and well equipped to command the respect of the other monitors, and the two rivals would not have dared to come to blows. There was a time when, if you so much as held up your finger, the whole school would tremble. Nobody trembles now. Nobody cares one farthing what you think or say. And why? Because you have grown a sloven and a screw, and Boys despise both the one and the other. You ought to have prevented the fight from the very first. Failing this, you ought, in conjunction with the other monitors, to have stepped in the moment the Boys had proved their relative strength, and struck a fair balance between them. Instead of doing so, you sit coolly in your shop, supplying the means of carrying on the fight, and coining a few wretched coppers out of your schoolfellows' blows and wounds. You have been a bad friend to both of them. Well, some day, perhaps, you may want friends yourself. When you do, I hope you may find them. Take care that William, the peaceable, unaggressive Boy,