Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/37

16 ship. During these early years the school had never outgrown the confusion amid which it started in 1843, when two hundred boys from all parts of England were suddenly shot down into the chaos of a new school with no tradition, little organization, and insufficient funds. Yet the need for the school was so great that these numbers kept growing term by term: within the first three years they doubled, and for some time afterwards there was an incessant race between the growth of the school and the progress of the new buildings. More than a hundred new boys entered along with Morris at the beginning of 1848. The Great Western Railway was then being pushed slowly westward from Reading. Until Morris left school, Hungerford, eleven miles off, remained the nearest station. The town itself was the same quiet little place that it is now. Its remoteness from any large town, and the weakness of the school organization generally, resulted in the boys being allowed much greater individual freedom than was even then common, or than now exists at any public school. There was no regular system of athletics. Cricket and football were only played by a small number of the boys. In play hours the bulk of them used to ramble about the country. There was no fixed school dress, and no prefect system. A single large schoolroom served for all the boys under the fifth form. For the average schoolboy the effects of this loose discipline may be doubtful; but for a boy of strong tastes and exceptional gifts it was not without its advantages. Under the elaborate machinery and the overpowering social code of the modern public school the type is fostered at the expense of the individual: with a boy like Morris the strain would have been so great that something must have snapped. Even as it was he