ious question as between Catholics and Protestants has
no essential connection with the subject. A Protestant school might, and
Grimstone's did, have tale-bearers; possibly a Catholic school might
exist without parental surveillance. That system is called by its foes a
"police," by its friends a "paternal" system. But fathers don't exercise
the "paternal" system themselves in this country, and we may take it for
granted that, while English society and religion are as they are,
surveillance at our large schools will be impossible. If any one regrets
this, let him read the descriptions of French schools and schooldays, in
Balzac's _Louis Lambert_, in the "Memoirs" of M. Maxime du Camp, in any
book where a Frenchman speaks his mind about his youth. He will find
spying (of course) among the ushers, contempt and hatred on the side of
the boys, unwholesome and cruel punishments, a total lack of healthy
exercise; and he will hear of holidays spent in premature excursions into
forbidden and shady quarters of the town.

No doubt the best security against bullying is in constant occupation.
There can hardly (in spite of Master George Osborne's experience in
"Vanity Fair") be much bullying in an open cricket-field. Big boys, too,
with good hearts, should not only stop bullying when they come across it,
but make it their business to find out where it exists. Exist it will,
more or less, despite all precautions, while boys are boys--that is, are
passing through a modified form of the savage state.

There is a curious fact in the boyish character which seems, at first
sight, to make good the opinion that private education, at home, is the
true method. Before they go out into school life, many little fellows of
nine, or so, are extremely original, imaginative, and almost poetical.
They are fond of books, fond of nature, and, if you can win their
confidence, will tell you all sorts of pretty thoughts and fancies which
lie about them in their infancy. I have known a little boy who liked to
lie on the grass and to people the alleys and glades of that miniature
forest with fairies and dwarfs, whom he seemed actually to see in a kind
of vision. But he went to school, he instantly won the hundred yards
race for boys under twelve, and he came back a young barbarian,
interested in "the theory of touch" (at football), curious in the art of
bowling, and no more capable than you or I of seeing fairies in a green
meadow. He was caught