e big fifth-form boys, who were a sporting and drinking
set, soon began to usurp power, and to fag the little boys as if they
were praepostors, and to bully and oppress any who showed signs of
resistance. The bigger sort of sixth-form boys just described soon made
common cause with the fifth, while the smaller sort, hampered by their
colleagues' desertion to the enemy, could not make head against them. So
the fags were without their lawful masters and protectors, and ridden
over rough-shod by a set of boys whom they were not bound to obey, and
whose only right over them stood in their bodily powers; and, as old
Brooke had prophesied, the house by degrees broke up into small sets and
parties, and lost the strong feeling of fellowship which he set so much
store by, and with it much of the prowess in games and the lead in all
school matters which he had done so much to keep up.

In no place in the world has individual character more weight than at a
public school. Remember this, I beseech you, all you boys who are
getting into the upper forms. Now is the time in all your lives probably
when you may have more wide influence for good or evil on the society
you live in than you ever can have again. Quit yourselves like men,
then; speak up, and strike out if necessary for whatsoever is true, and
manly, and lovely, and of good report; never try to be popular, but only
to do your duty and help others to do theirs, and you may leave the tone
of feeling in the school higher than you found it, and so be doing good,
which no living soul can measure, to generations of your countrymen yet
unborn. For boys follow one another in herds like sheep, for good or
evil; they hate thinking, and have rarely any settled principles. Every
school, indeed, has its own traditionary standard of right and wrong,
which cannot be transgressed with impunity, marking certain things as
low and blackguard, and certain others as lawful and right. This
standard is ever varying, though it changes only slowly, and little by
little; and, subject only to such standard, it is the leading boys for
the time being who give the tone to all the rest, and make the School
either a noble institution for the training of Christian Englishmen, or
a place where a young boy will get more evil than he would if he were
turned out to make his way in London streets, or anything between these
two extremes.

The change for the worse in the School-house, however, didn't press very
h