Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters

appealed far more to our imagination than the story of early martyrs. Action rather than contemplation is the essence of school life.

I am aware that many will disagree with this assertion. Both Martin Browne and Jack Hood made in their books a great point of religious teaching and early confirmation, but I cannot help feeling that in this respect they are exceptional; certainly if they had not been exceptional they would not have written books; religion has meant a lot to them, and they feel that it should do the same for others. It is a mistake we all make in our different spheres. The poet thinks he will reform the world by placing the poems of Shelley in the hands of trade union officials; and the small craftsman sees life redeemed by hand weaving and hand pottery. We all think that the prop that has supported us will support others. It is part of our egotism. For the many, to whom faith is not intuitive, religion needs a solid foundation of experience.

A change of spirit requires a change of setting, and I am inclined to think that this would be provided were boys to leave school at seventeen instead of nineteen.

It would not, perhaps, from the point of view of the moral question, cause a very great diminution in the actual immorality between boys of the same age and the same social position. But it certainly would improve matters. As things are at present, the boy of fifteen and a half occupies a pleasantly irresponsible position. He has left behind him the anxieties of the day room, and the responsibilities of seniority are still far distant. His peccadilloes are not taken seriously. He can rag in form and smash windows in the studies without prejudice to his future. He has imbibed the example of Prince Hal. For a while he may rollick with Falstaff at the Boar's Head. Time enough to settle down when the privileges of power draw nearer him. For a good year and a half he may make merry.

The lowering of the age limit would telescope events; it would reduce the period of revelry to a couple of months. No sooner would a boy have ceased to be a fag than he would be under the eye of authority as a candidate for responsibility. A display of rhodomontade would prejudice his future. He would play for safety; and such considerations would certainly place a check on his moral lapses. He would think twice. If he was discovered he would have no time to recover his position by subsequent good behaviour. He would be passed over in the struggle for promotion.

To a certain extent the lowering of the age limit would prevent that type of immorality that takes place between boys of the same age and same position, but only to a certain extent. There always will be such misconduct in schools; it will never be possible to stamp it out entirely, but it is possible to overrate its seriousness. Certainly the romantic friendship is more important, and it is because of the romantic friendship that I advocate so strongly the lowering of the age limit.

I have said that the romantic friendship is the natural growth of an unnatural system; but even a natural growth develops soon or late, according to the soil in which it is planted and the climate by which it is nourished. The presence of boys of 18 to 19, by their example, force this growth like a hot-house atmosphere. In a boy of eighteen the sexual impulse has become defined. He understands the implications of its symptoms. He is old enough to be married. But the boy of sixteen is not so sure of himself. In him the impulse is wavering and undetermined. He does not understand the nature of the emotions that are moving him. And he only comes to understand it through the example of elder boys. If a boy were told nothing of the existence of romantic friendships, of their technique, of the complicated moral code that allows this and denies that, if his curiosity were not continually quickened by stray references in sermons and addresses, I believe that he would not, at the age of seventeen, have realised that the friendship he felt for a smaller boy was essentially different from that which he was feeling for his contemporaries. It would be a deeper, an intenser friendship, but he would not see that it possessed a different nature. Why should he? The schoolboy has read The Hill. He expects every Verney to find a Desmond. So much has been written about the lasting friendships of school life. Every boy must have his 'special friend.' Why should he be any different from his fellows? There would be moments when he might wish to caress his friend, but he would immediately smother such a wish, feeling it to be foolish, girlish, unworthy of him. He would be too young, he would not have the intellectual independence to be able to say to himself: 'This is what I want. And what I want is natural to me. Damn anything else!' Shadowy imaginings would haunt his reveries, but they would never become defined in action.

For a boy of eighteen it is different. His impulses are strong; he knows now exactly what he wants. And he is prepared to get what he wants. He knows that the emotions he feels for a small boy are of a different nature altogether from the friendship that he feels for his contemporaries, and the fact that there are boys in the school old enough to have defined these emotions, provides a hot-house atmosphere for the development of younger boys.

To most people life comes at second hand. They learn from books, cinemas, and plays what are the appropriate emotions and the correct procedure for any given situation. The public school boy is no less conventional than his elders. He allows his inclinations to be directed into the accepted course. He is surprised, in the first place, by a delightful and unexpected emotion; but the surprise soon passes. He has formed just such another attachment as has been formed by practically every senior boy in his house. He exchanges confidences, he seeks the advice of some older boy, and follows the convention. If there were no senior boys, no example, and no convention, the first surprise of charmed bewilderment would endure. In the course of time it might very well be that out of that first romantic story would grow a deep, mutual, and lasting friendship. But such a development is hardly possible in an unnatural society where children and fully grown men are herded indiscriminately together.

The example of elder boys, moreover, not only defines the nature of half-perceived emotions; it also forces emotions that would otherwise remain a long while in bud. There are many who consider it is the blood thing to have a jeune ami; that such a relationship is the privilege of a house colour. They want to be talked about. They have themselves spoken when juniors with bated breath of supposed 'cases.' They would like to be spoken of like that themselves, to feel themselves moving in an atmosphere of conjecture and intrigue, to gather an added sense of their own importance.

Besides this itch, a natural one, to occupy the limelight by copying the customs of the great, there is the subtle influence of indirect example. In the same way that a boy who goes often to the theatre and the cinema and observes there the charming processes of love, begins to long for tenderness, and caresses, and endearments, so does the schoolboy who hears on all sides romantic confidences, find himself drawn into the glittering circle. This lure would at least be removed by the lowering of the age limit. That it would solve all the difficulties I would not for a moment maintain.

We cannot imagine a world in which men and women will not desert or betray each other; in which husbands will remain faithful and the unmarried chaste. Why should we expect school life, which is the world in little, to be so startlingly different. Parents refuse to believe that their own children are mortal: 'These things,' they say, 'may happen to our neighbour's children. They do not happen to our own.' And schoolmasters are only too anxious to reassure them. Parents have such faith in their sons that they will believe in the most superficial testimonials. They are so anxious to be deceived.

For this reason I believe that a mere statement of facts has value. There is much clamour to-day for reconstruction, and the controversialist who has not a cut and dried scheme for regenerating the world is looked on with disfavour. But on sex questions, which are after all intensely personal questions, which concern the individual in the first place and society in the second, only the superficial will dogmatise.

I cannot do better than quote from Havelock Ellis's General Preface to The Psychology of Sex:—

'A resolve slowly grew up within me,' he writes, 'one main part of my life-work should be to make clear the problem of sex. That was more than twenty years ago. Since then I can honestly say that in all that I have done that resolve has never been far from my thoughts.... Now that I have, at length, reached the time for beginning to publish my results, these results scarcely seem to me large. As a youth I had hoped to settle problems for those that came after; now I am quietly content if I do little more than state them. For even that, I now think, is much. It is, at least, the half of knowledge. In this particular field the evil of ignorance is magnified by our efforts to suppress that which can never be suppressed, though in the effort of suppression it may become perverted.'

If this is the conclusion at the end of his work and of his life, of perhaps the greatest living authority on sex, by what right does the amateur produce cheerful remedies.

In the case of the Public School it is indeed something to state the problems. There is so much ignorance to dispel; the ignorance of mothers, the ignorance of fathers who have themselves not been to a Public School, the conspiracy of silence of boys, old boys and masters. Too much and, at the same time, too little, is made of immorality. Schoolmasters assure us that its appearance is occasional, but their attitude to it is that of a doctor who suspects that his patient is suffering from a malignant disease and watches all the time for signs of it to appear. The schoolmaster is always afraid lest he may be sitting on a volcano. He encourages the athletic cult as a preventative, in the belief that the boy who is keen on games will not wish to endanger his health, and that the boy who has played football all the afternoon and has boxed between tea and lock-up will be too tired to embark on any further adventures. It does not occur to him that the boy will be equally too tired to do his prep.

Such encouragement of the athletic cult is a confession of failure. It is as though the master were to say: 'I know I cannot interest you in your work. I know that unless I look after you, you will land yourself in all manner of mischief. A man must have a god of sorts, therefore make unto yourself whatsoever manner of god you choose, and I will see that it receives a fitting reverence.'

The public school code of honour, the majority of the standards, indeed, of school life are dependent on the athletic worship, and the athletic worship is in its turn largely dependent, not so much on the moral question, as on the official attitude to the moral question. Too much energy has been devoted to the damming of trickles, while on another side of the hill the main stream has passed into the valley, laying waste the plains.

Greater honesty between boys, parents, and masters would undoubtedly achieve much. But more than a change of spirit is required. If no boy was allowed to stay on at school after the term in which he became seventeen years old, I believe that the moral question would, to a large extent, simplify itself.

CHAPTER XIII THE LEAVING AGE WITH REGARD TO ATHLETICS

But it is not only on account of the moral question that I would advocate the lowering of the age limit. Such a reform would, I believe, make its influence felt on every side of school life. It would not alter, but it would modify certain conditions. The blood system would still exist, but less acutely. The gap between the junior and senior would be small. At present a man of nineteen who has been tried for his county eleven appears to the junior as a gorgeous giant. He and his friends live in a world apart, and they know it. A good three years separates him from the anxieties and indignities of the day room. No one, save his actual contemporaries, remember him as being anything but a blood. He is, and has been, a prince among mankind. He idles through his last two years, a very splendid, a very attractive figure; but, as we have already seen, his is hardly the ideal apprenticeship for life.

If the leaving age were fixed at seventeen instead of nineteen, so proud a position would be unattainable. There would still be bloods, still elegant creatures to saunter across the courts, languidly arm in arm. But a certain refinement would be missing. The languor would be less certain of itself, it would seem to fear a sudden assault and a fierce shout of 'Jones, you young swine, what right have you to shove on side?' There is a difference between the blood of eighteen and the blood of sixteen. It is only four terms since the blood of sixteen was suffering the last exaction of the law. He remembers vividly being beaten for ragging in the dormitories; it is not so long since he was a fag. If we were suddenly transplanted on a magic carpet into the luxury of an Eastern court we should stand for some time in dazed bewilderment, marvelling at what had happened to us, wondering who were these comely Ethiopians that prostrated themselves before us. For quite five minutes we should lack the courage to give an order. The blood of sixteen feels like this; can he have achieved so swiftly his ambition? It is only yesterday that he was trembling in the presence of the great. By the time he has recovered from his bewilderment and is preparing to exert his authority his year of office is at an end.

Not only, moreover, is the sixteen year old blood unable to hold so exalted an opinion of his own importance, but his immediate juniors refuse to recognise him as the gilded figure of romance. The men on the Fifth Form table remember when the head of the house helped them to wreck Bennett's study. They cannot feel him to be so vastly superior to themselves. It is different for the blood of eighteen. He has passed slowly through many circles to the dignity of an Olympian. He has served his period of probation. He was not a colt's cap one season and the next a colour. He took a year to pass from house cap to seconds, and another year from seconds to firsts. He discovered himself gradually. He rose slowly to his greatness. By the time he has reached his last year the days of conflict are infinitely remote. He can hardly believe it possible that he was ever caned. He is, in fact, a great deal too old for a Public School. And as things are now it is impossible for any, save the exceptional boy, to reach a position of authority till he is eighteen, or at least seventeen.

A great many boys do undoubtedly leave between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, but by doing so they lose the most valuable lessons they should learn at school. A boy who leaves before he has been a house prefect fails to put the coping stone to his education. The responsibilities of prefectship are an invaluable experience. And when the house master begs the parent to let 'Arthur stop on another year,' the parent naturally gives way. And it is, of course, always the wrong type of person who stays on that extra year. It is the clever, the brilliant, the athletic boy, the boy who already stands out above his contemporaries and in the course of the next year will be even more prominent, that is encouraged to remain. It would not matter if the dull boy stayed on another year. His natural talents would not be sufficient to lift him to the rarefied atmosphere of Olympus. It is the second eleven colour who is urged to stay on to get his firsts. The fast bowler who is asked to captain the side next year, the exhibitioner who hopes that another year's work will win him a scholarship at Balliol. The great become more great, and, as their undistinguished contemporaries fall out of the race, the gap between the prefect and the fag grows more pronounced. The intermediate steps are few and dimly seen. It is not surprising that the blood system should gloriously flourish. It would not so flourish were the leaving age to be fixed at seventeen. We have the proof of this in the knowledge of what happened during the war, when the big men left suddenly in August, 1914, when boys of sixteen sat at the Sixth Form table, and when no one stayed on at school after his eighteenth birthday.

War conditions were, of course, abnormal. It was inevitable that at such a time the rewards of school life should lose their value. It was impossible to feel the old excitement about the result of a house match when the morning paper had brought with it the story of Neuve Chapelle. The winning of cups and the gaining of colours ceased to be an end in themselves. For the boy who was prevented by lack of years from joining the army in 1914 school life became a period of probation, of marking time. Life in its fullest sense was waiting for him on the other side; no prefect ever looked forward to Oxford more eagerly than those of us who were still at school in 1915 looked forward to the day when we should join the army. Our imagination was quickened by the stories told us by old boys returning from depôts and from the front. Was it possible that Smith, who had played with us only eight months earlier in the Two Cock, should be in charge of a company in the front line trenches? We fretted at our tether; our eyes were fixed on the future. We scorned the prizes that lay to our hand. We began to reconstruct our scale of values: it was not only the giants of the football field who were winning honours for themselves and for the school in France. Queer, insignificant fellows who had never risen above the Upper Fourth, and had never been in the running for a house cap, came home on leave with the blue and white riband of the military cross. We began to realise that it was not only the blood that was entitled to our respect. The blood system received a rude shock in August, 1914. It will never, unless we become involved in social revolution, receive such another. I believe, however, that it would be considerably modified were the leaving age to be altered.

There would be also less hooliganism and less bullying. The third yearer would no longer be in a position of reckless freedom. Studies would still be stripped, scholars would still be ragged, but the process would be compressed. The swash-buckling element would find itself sooner in authority. The scholar would reach sooner the immunity of the Sixth. And the prefect would be no less capable of keeping order. For, after all, the prefect owes his power as much to the system that is behind him as to himself.

But perhaps the greatest difference that the change would effect would be in the boy's attitude to his own life. Six years is a very long time to be in one place. I remember at the end of my first year overhearing a conversation between the barber and a boy who was leaving the next day.

'Well, Mr. Meredith,' the barber was saying, 'I suppose this is the last time I shall cut your hair. I have cut it a good many times.'

'I have been in this town,' said Meredith, 'for ten years: five years at the prep, and five years at the school. I'm jolly well sick of it.'

It is certainly a mistake to send a boy to the prep. of the school to which he will one day go. Ten years is too long. But six is too long, too—at that age.

It is not easy for any one under thirty to picture himself in six years' time. We look back and remember ourselves six years ago in the discomfort and disquiet of khaki. What a lot has happened since then. Who can tell what the next six years may hold? Very few men under thirty can look far ahead, and the new boy at a Public School who can see his life mapped out for six years naturally does not look beyond them. He hardly realises that there is a world outside. He will have to travel so far before he reaches it. He comes to consider his Public School not as a prelude, but as the whole sphere in which his personality has to move. Certain prizes and certain honours await him. He does not pause to think whether those prizes and those honours will be of much or little service to him after he has put the cloistered world behind him. Not only is he incapable of viewing his life under the hard light of eternity, he is incapable of viewing it under the light of the fifty odd years of traffic that wait for him among phenomena. He accepts unquestioningly the standards and values of his school. He does not feel that he is preparing for a contest. That phase of endeavour belonged to his 'prep.' He has started the race.

There is a big difference between four years and six. It is a wall over which even the fag can peer on tiptoe. The passage of ambitions and loyalties and jealousies is much more swift. It is possible to consider four years as a prelude; and as soon as public school life is regarded as a prelude the scale of values becomes changed. The boy begins to wonder whether he is doing his best to fit himself for after life. He will cease to be contented with the honours that come to him on the way. Because his school is a fixed institution, because the scope of his masters is fixed within its walls, there is a tendency to regard him as an inhabitant and not a sojourner there. That is what the schoolboy should never be allowed to forget—that he is passing through one phase of his life into another; it is because he has forgotten that that he so often pauses bewildered and irresolute on the threshold of life.

CHAPTER XIV CONCLUSION

Were the moral question to be tackled sensibly, and were the reduction of the age limit to modify the 'blood' system, and insist upon the fact that school life is only a prelude, I believe that athletics would occupy their proper place in the life of the school. The social force of religion depends, to a large extent, on the appreciation of the importance of what will follow the 'here and now.' During the war, when the future was insecure, and no one could see anything certainly beyond the limits of a fortnight's leave, the country plunged recklessly in search of pleasure. No one looked ahead. No one paused to consider what would be the harvest of their sowing.

The eyes of the preparatory school boy are fixed upon the future. He knows that the successes and failures of the moment are unimportant. He knows that a strenuous contest lies in wait for him. In consequence there is at a Preparatory School little of the fanatical devotion that colours the fabric of public school life. I remember a house master once saying that it was impossible for a member of a house side to do much work while the house matches were in progress. And, as the house matches covered a period of six weeks, this was a pretty generous allowance. At the same time the house master only spoke the truth: it was practically impossible to do much work during the house matches term; we could think of little else. Every evening we would discuss at considerable length the afternoon's punt-about and the morrow's match. We would devise schemes for the better outwitting of our opponents. We would discuss the weakness and strength of individual players. And the majority of masters, certainly of house masters, shared this fervour. It is true that a certain house master, when presented with the excuse for an indifferent prose that house matches were too exciting, remarked: 'I don't know whom they excite, they don't excite me.' But this assertion was belied by his subsequent behaviour on the touchline. During house matches there is an educational moratorium. In peace time the energies and interests of a nation are directed into a thousand different channels, but in war time every interest is secondary to that of war. And, while house matches are in progress, the atmosphere of a house is not unlike that of a nation that is at war. Individual members may have their private troubles, but they realise that these troubles are of small account at such a time. And, though it is no doubt admirable for the individual to feel himself of less importance than the community, it will hardly be conceded that self-negation in such a cause is likely to prove of any very permanent value to him.

Now there are those who will urge that boy nature cannot be altered, that it is natural for a boy to worship games, and that you cannot expect him to be otherwise. But that I shall never believe is so. For myself, I know that I play cricket and football as keenly as I did seven years ago, that I spend a great many evenings with a Wisden in my hands; but that I manage to get through a fair amount of work between each January and December. That is not in itself a fair argument. One cannot arraign the enthusiasms of sixteen before the enthusiasms of twenty-three any more than one can arraign the enthusiasms of twenty-three before those of forty. There is no more fallacious argument than the 'when you have reached my age, young man.' At different stages of our life we are vexed by different problems. At twenty-three our sexual life is of vast importance; it stretches before us, a wide field for courage, enterprise, adventure. In the man of forty, curiosity has been satisfied. He has settled many of the problems that perplexed him when he was a young man. And he says: 'My dear fellow, all this that is worrying you does not really matter.' But he is wrong. It does matter to a young man of twenty. And nothing is trivial that has ever exercised deeply the human spirit.

In a world that is in flux the permanence or impermanence of any emotion is of less matter than its intensity while it lasts. Sooner or later everything must desert us. Is the brain a useless possession because it will one day soften. Are teeth less efficacious now because one day they will decay. Is a young man of twenty going to listen to the impotent man of sixty who mutters: 'Young man, the charms of woman are a snare and an illusion. When you have reached my age you will be no longer moved by them.' For that is where the 'when you are my age, young man,' argument finally lands us. And it is not fair to say to a boy of seventeen: 'This mad excitement about games is absurd. In six years even you will have outgrown it.' It is for us to decide whether this mad excitement is the natural expression of a boy's temperament, or whether it is the peculiar growth of a peculiar environment.

I will take as an example Sandhurst as it was in the autumn of 1916. It was composed almost entirely of boys straight from the Public Schools, and I should imagine that the average age of a company was about eighteen, the age, that is to say, at which most of them would have been about to start on their last year. They brought with them the standards of public school life. One would have expected them to establish their standards at Sandhurst. They did nothing of the sort. There was nothing that bore the least approach to a blood system. There were seniors and juniors, that was all. There was no fierce cult of athleticism. The G.C. who scored tries in company matches was not granted a general permission to drive his bayonet through college furniture. In the daily life games played a prominent part. Indeed, the under officer whose company did not make use of the ground allotted to it would have had to face an unpleasant half-hour with the commandant. But games never became the business of life. They were played for their own sake. They were untouched by professionalism. If a three-quarter missed a pass five yards from the line he did not bury himself in a far corner of the anteroom, apart from the gaiety of his companions. The average company side played just as keenly as a house fifteen at school. While we were on the field we were as desperately anxious to win. But we did not spend the morning in a state of nervous irritation, nor did the issue of the contests drive us to deep despondency, or to hysterical elation. A certain intensity had passed. Yet I do not think that ever before had I derived such pleasure from the actual playing of the game as I did at Sandhurst.

One would not, of course, hold up a military institution as the model for an educational system. But, from the point of view of athletics, the Sandhurst that I knew in the winter of 1916 and the spring of 1917 possessed all the merits and none of the faults that one associates with the average Public School. And yet that Sandhurst was composed of the same boys that a few months earlier had, at their Public Schools, rigidly observed the exacting ritual of the great god of sport.

Reasons for this change are not difficult to find, and it may be noticed that they are in line with the improvements suggested in an earlier chapter. There is no blood system, because there is little disparity of age between the G.C.'s. Juniors belong to a lower caste than the seniors, but they inhabit that lower world without worrying much about what is happening in the superior world. Contact between the two is not established. There is a hard dividing line. A junior may not sit on a certain side of the anteroom. There is no social fluidity. One is one thing or the other. Athletic worship in school was due largely, I suggested, to the absence of any other focus for a boy's enthusiasm. At Sandhurst several such focuses were provided. To begin with, the work was interesting. The morning was not a mere succession of tiresome hours relieved by a quarter of an hour's break. The G.C. did not listen to lectures and tactics with the listless condescension that he had paid formerly to the Greek syntax; he realised that the knowledge of the subjects he was studying would be of practical value to him at a later date. He was anxious to be a good officer. He was, therefore, interested in his work. He was also at Sandhurst for a very little while. He regarded Sandhurst quite definitely as the anteroom to a career; he never imagined it to be anything else. In a few months he would have joined his regiment. The honours he won at Sandhurst would be of little value in themselves, and were only worth the gaining in as far as they would enhance the reputation which he would take with him to his regiment. A Sandhurst cadet was always looking beyond the present.

Nor did the officers in charge of companies feel any compunction to prescribe athleticism as an antidote to immorality. In the first place, they were not responsible for the G.C.'s moral welfare, nor was there, indeed, any occasion for alarm. The amount of immoral conduct between G.C.'s, if there was any, must have been extremely small. Such conduct is essentially faute de mieux: women were abundantly available for those who wanted them. And in a town such as Camberley there were endless opportunities for innocent romance.

The three main causes for athleticism were removed, and in consequence there was no athleticism. Now it is obviously impossible for all these conditions to be introduced into a Public School. There must be a disparity of age, schoolmasters must feel some anxiety about the morals of the boys that are to be entrusted to them. But, if we can show that the complete removal of certain conditions of public school life can entirely remove certain evils, we can only assume that the modification of these conditions would cause considerable improvement. The smaller the disparity of age between the eldest and the youngest boy, the less intense will be the blood system. The shorter the period that a boy spends at school, the less will be the tendency to regard school life as the complete compass of his life. The supply of another focus for a boy's enthusiasm will diminish the strength of his athletic ardour. The greater the honesty in tackling the moral question, the less will masters feel themselves forced to recommend athleticism as an antidote to immorality. And these changes are, I believe, possible without altering appreciably the principle of public school education. The supply of other focuses may, at first glance, seem a highly difficult job. It may, indeed, be advanced that were there another focus, athleticism could not exist in its present state, and that there would be no need for a reduction of the age limit. But I am inclined to think that it would be hardly possible to run any school which contained boys of thirteen and boys of nineteen and not have a blood system and an athletic worship. The forces of a natural inclination are too strongly entrenched behind the barricade of six years. The masters do not stand a fair chance. But the weakening of one force means the strengthening of another. A lowering of the barricade by a couple of years would give the other side a chance of contending equally. The moment a boy realised that the prizes of school life had only a temporary value, he would question his blind devotion to the religion of athleticism. He would wonder whether other things were not worth while. His allegiance would be divided.

But the passing of regulations cannot in themselves effect a reformation. They can be of great assistance; they can support and they can protect. They cannot build. And, in the study of public school life, we have to return in the end to the point from which we started. Boys and parents and schoolmasters must meet on a common ground and discuss their mutual welfare. They can do nothing till they are honest with each other, till they face the facts together. When they had once done that they would not find the road hopelessly barricaded. The solutions that I have, from time to time, suggested in these chapters, would, I believe, prove beneficial. But it is as a statement of facts, an analysis of certain conditions, tendencies, and lines of thought, that I would chiefly submit this book to the consideration of parents and schoolmasters and those others who are interested in these questions. For nothing can be done till the conspiracy of silence, the policy of evasion and self-deception, the diplomacy of the merchant and his goods is broken down, till, that is to say, parents and schoolmasters meet on the common ground of co-operation, till they can look each other in the face and say: 'Things are so, and it is for us to find a remedy.'

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A God's-Eye view of a village. This book is unique in English literature both in conception and treatment. The author presents a whole community to the reader, taking for his subject our largest social unit—an English village—where everybody knows everything about every one. He has taken a typical village during one day of the war and given a camera obscura presentment of the multitudinous intrigues, ambitions, desires, disputes, relationships, and interests which thread its fabric so closely. There is no hero or heroine, for the author presents some hundreds of characters, each all important to himself. These speak their own thoughts, throw startling sidelights on their neighbours; and from the whole, a picture of a village community takes definite shape. The author has snapped his village at one instant on one day, so that there is no 'action.' The village is frozen motionless whilst the reader inspects each inhabitant. There is no sentimentalism, no 'kailyard' gloss; the villagers expressing themselves with immense force from the Earl to the mole-catcher. Mr Gilbert has done intensely for the English countryside what Balzac did for his nation on a great scale. Not only is each of the great array of characters set forth vividly, but the larger problems of the countryside are illuminated from various angles. A map of the village shows every cottage, some fifty genealogical trees explain the relationships of the villagers, and a 'Who's Who' gives full information about each inhabitant. The author has taken three years to write this book, and it is the fruit of a life-time's close observation. All who were born in the country or have any interest in rural life and problems must be interested in Old England.

The Carpenter and His Kingdom   Dr ALEXANDER IRVINE

Crown 8vo, Cloth, 7/6 net

Dr Irvine has already secured a very high place in the affections of the people of this country through his books, My Lady of the Chimney Corner and The Souls of Poor Folk. The Carpenter and His Kingdom, as the name denotes, is a Life of Christ, a re-interpretation of His life as seen by a very simple yet very subtle, very human yet very wise idealist and Christian. No writer on social tendencies after the war has failed to point out the great loss of prestige suffered by the Churches. Speaking broadly, they are regarded with a disinterested tolerance almost amounting to contempt by the great majority of people, and this attitude has as its general effect a marked decrease in 'belief' in Christianity. Dr Irvine's book may prove a very real antidote to that progressive agnosticism, for he still believes that the Life of Christ is the greatest example mankind has ever been given, and that the influence of His message is vastly greater than that of any other single influence in history. But to show that he has to draw a new picture of Christ emphasising His Humanity as well as His Divinity, and make His teaching intelligible to a Society still hardly approaching convalescence after a prolonged and virulent disease. It is an original, beautiful, and timely book.

A London Mosaic   W. L. GEORGE

Small Crown 4to, Cloth 15/- net.

Illustrations by P. Forbes-Robertson

A series of brilliant satirical sketches of London places and London people by one of the most popular novelists of the day. Mr George is always interesting and his point of view original and challenging. He knows London intimately and loves her well, but his affection does not blunt his critical sense.

To go with him to the Café Royal and listen as he points out and discusses the great ones sitting therein; to follow him on his pilgrimage 'In Search of Vice'; to accompany him to theatre or music hall, are most amusing and instructive experiences which no lover of London should miss. Mr Philippe Forbes-Robertson's illustrations perfectly interpret the mood of the book.

South with Scott   Capt. E. R. G. R. EVANS

C.B., D.S.O., R.N.

Demy 8vo, Cloth, 10/6 net

With photogravure portrait of Captain Evans

Captain Evans was second in command of the British Antarctic expedition commanded by Captain Scott, and took over Captain Scott's position as leader after his death. It will be remembered that, during the war, Captain Evans was in command of H.M.S. Broke, which, together with H.M.S. Swift, engaged six German destroyers, sinking two and torpedoing a third. It is an interesting, intimate, racy, and absorbing account of the expedition compressed into a comparatively small compass, and fully brings out the intense difficulties the expedition had to face, the heroism displayed by every member of the party, and the magnificent scientific results obtained.

Labour: The Giant with the Feet of Clay   SHAW DESMOND

Demy 8vo, Cloth, 10/6 net

Mr Shaw Desmond is very well known as a versatile writer and as a great champion of the Labour Cause. His book, therefore, is of singular interest at the present time. It is a critical and sympathetic analysis of the Labour Movement from the inside, by a man who, after being a member of the Labour Party for fourteen years, is frankly disillusioned. In what amounts to a sweeping but reasoned indictment, the writer shows the 'feet of clay' of the Labour Movement, and claims that though outwardly united the movement is split from crown to heel by fundamentally opposed ideals, tactics, and objectives, that it might collapse at any moment, and that such 'success' as has been obtained has been purchased at the price of principle. In so doing he gives many vivid and revealing portraits of great Labour figures of the last generation, from Keir Hardie to Rosa Luxemburg, 'the Red Tigress.' The book is not merely destructive, the latter portion is given over to a constructive examination of the problems facing democracy with a very interesting foreshadowing of what the writer calls 'The New Democracy' or 'The Spiritual Democracy.' He shows not only how Labour may set its house in order but how the House of Society itself may be saved from that 'unrest' which is slowly destroying it. Mr Desmond's writing is at once stimulating and suggestive, instructive and illuminating, and will certainly be widely discussed.

The Island of Youth   EDWARD SHANKS

Author of The Queen of China, The People of the Ruins, etc.

Small Crown 8vo, Cloth, 5/- net

The Island of Youth is the fourth volume of verse by a poet whose powers have been steadily maturing. Two years ago Mr Shanks's The Queen of China won the Hawthornden Prize, and the present volume contains all the poems he has since written. It contains one long poem, a beautiful idyll in blank verse, and a number of short poems. Mr Shanks's language is refreshingly pure and his rhythm refreshingly musical, in an age which has made many attempts to glorify gibberish and raucous discord. He is, as all good poets must be, at once original and in the stream of national tradition, and in no respect more traditional than in his affection for and knowledge of the English landscape which has breathed its fragrance into so much of our great poetry in all ages. Those who know his previous books, or the selections from them in Georgian Poetry, do not need to be told this, and those unacquainted with Mr Shanks's previous work can be most emphatically assured that they will not be disappointed in The Island of Youth. It is one of those books familiarity with which breeds an ever deepening admiration and love.

Ibsen and His Creation   JANKO LAVRIN

Crown 8vo, Cloth, 7/6 net

This is a further contribution to 'psycho-criticism' by Mr Janko Lavrin, whose able study of Dostoevsky was so favourably received. His aim is to present a new and original solution of the central problem of Ibsen, and to show how Ibsen's individual psychological conflict is worked out in his plays.

Mr Lavrin reveals in a new light the great significance of Ibsen as a representative of modern consciousness, and in so doing illuminates not only Ibsen's dilemma but also our own.

Last Studies in Criminology   H. B. IRVING

Demy 8vo, Cloth, 15/- net.

With photogravure portrait of H. B. Irving

With the death of H. B. Irving one of the most remarkable figures of the English stage disappeared, for not only was he an actor of great merit, but a man of very versatile mental attainments. His bent was always towards criminological study, and his various studies in crime and criminals are familiar to many readers. These, the last of his essays, will be read with great attention. They are mainly studies of persons accused but not convicted of crime, men such as Adolph Beck; and the element of uncertainty that attaches to so many of these cases gives them an added point of interest for so subtle and penetrating a mind as that of the late Mr H. B. Irving.

From Waterloo to the Marne   COUNT PIETRO ORSI

Small Crown 4to, Cloth, 15/- net

This is a book which should be read by all those who wish to arrive at an accurate knowledge of the causes and condition which led up to and provoked the Great World War of 1914-1918, and are responsible for the world unrest of to-day. The author, the well-known Italian Professor of International History, describes in this book, clearly and logically, the rise, the ebb and flow of the international democratic spirit which floods the world of to-day. He shows the nexus which unites all races and nations of the world into one coherent whole, and traces with admirable clarity the birth, life, and struggles of that desire for popular liberty which first penetrated into every corner of Europe with the armies of the great Napoleon. It is a compendium of the history of each country of the world, and should be read by each student who not only wishes to familiarise himself with the history of the last century of his own country, but desires also to gain a solid acquaintance of that of the remaining countries of the globe. The arrangement of the book is excellent and original; the libraries of every nation have been ransacked for its compilation, and the work, without being in the least degree scrappy, gives all the salient points of universal history. This historical encyclopedia should be in the hands of every thinking man.

The Riddle of the Rhine   VICTOR LEFEBURE

Demy 8vo, 10/6 net

This book establishes beyond any shadow of doubt the importance of chemical warfare in the recent war and its supreme significance for the future. It shows, in addition, the intimate connection between the new war method and chemical, scientific, and industrial development. What chemical steps must be taken for national safety in an armed or disarmed world? What international disarmament measures can be taken in this field? It proves beyond refutation that if the second question remains unanswered all other disarmament measures are farcical. These general questions, although of enormous importance, were, however, all introduced by the menace and critical war activities of the German organic chemical or dye combine. This menace still exists, and can only be removed by a redistribution of the organic chemical forces of the world.

A History of English Furniture   PERCY MACQUOID, R.I.

With plates in colour after Shirley Slocombe, and numerous illustrations selected and arranged by the author; in four volumes:

£21 net per set, or £5 5s. net per volume.

Size, 15 in. 11 in.; bound in red buckram, gilt.

With a new index.

The subject has been divided into four periods, the first dating from 1500 to 1660, comprising furniture that can be attributed to the Renaissance, and its evolution from the Gothic. The second from 1660 to 1720, when the change is varied by the Restoration and Dutch influence, followed by a distinctly assertive English spirit. The third period covers the introduction from France of fresh ideas in design, clearly marking another change, lasting from 1720 to 1770. The fourth, 1770-1820, which was inspired by an affectation for all things classical. While the book only purports to deal with English furniture, it is obvious that reference is freely made to foreign styles in order to keep the matter in perspective.

Illustrated Prospectus will be sent on application.