abound--is surely not a very useful and valuable severity in
education. It is not the life in miniature which he is to lead
hereafter, nor does it bear any relation to it; he will never again be
subjected to so much insolence and caprice; nor ever, in all human
probability, called upon to make so many sacrifices. The servile
obedience which it teaches might be useful to a menial domestic; or
the habit of enterprise which it encourages prove of importance to a
military partisan; but we cannot see what bearing it has upon the
calm, regular, civil life, which the sons of gentlemen, destined to
opulent idleness, or to any of the more learned professions, are
destined to lead. Such a system makes many boys very miserable; and
produces those bad effects upon the temper and disposition which
boyish suffering always does produce. But what good it does, we are
much at a loss to conceive. Reasonable obedience is extremely useful
in forming the disposition. Submission to tyranny lays the foundation
of hatred, suspicion, cunning, and a variety of odious passions....

"The wretchedness of school tyranny is trifling enough to a man who
only contemplates it, in ease of body and tranquillity of mind,
through the medium of twenty intervening years; but it is quite as
real, and quite as acute, while it lasts, as any of the sufferings of
mature life: and the utility of these sufferings, or the price paid in
compensation for them, should be clearly made out to a conscientious
parent before he consents to expose his children to them."

Lady Holland tells us that in old age her father "used to shudder at the
recollections of Winchester," and represented the system prevailing there
in his youth as composed of "abuse, neglect, and vice." And, speaking of
the experience of lower boys at Public Schools in general, he described it
as "an intense system of tyranny, of which the English are very fond, and