from their parents and plunged into a world of perfect strangers.
Everything is done to make them at ease and comfortable in their new
surroundings; the headmaster is kindness itself, the matron beams on
them with smiles and fortifies them with encouragement; but just at
first the wrench for the little fellows is great. In a day or two,
however, they will begin to acclimatise themselves; the strangeness
will begin to wear off; and having borne up bravely against their
first sense of loneliness in the midst of a crowd they will gradually
become parts of the machine to the making of which many gentle and
sympathising hands for years past have contributed.

"Schools are not what they were," says one of my friends. "There is
no bullying nowadays and little roughness of any kind. Masters are
not looked upon as the natural enemies of boys. Corporal punishment,
except for the gravest offences, is abolished. Whereas, formerly,
little boys were at once sucked into the vortex of a Public School,
there are now Preparatory Schools, where Tommie and Dickie and Harry,
aged from nine to ten, learn the business of Public Schooling in
a manner suited to their age and capacity. When we were boys," he
continues, "these admirable buffer states were so few that they might
almost be said not to exist at all; they now flourish everywhere. The
path of the little boy is thus made easier for him."

"But," I said, "is a little boy, then, never brought to a sense of
his unimportance by being physically, if not morally, kicked? Is he to
pass his life in a condition of Sybaritic softness?"

"You need not," he said, "worry about that. Softness makes no appeal
to the average English boy."