different from ours. You have the mixed day school such as largely
obtains in Scotland, but which does not exist, at least for the upper
classes, in England. You have private boarding-schools, which with us
are called preparatory schools, as they form the vestibule to the public
school. And you have, lastly, a few large public schools somewhat on the
model of Eton and Harrow.

Let us begin with the boarding-school. I do not intend for one moment to
deny the advantages of our great English public schools. They are
excellent for discipline and the formation of strong character,
especially for a ruling race like ours; and their very numerical
strength and importance command a splendid set of men as masters. But
both public and private boarding-schools labor under one great
disadvantage: they remove a boy from all family influence and violate
the order of our life, which can never be violated with impunity. Boys
and girls are sent into the world in pretty equal proportions, and we
were never intended to pile a lot of boys together without girls and
largely without any feminine influence whatever. To do so is to insure
moral disorder whether in our schools or yours. To quote from an
excellent paper of Dr. Butler's: "In giving us sisters," says one of the
Hares in _Guesses at Truth_, "God gave us the best moral antiseptic,"
and it is their absence more than anything else that has produced the
moral problems which our boarding-schools present. To be absent from
sisters for the greater part of the year, at an age when their
companionship is perhaps the most eloquent of silent appeals to purity,
is undoubtedly one of the greatest evils to be set against the blessings
of our public schools.[11]

For my own part, I can only say that the one thing which has filled me
at times with the darkness of despair has not been the facts about our