boys loafed. Then it came home to school authorities that there was
a good deal of danger in the method; that lack of employment was an
undesirable thing. Thereupon work was increased, and, at the same
time, the masters laid hands upon athletics and organised them.
Side by side with this came a great increase of wealth and leisure
in England, and there sprang up that astonishing and disproportionate
interest in athletic matters, which is nowadays a real problem for
all sensible men. But the result of it all has been that there has
grown up a stereotyped code among the boys as to what is the right
thing to do. They are far less wilful and undisciplined than they
used to be; they submit to work, as a necessary evil, far more
cheerfully than they used to do; and they base their ideas of social
success entirely on athletics. And no wonder! They find plenty of
masters who are just as serious about games as they are themselves;
who spend all their spare time in looking on at games, and discuss
the athletic prospects of particular boys in a tone of perfectly
unaffected seriousness. The only two regions which masters have not
organised are the intellectual and moral regions. The first has been
tacitly and inevitably extruded. A good deal more work is required
from the boys, and unless a boy's ability happens to be of a
definite academical order--in which case he is well looked
after--there is no loop-hole through which intellectual interest can
creep in. A boy's time is so much occupied by definite work and
definite games that there is neither leisure nor, indeed, vigour
left to follow his own pursuits. Life is lived so much more in
public that it becomes increasingly difficult for SETS to exist;
small associations of boys with literary tastes used to do a good
deal in the direction of fostering the germs of intellectual life;
the net result is, that there is now far less interest abroad in
intellectual things, and such interests as do exist, exist in a