bodily effort in the playground; that the school matches assume an altogether undue value in our own eyes, and consequently in the eyes of our pupils. If it be so, it is an unfortunate and self-defeating oversight in our organisation; but I do not believe it to be a true bill at all. That we do consider that a good school eleven and a good school spirit in all our games are essentials of good and healthy school life we would do more than admit: we should be the first to assert it. To prove that our efforts to secure this are not occasionally overstrained would be a thankless task, but that the zeal for games which induces grown men and first-class athletes to devote hour after hour and day after day to the eager and intelligent instruction of small boys is either waste of time or in any way to be blamed is a difficult thing to believe. By it the small boy learns, as those who have not seen it would marvel to see, the free use of shoulder and arm and leg and eye, and above all the mysteries of "timing and of instructive co-operation, which go far on the road not only of physical but of moral education. It is apart from the purposes of this article to discuss this branch of physical training at length, nor do I at all assert that the athletic sense of the age is not overburdened; but it would be a grave omission were no mention to be made of this greatest and essentially English branch of the subject. I believe myself that the zeal for games now to be seen in English schools is wholly good. In the pressure of the intellectual side of school life is to be found the greatest safeguard against games becoming to the majority the paramount interest. And if this be in reality a danger, is it for a moment to be weighed against the evils of loafing which that insidious suggestion of more leisure too frequently covers?

Such are in outline the principal methods of physical training in preparatory schools. In a minor degree under this heading should be classed the training of hand and eye in the carpentry class, and in the various branches of natural history open to small boys at school. When a boy myself I attended at the village carpenter's shop at stated times during the holidays to be taught "to carpenter." I did, I believe, achieve one or two Oxford picture frames and a dovetailed box, but I should be sorry to say now how much of either was done by myself and how much by my instructor. Many years ago I saw a school carpenter's shop conducted on the same principles; many and beautiful frames and brackets and cupboards were turned out during the term's course and were exhibited doubtless as "my work" during the holidays; but I happened to pay my visit at an off time shortly before the holidays, and came upon my friend the carpenter just "tidying up' the young gents work," and I thought little of the carpenter's shop as an educational medium; but I have seen that it can be bettered. I have watched a conscientious instructor, of the class employed in the technical classes under the County Council, from week to week taking a clumsy-handed class of ten or a dozen awkward-fingered boys up from the first mysteries of sawing straight and planing true, to the higher intricacies of mortising and dovetailing, and

342 Health and Physical Training in Preparatory Schools.

above all of setting out work, and to a divine discontent with an unfinished or badly-turned-out job, and I have seen that the carpenter's shop is one of the best and most valuable of the school departments. The two things that are absolutely necessary for success are a really conscientious trained instructor who will not touch the work himself, and will insist on all work being subject to his scrutiny and criticism, before being pronounced finished.

There is much to be said of the training in observation and quickness of eye to be learned during country walks, and in the collection of birds' eggs or butterflies, or wild flowers, and yet I hardly think this can be dignified by the title of physical training. In the first place, though interest in such pursuits should be; and is always encouraged, instruction in them is never, I think, compulsory and rarely systematically given, and in the second place it is almost impossible to assign any definite place or time in the school curriculum to them. They are therefore to be noted only as among the bye-paths of training proper. In the same category may perhaps be placed the long paper chases and runs which take place in many schools. Of these my experience has been unfortunate. They were probably ill-organised, and were certainly found to be fatiguing, so that I am possibly inclined to underrate their value.

In conclusion I would say that in the preceding pages I seem to myself to have touched on many of the most trivial and perhaps rudimentary parts of a preparatory schoolmaster's work. To others much of what I have written may have come by intuition. By some like myself it has been bought by experience. For neither of these classes should I have presumed to categorise the elements of their profession; but if to those outside the profession, whether the public which has sons to educate, or others who are interested in secondary education, I have succeeded in conveying the notion that there is more for a schoolmaster to do than, as was said to me this very afternoon, "make money for a certain number of years, and then sit down and enjoy it," then at least I shall claim to have in part, fulfilled that which I was asked to perform. C. T. WICKHAM.

GAMES IN PREPARATORY SCHOOLS.

(CRICKET, FOOTBALL, ATHLETIC SPORTS, PAPER CHASES, RUNS, GOLF, CYCLING, SWIMMING.)

Upwards of forty years ago I entered upon my first experience of Preparatory School life, an experience similar, no doubt, to that of many of my contemporaries, though differing materially from that of men of younger standing: the system was then in its infancy, the public schools still absorbed a considerable proportion of the annual supply of ten-year-old boys, and although Preparatory Schools did exist here and there, they were mainly small in size and forerunners rather than types of the vast host that has followed them, largely based on oldfashioned principles, and only tentatively admitting the more modern ideas that were beginning to be ventilated. At all events, so far as my experience went, the schoolroom was the school; we ate (on a most liberal scale in our case; others may have been less fortunate), we breathed fresh air (for 12 hours daily), we slept (for nearly 10 hours) in order that we might return to the classroom for work; that work was enforced by coercive measures which were as simple as they were rigorous; they passed uncriticised as being natural and foreordained; in the sweat of our face we ate bread, and the child was not spoiled for want of the rod. Like the other ten-year-olds I sat from 6.30 until 1.0 with only a single half-hour's interval for breakfast; neither better nor worse than the others, I experienced the frequent application of the most primitive instrument of instruction, and the hand that applied it was that of an earnest, generous, and warm-hearted master, who, if he spared us little, spared himself yet less.

It was a small school, and our games were neither organised nor supervised in the modern sense; indeed, they occupied too subsidiary a position. Nature, for reasons of her own, demanded a daily tribute of bodily offices, and among them the respiration of fresh air and the exercise of muscular tissue: Nature should not be baulked of her due; but the sooner such animal needs were satisfied, the sooner we got back to real business. A stern system, perhaps, but faithfully carried out in what were considered our best interests, and accompanied by unlimited. personal kindness.

If my experience should seem to have been exceptional, I can only say that within my small horizon it tallied with that of my elders, as recounted by them, and that I knew no other: the legend that first met my eyes at my Public School echoed the

old refrain, "Aut disce," and a painted mitre indicated the reward of learning, " Aut discede," and the picture of a sword suggested a creditable refuge for the idle and the empty-headed, Manet sors tertia," and the symbol of this third alternative was not a spliced Cobbett or lemon-shaped football, but a painfully realistic representation of the flogging rod of the time. The legend has long outlived its application, but there are men yet living who speak with regretful respect of the merits of the old-time system; on its defects, however, modern judgment has pronounced unequivocally.

I presume that it was the extension of railways throughout. the country which led to the large increase in the number of our Public Schools, and to a concomitant freshness of ideas concerning aims and methods of education; also that the greater facilities for travelling reconciled the parent to parting with his boy at an earlier age, more particularly when it became recognised that a line of cleavage was being drawn between elder and younger boys by the establishment of separate schools for the latter. If this was so, one might say that the thirty years which saw the rise of Preparatory Schools were a period of new ideas, and perhaps one might fairly add that this freshness of view which witnessed their nativity has been assimilated by them and remains their distinct characteristic.

For present purposes it is unnecessary to refer to this subject further than to note that a feeling arose that greater consideration was required in regulating and distributing the hours of the little boy's time-table of lessons; and as a general rule the effect was to shorten their aggregate, and earmark a proportionately larger amount of the day as sacred to outdoor recreation.

Now, it may be accepted as a natural law of school-life that the unoccupied herd degenerates; for whatever may be said in favour of the Preparatory School, its warmest supporters will not contend that it is an institution contemplated by Nature; and, as is usual, when we find it advisable to depart from Nature, difficulties are to be expected. At such an age little boys would naturally be subdivided into their respective home groups, and would be running about with their sisters and brothers just sufficiently under the observation of the parental eye. The herd, artificially collected, must be treated artificially; wholesome recreative occupation must be enforced for all, and if no such games as cricket and football had been in existence, it would have been necessary to invent them or some inferior makeshift.

If this was the origin of the compulsory organised game, it would be misleading to imply that it possesses only so negative a sanction. Games, of course, had existed in our public schools for generations, accidentally so far as the main purpose of school life was concerned, and receiving scant formal recognition from the authorities, but none the less doing invaluable work. It is the spirit that loves these games and in turn is fostered by them, that has made England a dominant nation. To be covetous of

honour, slow to admit defeat, appreciative of discipline, selfreliant, ready of resource, quick to catch an opportunity, prompt to accept responsibility, and, above all, to be willing to sink the personal in the public interest, is to be English-like, or so we fondly imagine; and we pride ourselves on the foreigner's inability to understand the mad Englishman, who finishes his game of bowls within sight of an Armada, or who, while his rivals are hurriedly raising earthworks and sinking rifle-pits, levels himself a cricket ground. We recognise a something behind this seeming boyish inconsequence, and trace a method in the madness, if our English games are the means of developing a side of our faculties which the classroom cannot touch; possibly in mental attainments and trained habits of application, as scholars, mathematicians, and laborious students, we have never as a nation occupied a leading position; all the more reason that without infringing the sovereignty of the classroom we should formally incorporate as part of our school system a ready method of training that half of our capacities wherein our forte lies.

There is a third reason, too, for which these games are welcome, more particularly from the schoolmaster's point of view. Assuming, as we practically may, that he regards the formation of character as his principal work, they provide him with an incomparable field for making himself acquainted with his boys' real selves, for exercising his influence in infusing a manly, unselfish, and courteous spirit, and for fitting them to deal with some social problems of later life which the games portray in miniature. The Preparatory Schoolmaster is a fair representative of the products of our Public Schools and our Universities; whether from a sense of duty, or from inclination, or from both causes, he devotes a large proportion of his leisure hours to intimate association with the boys of his school in their playing field; cap and gown have long ceased to be the inseparable insignia of his office, and most reflecting boys will consider that the lessons which produced the most lasting impression were such as came to them informally, hardly consciously marked at the time, from some one clad in flannels.

It would be unfair to omit the frank statement of a serious drawback which attends the compulsory game, at all events when it asserts its sway without discrimination and without compromise. Its aim and its effect are to produce a type; a very desirable type, may be bright, wholesome, and Englishlike, but as uniform as the buttons of the regulation tunic. It provides no encouragement for individuality of taste, no scope for the development of powers of other orders indeed, it is scornful and intolerant of such. The "heart pregnant with celestial fire" of non-athletic genius is not conducive to alertness at coverpoint; the eye that is following the track of some winged insect fails to note the mis-hit, and the ball drops unheeded, or painfully awakens the potential naturalist. Day by day the edges are filed off, and in due time a "mute inglorious" Newton becomes a more or less passable cricketer; the all-embracing net, that is cast for the loafer, strands the genius.