oys do
certain things under compulsion is not developing their faculties, but
is absolutely preventing their development; and secondly, that this
infamous but universal proceeding is responsible for a positive
degeneration amongst those whom it is supposed to educate and improve.

Dr. Arnold held that a low standard of schoolboy morality was
inevitable. 'With regard to reforms at Rugby,' he wrote to a friend,
'give me credit, I must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make it
a place of Christian education. At the same time, my object will be, if
possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope
to make; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they
are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development
upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in many
respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in
what I consider the boyhood of the human race.'

In a letter to another friend he spoke still more strongly on the
subject. 'Since I began this letter,' he wrote, 'I have had some of the
troubles of school-keeping; and one of those specimens of the evil of
boy nature which makes me always unwilling to undergo the responsibility
of advising any man to send his son to a public school. There has been a
system of persecution carried on by the bad against the good, and then,
when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that very
account, and divers instances of boys joining in it out of pure
cowardice, both physical and moral, when, if left to themselves, they
would rather have shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boys
who can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, and
the way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (Carlyle's
"Shams") are sure on these occasions to swim with the stream and take
part with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what the
Scriptures say about the strait gate and the wide one--a view of human
nature which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies
and civilizations, we are apt, I imagine, to find it hard to realize.
But here, in the nakedness of boy nature, one is quite able to
understand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in
a whole city.'

This sweeping statement has been quoted because it comes with double
force from an undisputed authority such as the late Dr. Arnold.
Everybody who