was a prefect when Sydney was a junior, and this game of chess
must have been (as a living Wykehamist has pointed out to me) "a command
performance." The big boy liked chess, so the little boy had to play it:
the big boy disliked being checkmated, so the little boy was knocked down.
This and similar experiences probably coloured Sydney's mind when he wrote
in 1810:--

"At a Public School (for such is the system established by immemorial
custom) every boy is alternately tyrant and slave. The power which the
elder part of these communities exercises over the younger is
exceedingly great; very difficult to be controlled; and accompanied,
not unfrequently, with cruelty and caprice. It is the common law of
these places, that the younger should be implicitly obedient to the
elder boys; and this obedience resembles more the submission of a
slave to his master, or of a sailor to his captain, than the common
and natural deference which would always be shown by one boy to
another a few years older than himself. Now, this system we cannot
help considering as an evil, because it inflicts upon boys, for two or
three years of their lives, many painful hardships, and much
unpleasant servitude. These sufferings might perhaps be of some use in
military schools; but to give to a boy the habit of enduring
privations to which he will never again be called upon to submit--to
inure him to pains which he will never again feel--and to subject him
to the privation of comforts, with which he will always in future
abound--is surely not a very useful and valuable severity in
education. It is not the life in miniature which he is to lead
hereafter, nor does it bear any relation to it; he will never again be
subjected to so much insolence and caprice; nor ever, in all human
probability, called upon to make so many sacrifices. The servile
obedience which it teaches might be useful to a menial domestic; or
the habit of enterprise which it encourages prove of importance to a
military partisan; but we cannot see what bearing it has upon the
calm, regular, civil life, which the sons of gentlemen, destined to
opulent idleness, or to any of the more learned professions, are
destined to lead. Such a system makes many boys very miserable; and
produces those bad effects upon the temper and disposition which
boyish suffering always does produ