ut on this new system of the author before us (whom, for
the want of a better name, we shall call the Experimentalist) A for
the first time bears to B the relation of a positive quantity. The
terms _positive_ and _negative_ are sufficiently opposed to each other
to confer upon our contradistinction of this system from all others a
very marked and antithetic shape; and the only question upon it, which
arises, is this--are these terms justified in their application to
this case? That they are, will appear thus:--Amongst the positive
objects (or B) of every school, even the very worst, we must suppose
the culture of morals to be one: a mere day-school may perhaps
reasonably confine its pretensions to the disallowance of anything
positively bad; because here the presumption is that the parents
undertake the management of their children excepting in what regards
their intellectual education: but, wherever the heads of a school step
into the full duties of a child's natural guardians, they cannot
absolve themselves from a responsibility for his morals. Accordingly,
this must be assumed of course to exist amongst the positive objects
of every boarding-school. Yet so far are the laws and arrangements of
existing schools from at all aiding and promoting this object, that
their very utmost pretension is--that they do not injure it. Much
injustice and oppression, for example, take place in the intercourse
of all boys with each other; and in most schools 'the stern edict
against _bearing tales_,' causes this to go unredressed (p. 78): on
the other hand, in a school where a system of nursery-like
_surveillance_ was adopted, and 'every trifling injury was the subject
of immediate appeal to the supreme power' (p. 80), the case was still
worse. 'The indulgence of this querulousness increased it beyond all
endurance. Before the master had time to examine the justice of one
complaint, his attention was called away to redress another; until,
wearied with investigation into offences which were either too
trifling or too justly provoked for punishment, he treated all
complainants with harshness, heard their accusations with incredulity,
and thus tended, by a first example, to the re-establishment of the
old system.' The issue in any case was--that, apart from what nature
and the education of real life did for the child's morals, the school
education did nothing at all except by the positive moral instruction
which the child might draw from h