nces or bankers.
You only want to have your heads set straight, to take the right side;
so bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are
nine times out of ten in the wrong, and that if you see a man or
a boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or
blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him.
If you can't join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate
remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight
and suffer for, which is just what you have got to do for yourselves;
and so think and speak of him tenderly.

[8] #Vested interest#: a fixed estate; here, a deeply rooted
evil or abuse.

[9] #The Palaver#: a nickname for Parliament.

[10] #Kossuth#, etc.: patriots and reformers.

[11] #Balances#: money deposited to one's credit.

THE ISHMAELITES.

So East, and Tom, the Tadpole, and one or two more, became a sort of
young Ishmaelites,[12] their hands against every one, and every one's
hand against them. It has been already told how they got to war with
the masters and the fifth form, and with the sixth it was much the
same. They saw the praepostors cowed by or joining with the fifth, and
shirking their own duties; so they didn't respect them, and rendered
no willing obedience. It had been one thing to clean out studies for
sons of heroes like old Brooke, but was quite another to do the like
for Snooks and Green, who had never faced a good scrummage at
foot-ball, and couldn't keep the passages in order at night. So they
only slurred through their fagging just well enough to escape a
licking, and not always that, and got the character of sulky,
unwilling fags. In the fifth-form room, after supper, when such
matters were often discussed and arranged, their names were forever
coming up.

[12] #Ishmaelites#: outcasts.

"I say, Green," Snooks began one night, "isn't that new boy, Harrison,
your fag?"

"Yes, why?"

"Oh, I know something of him at home, and should like to excuse him;
will you swop?"

"Who will you give me?"

"Well, let's see; there's Willis, Johnson--No, that won't do. Yes, I
have it, there's young East; I'll give you him."

"Don't you wish you may get it?" replied Green. "I'll give you two for
Willis, if you like?"

"Who then?" asks Snooks.

"Hall and Brown."

"Wouldn't have 'em as a gift."

"Better than East, though, for they aren't quite so sharp," said
Green, getting up a