terests. They will work, for
instance, with immense vigour for a man who praises and appreciates
industry; but a man who grimly insists on hard and conscientious work
is looked upon as a person who finds enjoyment in a kind of
slave-driving.

Boys are, in fact, profound egoists and profound individualists. Of
course there are exceptions to all this; there are boys of deep
affection, scrupulous honesty, active interests, keen and far-reaching
ambitions; but I am trying to sketch not the exception but the rule.

You will ask what there is left? What there is that makes boys
interesting and attractive to deal with? I will tell you. There is, of
course, the mere charm of youthfulness and simplicity. And the
qualities that I have depicted above are really the superficial
qualities, the conventions that boys adopt from the society about them.
The nobler qualities of human nature are latent in many boys; but they
are for the most part superficially ruled by an intensely strong
mauvaise honte, which leads them to live in two worlds, and to keep the
inner life very sharply and securely ruled off from the outer. They
must be approached tactfully and gently as individuals. It is possible
to establish a personal and friendly relation with many boys, so long
as they understand that it is a kind of secret understanding, and will
not be paraded or traded upon in public. In their inner hearts there
are the germs of many high and beautiful things, which tend, unless a
boy has some wise and tender older friend--a mother, a father, a
sister, even a master--to be gradually obscured under the insistent
demands of his outer life. Boys are very diffident about these matters,
and require to be encouraged and comforted about them. The danger of
public schools, with overworked masters, is that the secret life is apt
to get entirely neglected, and then these germs of finer qualities get
neither sunshine or rain. Public spirit, responsibility, intellectual
interests, unconventional hopes, virtuous dreams--a boy is apt to think
that to speak of such things is to incur the reproach of priggishness;
but a man who can speak of them naturally and without affectation, who
can show that they are his inner life too, and are not allowed to flow
in a sickly manner into his outer life, who has a due and wise reserve,
can have a very high and simple power for good.

But to express all this in the pages of a book is an almost impossible
task; what one wants