spicious cases,
discovered some that he had not suspected, and dealt out the
traditional treatment. Then he followed the old method no longer; nor
did he ever return to it from that day till the day when he finally
left the school before his time. Instead, he set about interesting the
boys in politics. We have already described the course of his
experiments; how enthusiasm, kindled over newspapers, spread to plays,
to poetry, to pictures, and to music. And the result? The house was
transformed: it became such a place as every mother hopes the house
where her own son is may be. And yet during the whole time of which we
are speaking only one boy was beaten, and he for an act quite unrelated
to the seventh or indeed to any other of the Ten Commandments.

NOTE.--A fortnight after the writing of the present book was projected,
one of the writers was dispatched on military duty to India, and the
above chapter was sent home from "Somewhere" in "Somewhere"--I believe
Taranto. Close co-operation in authorship became impossible, and upon
his collaborator in England devolved the responsibility of sole
editorship. I leave the above chapter almost as it was written, for
there is about it, as it seems to me, an indomitable optimism which was
a characteristic of the writer's work and a cause of its success.

Still, in so far as it suggests that a complete solution has been found
for a problem I believe to be insoluble, I must in honesty add a few
words on my own account.

Our direct experience, or the more remarkable part of it, amounts to
this: that a certain head of a house achieved during the course of a
year, using the methods described, an uplifting of the whole tone of
his house that can only be described as marvellous. Other heads
elsewhere have no doubt achieved similar results by other means, though
we have never come across an example equally remarkable. The goal can
be reached, presumably, by the road of saintliness. It might be
reached, though it is doubtful, by the road of Puritanism and
"efficiency," the appeal to abstinence and "living hard." It cannot be
reached, that is certain, by merely disciplinary methods and the appeal
to fear, for the commonest form of schoolboy vice is such that, even
allowing for the casualness of boys, it will not be detected once in a
hundred cases.

Something, however, must be discounted from this result, by reason of
the fact that the experiments were new. These boys had