rather longer than other people, and to a certain extent
ministers to bodily health, although the statistics of rowing would
seem clearly to prove that it is a pursuit which is rather more apt to
damage the vitality of strong boys than to increase the vitality of
weak ones.

So, if we look facts fairly in the face, we see that much of the
training of school life, especially in the direction of athletics, is
really little more than the maintenance of a thoughtless old tradition,
and that it is all directed to increase our admiration of prowess and
grace and gallantry, rather than to fortify us in usefulness and manual
skill and soundness of body. A boy at school may be a skilful carver or
carpenter; he may have a real gift for engineering or mechanics; he may
even be a good rider, a first-rate fisherman, an excellent shot. He may
have good intellectual abilities, a strong memory, a power of
expression; he may be a sound mathematician, a competent scientist; he
may have all sorts of excellent moral qualities, be reliable, accurate,
truthful, punctual, duty-loving; he may in fact be equipped for life
and citizenship, able to play his part sturdily and manfully, and to do
the world good service; but yet he may never win the smallest
recognition or admiration in his school-days, while all the glory and
honour and credit is still reserved for the graceful, attractive,
high-spirited athlete, who may have nothing else in the background.

That is certainly the ideal of the boy, and the disconcerting thing is
that it is also the ideal, practically if not theoretically, of the
parent and the schoolmaster. The school still reserves all its best
gifts, its sunshine and smiles, for the knightly and the skilful; it
rewards all the qualities that are their own reward. Why, if it wishes
to get the right scale adopted, does it not reward the thing which it
professes to uphold as its best result, worth of character namely? It
claims to be a training-ground for character first, but it does little
to encourage secret and unobtrusive virtues. That is, it adds its
prizes to the things which the natural man values, and it neglects to
crown the one thing at which it professes first to aim. In doing this
it only endorses the verdict of the world, and while it praises moral
effort, it rewards success.

The issue of all this is that the sort of courage which it enforces is
essentially a graceful and showy sort of courage, a lively readiness, a