kings through his
bullying propensities; but a rudimentary survival of the idea may yet be
seen in big football-players, who are given good marks, and very gentle
mental massage in class. If the same scholars were small and skinny,
they would certainly be plucked.

The faculty found freedom in shifting responsibility for discipline to
the Sixth Form.

Read the diary of Arnold, and you will be amazed on seeing how he fought
against taking from the Sixth Form the right to bodily chastise any
scholar in the school that the king of the Sixth Form declared deserved
it.

If a teacher thought a pupil needed punishment, he turned the luckless
one over to the Sixth Form. Can we now conceive of a system where the
duty of certain scholars was to whip other scholars? Not only to whip
them, but to beat them into insensibility if they fought back?

Such was schoolteaching in the public schools of England in Eighteen
Hundred Thirty.

Against this brutality there was now a growing sentiment--a piping voice
bidding the tide to stay!

But now that Arnold was in charge of Rugby, he got the ill-will of his
directors by declaring that he did not intend to curtail the powers of
the Sixth Form--he proposed to civilize it. To try out the new master,
the Sixth Form, proud in their prowess, sent him word that if he
interfered with them in any way, they would first "bust up the school,"
and then resign in a body. Moreover, they gave it out that if any pupil
complained to the master concerning the Sixth Form, the one so
complaining would be taken out by night and drowned in the classic Avon.

There were legends among the younger boys of strange disappearances, and
these were attributed to the swift vengeance of "The Bloody Sixth."

Above the Sixth Form there was no law.

Every scholar took off his hat to a "Sixth." A Sixth uncovered to
nobody, and touched his cap only to a teacher.

And custom had become so rooted that the Sixth Form was regarded as a
sort of police necessity--a caste which served the school just as the
Army served the Church. To reach the Sixth Form were paradise--it meant
liberty and power--liberty to do as you pleased, and power to punish all
who questioned your authority.

To uproot the power of the Sixth Form was the intent of a few reformers
in pedagogics.

There were two ways to deal with the boys of the Sixth--fight them or
educate them.

Arnold called the Rugby Sixth together and assured them that he coul