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REFORMS AT ETON -189
Work). B, still gripping the knife-handle: " Sir, there
are eome things I can do and some I can't : this is one of
the latter category." It was generally felt there was
nothing to add to B's exculpatory statement, and Cock;
shott with a genial smile put on somebody else who. had
gained his place by mathematics, not by verses •.
By 1885 a new spirit prevailed. One by one the genial,
friendly, but inefficient teachers were replaced by keen
young men determined to exact their tale of bricks, no
matter how little straw had been provided. Result:
congestion. The scholars had much less time to read by
themselves. There was some gain, however, in the boys
having plenty to do. Less mischief went on. But the
pity of it was that they had nothing stirred in them which
could be called intellectual eagerness : and that remains
the chief problem in all schools to the present time.
In short, as often happens in the affairs of man, the
undoubted benefit of a change is balanced and sometimes
outweighed by a wholly unexpected loss. Who would
have believed that the substitution of good teaching for
bad in Modern Languages, History, and Science could be
anything but a gain ? But little good was done, chiefly
because the professors of the different subjects had to
scramble for their rights; and in the jostle which ensued
the boys were forgotten. The classical teaching was still
ordered on the ludicrous theory that every boy was a
· potentislscholar. Both Latin and Greek were compulsory,
though, before long, the latter was dropped at option
early in the Vth Form, and thus all the time previously
given to the language was wasted. Meantime, as each
new .subject began to assert itself the day soon got filled
up with heterogeneous employments. Instead of a
scholarlike boy polishing up his weekly Latin verses or
reading classical authors because he had nothing else to
do, in the eighties he would find himself harried through
his school career with claims of increasing stringency from
teachers of new-fangled subjects which he cared for not
one whit. Or if he was inclined to give himself to these,