1829.] Fagging, and the Great Schools. 13 
Thus have gone down to the grave of all the Capulets, a hundred showy 
schemes of public purification, and rightly have they been sent there. We 
will not accept our food, mental or bodily, from hands that we know to 
be perpetually dabbling in poison. If our institutions are to be healed, 
it will not be by the hands of a generation of quacks, however they may 
admire the race of charlatans that figured in the mischiefs of the French 
Revolution, or lament the tardiness of spirit that has so long denied them 
the glory of an experiment of subversion at home. Out of honesty 
alone can honesty come ; and we will no more trust the wretched rabble 
of Whiggery, whether in the raggedness of the Foxites, or the new 
equipment of faction from the popish wardrobe, than we will trust 
adders fanged. 
But let any one man of character commence his inquiry into the state 
of the great schools of England, and he must succeed. The opportunity 
is now opened for him by the publication of Sir Alexander Malet’s 
pamphlet; he has only to ask what effect that pamphlet, simple 
as its statements are, has had in recalling to the public the con- 
“viction of abuses, of which every man, educated at the great schools, has 
been a witness, and of which every man so acquainted has but one feel- 
ing—abhorrence of the system, wonder at its being suffered to continue, 
and the most unpleasant struggle in his own mind, between depriving 
his children of the natural advantages that ought to belong to a public 
education, and submitting them to the vices, brutalities, and barbarities, 
perpetually going on at the leading schools. 
| We give the story of the present transaction at Winchester School, in 
__. Sir Alexander’s own clear and temperate language :— 
« The prefects, or eight senior boys of the school, are in the habit of 
_ fagging the juniors ; and that they may have a greater command of their 
services during meal times, they appoint one of the junior boys with the 
title of Course Keeper, whose business it is to take care that whilst the 
przefects are at breakfast, or supper, the juniors sit upon a certain cross 
bench at the top of the hall, that they may be forthcoming whenever a 
prefect requires any thing to be done. (This is called « going on hall !’) 
« During that part of the short half year in which there are no fires kept, 
, a sufficient number of boys for this service was generally furnished from 
the fourth class, and it was considered that the junior part of the fifth 
- class, which is next in the ascending scale, was exempt from so dis- 
agreeable a servitude. It appears, however, that within these few years, 
there has been a much greater press of boys to enter the school than 
formerly, the consequence has been, that they have come to it older, and 
“more advanced in their studies than formerly, and the upper depart- 
- ments of the school have received a greater accession of numbers in pro- 
. ion than the lower classes. The fourth class, therefore, gradually 
rnishing a smaller number of fags, the prefects issued a mandate, that 
e junior part of the fifth class should share with the fourth in the duty 
f going on hall: this was for some time submitted to ; but at length 
one of the boys of this class intentionally abstained from seating himself 
on the cross bench at supper time, and being seen by the senior prefect, 
and desired by him to go on hall, refused to do so, and argued the point 
as a matter of right, alleging, as the ancient usage of the school, the ex- 
emption of the junior part of the fifth class from this duty till the com- 
mencement of fires ; he referred to the Course Keeper as being the 
ising of the rules, and expressed himself prepared to abide by his 
ecision. 
