small or great in their service, the right to dismiss must be allowed to them under certain very well understood conditions. The law has, indeed, protected the humblest domestic servant against any exaggeration of caprice in this particular, and has made it imperative that the dismissed employé should have his or her "character," or a good reason for the withholding of it; but that is all it could do. Public servants, however, have always been treated in a much less summary way. Justice has required that it should be more difficult to dismiss them, and that their immediate superiors should have no such power over them as a private employer has over the persons whom he engages in his private affairs. Up to a very recent date the Assistant Masters of the great English Public Schools were under perhaps a confused and somewhat uncertain, but unquestionably a very lenient and gentle, sway. Public interest was not much excited on the matter, and abuses no doubt went on peaceably without any agitation to disturb their calm. A master dismissed was a thing unknown. If he was a very bad master, or more likely, if he made himself disagreeable to his colleagues, he might perhaps be coaxed by a good living into early withdrawal; but even a peremptory tyrant like Dr. Keate dreamt of no harsher measure. This system was no doubt wrong in principle, and very little adapted to serve the interests of a great school, by the action of which, and the standard it kept up, the entire tone of education in England was inevitably affected; and when the public school system was revised and reconstructed in the year 1870 one of the chief subjects of consideration was this very important question. It is only now, however, or within the last year or two, that the new system, which confers absolute power upon the Head-Master, has been fully understood by the profession itself, and even now it is but imperfectly understood by the public. We are so entirely unaccustomed to individual tyranny, or to the exercise of absolute power in any department, that even those who were most closely affected by it regarded with comparative calm the extraordinary legislation which placed their most important interests in the hand of one of their colleagues, raised but a single step above them, by virtue of his office, but in every other respect one of themselves, the first member of the community, no more. It seemed so incredible to all parties that such a power should ever be exercised, that the Assistants thus reduced to the rank of private servants were not even disturbed by the change about which, as a matter of policy, there might be different opinions, but which no man for a moment regarded as the tremendous personal risk it has turned out to be.

We will say nothing of the recent events which have made the history of Rugby remarkable, for the right and wrong in that extraordinary series of commotions was too confused and uncertain to be capable of any satisfactory disentanglement. In a case where everybody seems to have erred, yet where nobody has suffered much, the critic has no particular function. The more recent case, however, is

of a different character. Another Head-Master has exercised his undoubted right in a way very different from that wild onslaught of exasperation by which Dr. Hayman endeavoured to revenge himself upon his tormentors. Dr. Hornby, of Eton, has dismissed at three months' notice, in the most summary way, one of his Assistants, of long standing and well-known character, popular as a tutor in his own sphere, and more widely known and appreciated in the larger world outside than is at all usual. This is not the place to enter into any discussion of the question between them, and, indeed, no personal discussion between two men can be so important as the broader question raised by a step so bold and arbitrary. The character of the gentleman dismissed is unimpeachable, though the case has been much embittered by a running fire of insinuation, artfully ambiguous, by which some guilt unrevealed has been suggested vaguely, though anything definite in the form of an accusation has been withheld. Such a mode of procedure can be judged only in one way by impartial men; but that also is secondary to the chief matter, which is this: that without definite reason given, or open accusation made, upon the strength of his own will alone, an English Head-Master has dismissed an experienced and able assistant, who has given his best services to the school for fifteen years, investing his private resources in the house he held, and concentrating all his prospects for the future, and all his interests in the present, in the place where he naturally expected to spend his whole life. A catastrophe so strange and sudden is, so far as we are aware, quite without parallel in any other branch of the Public Service. If the heads of public offices have such a power in their possession they certainly have not exercised it in any way which could bring them under the notice of the public, and no other functionary of any kind can boast of this power of social life and death. That the general body of Assistant Masters should be painfully disturbed by such an event is only reasonable. It shows in the most vivid way the extraordinary dangers of their position. When one man has fallen at a blow, slain in the dark, without even the opportunity of defending himself, who can tell how many other men may, as their time comes, be pitched headlong down the oubliette and made an end of, unsuspecting any such astounding doom? To make all your arrangements for life, or the best part of life, plant your stakes deep in the earth, build your walls of kindly shelter, form your plans for the ideal work which it is every good man's hope to do, something for his children, something for his country, something perhaps, since he is mortal, to leave a worthy reputation behind him; and then to be snatched in a moment from all this, torn out of the soil in which he has taken root, his undertakings destroyed, his schemes blown into the air like so many bubbles-all at the caprice, or by the malice, or from the mistake of another man, no wiser, no better, only one step advanced in official position above himself! Can the reader fancy any event more astounding to the victim, or more appalling to those who may be the victims to-morrow? To the outside

spectator, looking on at his ease, the question, bow such an anomalous power could have got into existence in England in the latter half of the nineteenth century, is bewildering enough; but for the men who go to sleep as they can every night, with this sword hanging over their heads, not knowing whether to-morrow morning a curt note of dismissal may not come to them with their breakfast, the position is serious beyond measure. If the present exercise of power had been as wise as that of Solomon the case would have been in no way altered, for Head-Masters as a class could not be always expected to possess superior wisdom; and apart from all the circumstances of this individual case, the fact remains, more alarming than any one event, that all the Head-Masters have it in their power to displace any, be he the best Assistant Master that ever was known, without cause and without appeal, when it pleases them and how it pleases them. The plainest words in which this fact can be stated are the most powerful. It is monstrous and incredible-yet it is true.

An absolute king is a dangerous personage; but still there is something in the greatness and remoteness of a throne which makes him really less appalling to the imagination than a petty tyrant. It was not Ahasuerus but Haman who noticed Mordecai in the gate and made such preparations for the hanging of the impertinent bystander. The king is too far off to pay much attention to the trivial incivilities of an ordinary man, and great officials are rarely despotic. They, too, are removed beyond the range at which personal motives tell; they are just, as it were, by mere effect of perspective and distance, which reduce events to their natural place in the great economy of the world. But if you take from among a small community one of their number who is supposed to be a little abler, a little cleverer, a little more notable, than the rest, or who (which is much more easily ascertainable, and helps immensely in the logic of appointments) is known to be a little more highly connected than the rest, and put the power of life and death in his hands, these are the true circumstances under which the executioner flourishes. A man needs to be exceptionally wise and strong in order to free himself altogether from personal dislikes, from those instinctive feelings of rivalry which are so easily kindled between two persons of the same profession, and from all the exasperations of a forced intercourse with an uncongenial person whose presence galls him daily. Which of us would not tremble if some fairy suddenly bestowed upon us the power of annihilating the person whom we regard with most fervour of aversion? How anxious should not we be to get rid of the too-tempting, too-terrible power before nature yielded to the temptation and we flung the thunderbolt! It is almost impossible to imagine a position in which abstract justice would be less likely to prevail. It is more difficult to be magnanimous to a petty offender at our elbow than to a great criminal at a distance, and it is next to impossible not to be influenced in feeling in the long run by a series of insignificant disagreements, even on the most indifferent subjects. Little continually recurring differences of opinion resolve themselves into

a system of determined opposition and contradiction when we regard them closely, as we are forced to regard the conduct of our nearest neighbours; and even members of the same family often get to believe that it is enough for them to adopt one view of a subject to make the other prevail with their favourite domestic antagonist. This tendency of human nature is so perfectly well known that to put it into words is little better than giving utterance to a truism. But even that common and simple knowledge of human nature which the race has laboriously acquired by oft-repeated experiment, and which represents the very a b c of moral information, is not to be expected to influence the maker of constitutions, whether for an empire or for a school. Let us inquire however, upon what principle, or theory of probable usefulness, the Commission on Endowed Schools suffered itself to be guided when it made the Head-Master an absolute ruler, the only specimen of the race tolerated in England at the present day.

We believe we are not far wrong in saying that the chief reason for the erection of this new despotism was not so much a theory as an example. The supreme authority of the Head-Master in his official capacity is founded upon no principle of reason or careful consideration of what is best, but upon a foundation at once more solid and more futilethe memory of Dr. Arnold. Because once in the course of the ages there has been a Head-Master of very high and noble qualities, whom some of us regard as half-divine, therefore let us erect (we can imagine our legislators saying) a pedagogic throne, untrammelled by Parlia mentary or other restrictions, upon which the abstract Head-Master ever hereafter shall, to the honour and glory of Arnold, sit and judge the world. Arnold had not-what great man ever had ?-sufficient reverence shown to him while he lived; but if we endow his successors, and even the successors of his colleagues in office, till the end of time, with that mark of infallibility and that sceptre of power which was his right, shall we not have done all that man can do to make up to his shade for the scanty appreciation with which he met in his life? This, we understand, was the real basis upon which the new authority was founded, and all the details of legislation on the subject are carefully adapted to keep up this leading idea. We have said that such a foundation was at once more solid and more futile than any theory; more solid, in that many minds are capable of perceiving greatness, or rather of perceiving that the leaders of opinion have decided that a certain man is great-whom such unsubstantial things as ideas would puzzle mightily; but futile in so far as it is certain that no second Arnold has arisen, or perhaps may ever arise, to exercise the power specially instituted in his honour. And we doubt whether even the great Apostle of hero-worship himself, with all his indignant certainty that the best man should possess the absolute direction of everything, would think it expedient to place the same power in the hands of the successors of the best man simply because they were his successors, as if the sacred virtue

which belonged to him must somehow linger in his seat―a notion in which all the imbecile dynasties of the world have had their origin.

Dr. Arnold was in himself a great man; but his influence has been of very doubtful advantage so far, to the educational legislation of the age. "We must take care not to do anything which might circumscribe the action of a man of genius," is said gravely, while we are in the very act of discussing the mischievous liberty enjoyed by various men who evidently are not men of genius; and this curious craze runs through all the discussions that have recently arisen on this subject-oppression, undeserved suffering, wrongful punishment, being nothing apparently to the chance of perhaps enfeebling at some remote period the flight of that Head-Master of the future who shall be, or may be, of the highest order of men. But men of this highest order may be trusted to break any feeble bonds that attempt to hold them, whereas we all know the disastrous effects that followed the efforts of the frog to inflate himself into bull-like grandeur of size and bellow. This latter is a far more likely danger than the distant peril of repressing genius, from which we do not see any likelihood of immediate suffering.

Besides, however, the curious negation of individual rights which this system involves, another result, almost more important, presents itself to the spectator as inevitable. The absolute supremacy of the Head-Master must, sooner or later, unless the Head-Master is a man of singular candour, magnanimity, and liberality of mind, end in the reign of absolute uniformity in the school. A great English school is of all places in the world the one least adapted for the forms of tyrannical government. One of its great advantages is that the boys trained in it are subject to the influence of many minds differing in character, in calibre, and even in opinion. The freedom of individual thought and the developments of independent intellect are nowhere of greater importance. Nothing more fatal to the special characteristics of such an institution could be, than any attempt to reduce a body of thirty or forty educated men to one level, pervaded by one unchanging tone and tendency, and following one rigid rule; it might be done, no doubt, by vigorous and persevering manipulation, but such a result would be fatal to the working of the public school system as recognised among us. In any circumstances a number of men trained in the same way, and engaged in the same kind of work, have a disposition to fall into monotony and the jog-trot of routine; and a wise system would encourage rather than repress the stir of new opinions and even those modi

fications of method which are the evidences of a new life. But it would be unreasonable to expect from a mere mortal that he should be so wise as this. One of the chief dangers of the pedagogic mind is the desire to conform other minds to its own, and secure universal sway for its pet systems and modes of thinking; and it is hard to imagine anything more. likely to produce mental collapse and stagnation than the power to enforce this, with which recent law-making has endowed the heads of the great schools. The attempt at Rugby was quite logical and in conformity with