do nothing else) had been expelled from a large English school.  And he was expelled because he had felled a bully with a paving-stone, and had expressed his readiness to do it again.  Now, there was no doubt that this cook in the mountain inn was a very unserviceable young fellow.  But I wish more boys who have suffered things literally unspeakable from bullies would try whether force (in the form of a paving stone) is really no remedy.

The Catholic author of a recent book ("Schools,” by Lieut.-Col.  Raleigh Chichester), is very hard on “Protestant Schools,” and thinks that the Catholic system of constant watching is a remedy for bullying and other evils.  “Swing-doors with their upper half glazed, might have their uses,” he says, and he does not see why a boy should not be permitted to complain, if he is roasted, like Tom Brown, before a large fire.  The boys at one Catholic school described by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, “are never without surveillance of some sort.”  This is true of most French schools, and any one who wishes to understand the consequences (there) may read the published confessions of a pion—­an usher, or “spy.”  A more degraded and degrading life than that of the wretched pion, it is impossible to imagine.  In an English private school, the system of espionnage and tale bearing, when it exists, is probably not unlike what Mr. Anstey describes in Vice Versa.  But in the Catholic schools spoken of by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, the surveillance may be, as he says, “that of a parent; an aid to the boys in their games rather than a check.”  The religious question as between Catholics and Protestants has no essential connection with the subject.  A Protestant school might, and Grimstone’s did, have tale-bearers; possibly a Catholic school might exist without parental surveillance.  That system is called by its foes a “police,” by its friends a “paternal” system.  But fathers don’t exercise the “paternal” system themselves in this country, and we may take it for granted that, while English society and religion are as they are, surveillance at our large schools will be impossible.  If any one regrets this, let him read the descriptions of French schools and schooldays, in Balzac’s Louis Lambert, in the “Memoirs” of M. Maxime du Camp, in any book where a Frenchman speaks his mind about his youth.  He will find spying (of course) among the ushers, contempt and hatred on the side of the boys, unwholesome and cruel punishments, a total lack of healthy exercise; and he will hear of holidays spent in premature excursions into forbidden and shady quarters of the town.

No doubt the best security against bullying is in constant occupation.  There can hardly (in spite of Master George Osborne’s experience in “Vanity Fair”) be much bullying in an open cricket-field.  Big boys, too, with good hearts, should not only stop bullying when they come across it, but make it their business to find out where it exists.  Exist it will, more or less, despite all precautions, while boys are boys—­that is, are passing through a modified form of the savage state.