in the school; all boys in the sixth and fifth forms had the power of
ordering--all below the latter form being bound to obey. This system of
fagging has a very injurious effect upon most of the boys; "it finds
them slaves and leaves them despots. A boy who has suffered himself,
insensibly learns to see no harm in making others suffer in turn. The
whole thing is wrong in principle, and engenders passions which should
be stifled and not encouraged." Why free and enlightened England should
tolerate, even then, such barbarous slavery cannot be understood and
yet there are outrageous customs prevailing among college students of
our day in every civilized land that should be suppressed.

Flogging was in vogue, too, at Eton, with all its degrading and
demoralizing effects, and was performed by the Head-Master himself. In
1820, the year before Mr. Gladstone entered Eton, there were 280 upper
students and 319 lower, a total of 612, and none were exempt.

Some curious stories are told of flogging, which has ever existed at
Eton, and from which even the largest boys were not exempt. Mr. Lewis
relates how a young man of twenty, just upon the point of leaving
school, and engaged to be married to a lady at Windsor, was well and
soundly whipped by Dr. Goodford, for arriving one evening at his tutor's
house after the specified time. And it is related that Arthur Wellesley,
afterwards the Iron Duke of Wellington, was flogged at Eton for having
been "barred out." At the same time there were eighty boys who
were whipped.

And the Eton of twenty years later was very little improved over its
condition in Mr. Gladstone's time there, or in 1845. John D. Lewis,
speaking of this period, says that after the boys reached the fifth
form, then began "some of the greatest anomalies and absurdities of the