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It would have been a meagre tribute to the spell of Westminster if some of those who, in passing out of Abbey on that last Sunday of Election Term, passed also out of their pupilage, did not look forward from the threshold of manhood in a spirit of dedication; it would have been an admission of dubious gratitude if, in bidding farewell that afternoon under the trees of College Garden, they had not confessed their debt to the school. In six years some few of them had developed into fair scholars along lines of education which had not then been so bitterly attacked as they have been since: no one, indeed, aimed to make them proficient in preparing a manifest and detecting an escape of sewer gas; in their curriculum the financial possibilities of Spanish and Russian were ignored, like all other adjuncts to a sound commercial training; and, though the art of Asia and the letters of Ethiopia have since been urged as an alternative to Greek and Latin, they stuck insularly to the literature and history of the civilisation from which all the great modern civilisations of Europe derive. Those who cared to work contrived to cover a wide field even in that English literature which is popularly thought to be excluded from public-school study; for the rest, it should be recognised that a point is quickly reached at which those who do not wish to work can no longer be compelled. At the lowest computation, all had received at least a grounding in the humanities and an equipment for profounder study of subjects that by pressure of time could not be exhausted at school.

In addition, they were for five or six years disciplined to a system, yielding obedience as unquestioningly as afterwards they exacted it.

"This we learned from famous men,

Knowing not its uses,

When they showed, in daily work,

Man must finish off his work—

Right or wrong, his daily work—

And without excuses....

This we learned from famous men

Teaching in our borders,

Who declared it was best,

Safest, easiest, and best—

Expeditious, wise and best—

To obey your orders.

Some beneath the further stars

Bear the greater burden:

Set to serve the lands they rule,

(Save he serve no man may rule),

Serve and love the lands they rule;

Seeking praise nor guerdon...."

They learned initiative and responsibility; they were trained to subordinate the individual to the community; and they acquired a code which at its worst was limited and foolish, at its best exalted and honourable. If the panorama of a public school has its ugly patches, so has the panorama of life; if the prejudices were many, they were fewer than the prejudices encountered on leaving school; if the honour was circumscribed, its boundaries were reached perhaps less quickly than the boundaries of honour in later life. The convention that there is at best an armed neutrality between boy and master leads the boy to a diplomatic economy of truth not always distinguishable from disingenuousness; in his dealings with seniors, contemporaries and juniors he is honest, truthful and substantially just. As he is taught to accept undeserved punishment without complaining, so he learns to avow the undetected misdeeds by which a fellow might suffer; never to fail the team, the house, the school or a single friend, always to hide emotion and to be in hard physical condition may be crude social ethics, but they are neither unworthy nor fruitless in their effect on public life. Twenty years ago it would have been unnecessary to put forward these claims, but the querulous aftermath of the war has involved the public schools in ill-defined suspicion; yet the leader of a crusade would find no more ardent, generous and upright spirits than in old British public-schoolboys of seventeen to twenty-two; and, before the worldling discharges his gibes at their honour and their code, he might stay to reflect whether the administration of empire, as carried out in two hemispheres by the sons of these long-suffering schools, must yield pride of place, for integrity and devotion, to the public services of Germany and France, Italy and Spain, America and Japan, whether, too, the scandals and treacheries which have broken the monotony of English public life in the last ten years are due to excess of these derided qualities or to want of them.

If, on the last Sunday, many lacked the detachment to set out in detail their debt to Westminster, all could acknowledge their love and treasure their last moments. Next morning the Major Candidates were imprisoned in a form-room leading to School and summoned one by one to stand before a long table for the viva voce examination. There followed the match between the King's Scholars and the Town Boys. Next morning those who were leaving rose and for the last time put on dress clothes and a gown for their last day at Westminster.

After the breaking-up service in the Abbey, they assembled in School for call-over. The results of Election and the removes were read out, the prizes distributed, the prize epigrams recited by their authors and rewarded with one of the silver pennies that come to Westminster in the distribution of the Maundy. Armed with a birch ("rod"), one of the School Monitors was despatched down the gangway between the lower forms to find and escort to the head master's dais a young offender who paid for his too frequent presence in penal drill by being publicly flicked across the back of the hand. Then the Captain and three School Monitors stood up and in turn were handed the birch which they reversed and gave back to the head master; as soon as they had been discharged of their dignity and duties, the new School Monitors were handed the birch in token of office. At the "Oremus" the new Captain knelt facing the school and read the Latin prayers; with the "Ire licet" was born a new generation of Old Westminsters.

In an interview with the Dean of Christ Church, those who had been elected to the House were told the day on which they had to present themselves in Oxford.