THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE
Social importance of Eton, Harrow, and other great schools, as representing the social evolution of the epoch. The conventional mistake that the new wealth has been injurious to the social tone or scholarly studies of public schools. In the case of Eton the historic details and educational statistics prove the falseness of the statement. Progress of the school shown by success in the new as well as old examinations during the incriminated period of the last forty years. New social elements have increased the value but not the expense of Eton. The fourteenth Earl of Derby as a typical Eton product.
The whole region of public elementary and secondary education, whose improvement is so conspicuous an incident in the recent domestic or social annals of the time, has now been indicated at sufficient length and minutely enough to convey an accurate notion of the facts. One may, therefore, pass to those educational levels which stand a little higher, and up to which recent reforms of popular education are, as has been seen, gradually assisting the progress of Board School children. The sociological feature of the present reign has already been described in these pages as a process less of revolution, than of evolution; of the natural incorporation of new elements into an old fabric, of the harmonious assimilation on the part of a polity that is the growth of centuries, of the ideas and types that are the products of to-day. These processes can nowhere be witnessed more crucially in operation than at those little worlds, the great public schools such as Eton and Harrow, which, as they have ever been, are the faithful microcosms of the great worlds that lie beyond them. Many of the accounts of Eton which periodically find their way into print seem inspirations from Baron Munchausen. The school that during centuries has been the special training ground for the country gentlemen of England, which was once to such an extent the nursery of future lords spiritual and temporal as to enable Dr Keate to include among his titles to respect the fact of his having flogged in their youth the whole Bench of Bishops,[41] is conventionally represented as corrupted at its heart by the predominating influence of the sons of the 'new rich' on its classic soil. The parent who wishes his son to be at the school where his sire, and his sires before him, had been, is disgusted by reading romantic accounts of the bank balances in Windsor town kept for their boys by the plutocrats, Saxon or Semitic, of the City. It may, therefore, be said authoritatively that thus far research has failed to bring to light a single instance of the new rich Etonian who possesses during his school days a banking account of his own. Now, not less than formerly, the lad who returns to his tutor's or his dame's with a £5 note in his pocket is looked upon by his comrades as in luck.