flog me suddenly altered his mind and desisted; it was as if a hungry dog should leave a bone, and caused considerable surprise, being quite unprecedented. From that time he evinced a kind of liking for me, and gave me several strange nicknames. I have no cause, therefore, to be unjust to him. I even feel that involuntary admiration for him which Earnshaw evinces for Heathcliffe in Wüthering Heights. But a sense of compassion for others compels me to show what tyranny may still exist in a little realm where despotic power is wielded, where the subjects are dumb, and where reporters are excluded.

I have misrepresented this man, however, if I have given the impression that there was no better side to his character. There was an element of stoic nobleness about him that extorted sullen admiration. If he never spared us he never spared himself. While his method was damnable his motives were, I believe, in the main good. It is even possible that some of the older boys who were placed in the sixth form on his arrival and were spared much of his tyranny may look back upon his memory with feelings akin to hero-worship. Several of these have profited by their forced education and occupy good positions in the world. He certainly tried to inspire us with a self-respect which we much needed. One of his most violent outbursts was caused by the sight of boys scrambling for half-pence thrown to them by a fat director. The boys who demeaned themselves by picking up those coppers have never paid so dearly for anything since!

The head-master was an advanced Ritualist in religion and a high Tory in politics. Asceticism was the attraction in the one case, I suspect, and autocratic principles in the other. I was in the sixth form at the time of the Governor Eyre scandal, and I remember with what stern joy he exulted over the governor's atrocities, and what scorn he poured upon Bright and others who wished to arraign him. At prayers he never read any of the gentler parts of the Gospel-they would have sounded odd indeed in his mouth. His favourite books were Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, and certainly the one precept he lived up to is that contained in the latter book, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

The general result of his system was deplorable. Boys left the school broken, spiritless, utterly unfitted for any post requiring

energy or power of initiation. Again and again old school-fellows have told me that their lives have been utterly ruined by him. I have heard of some who in after years have made long pilgrimages to insult his grave; rejoicing, doubtless, in the thought that a living dog is better than a dead lion.

It will probably be said that what I have described is now all a thing of the past. But what security is there for this? The conditions under King Log reproduced those of Cowan Bridge after the lapse of nearly half-a-century; the conditions under King Stork were worse than those described by Dickens several decades earlier. Our orphanages are even less open to public inspection than our reformatories, and both in the one and the other cruelties may go on unchecked even where the outward results seem most encouraging. It is only a year or two since I saw a letter in a journal describing a public institution for girls under royal patronage in which the boast was made that the birch was in use precisely "as at Eton." As at Eton, yes, but on girls, not boys, and without any of the safeguards and wholesome counteracting influences which prevail at all public schools. To the eye of the uninitiated the letter meant little; to my eye it conjured up a microcosm of tyranny and torture, mental and physical. The poor girls leave that school meek and subdued, doubtless, but robbed of all self-respect. A broken will is as disabling to human beings as a broken wing is to a bird, and a system which saves children from a prison only by dooming them to a workhouse stands self-condemned. It is to expose the evils of such a system that these reminiscences have been put together. My hope is that they may help to hasten the day when Barrack Schools of all descriptions shall have become things of the past; and if so I shall be amply rewarded for the reluctant performance of a painful task.

CLERICUS.

A STATE MEDICAL SERVICE.

THE question of a State medical service is rapidly maturing to the point when it must become an urgent one from a political point of view, and it would behove one or other of the political parties to give it heed. To the writer it appears the very question most likely to rehabilitate the great Liberal party that was, and I marvel much that neither wing of that party nor the caucus thereof presided over by Dr. Spence Watson have thought of conjoining interests and going to the country with a policy of establishing medicine upon a national footing. Upon all hands evidence accumulates that, owing to causes over which he has really had no control, purely environment circumstances, the position of the general practitioner, urban and rural, and there socially and financially, is most unsatisfactory. Sir Walter Foster referred to it in a speech long ago, and it was brought up recently at the British Medical Association, though not in any practical way, at its meeting in Edinburgh. The Law Courts recently reveal somewhat of this also. Surely it ought to give all serious people pause when they behold practitioners, holding good diplomas, and, it may be, moving in good society, hailed up before magistrates charged with performing acts, in a professional capacity, forbidden by the legislature, as well as by the ethical canons of the profession itself. What dire need, what res angusta domi, what decadence from high ideals, what ineptitude of procedure do we not witness here? To us, of course, it is grotesque to think of explaining such a phenomenon by the "desire to do evil," by “original sin," by "temptation of the devil," the "lust of the flesh," or the "love of the world." Such phrases have little or no meaning to us. We all know that we are all more or less on a par so far as these things are concerned. Even your regular church-going and sacrament-observing Christians admit that they "are miserable sinners, deceitful above all things, and ( 253 )

desperately wicked." We admit the fact, but we do not admit that the repeated dwelling upon the fact, and hypocritical confession of the fact, is calculated to heighten moral tone or calibre. As a matter of fact we know that it doesn't. We must seek for a more potent and definite explication of a sociological phenomenon characterised by such oblivion of what was due to society, to profession, to self, and to family. Was society itself not initially at fault? Have the ruling professional bodies not been guilty of apathy, regardlessness, sheer indolence, and stupidity in the matter of guarding the interests and maintaining the prestige of the units, the great body of general practitioners? Have they not just exploited the practitioner wherever and whenever they could? Again, what has the State done for the profession? The answer is nothing of its own proper motive. Whatever it has done has been under compulsion of the profession itself moved frequently by one or two far-seeing and indefatigable practitioners. There can be no doubt that society is selfish and supine, and the General Medical Council has been deaf and blind to the interests of the general practitioner, and is only now making up under the indefatigable stimulation of Professor Victor Horsley after a Rip van Winkleish sleep of years. Howsoever be it, whatsoever be the etiology, the phenomenon is ominous, and demands the immediate attention of the legislature, both in its professional and social aspects. Is it necessary to point out that the methods of Rome will not do, however, the method by repression and punishment? Such never succeed. Let the causes be found out and removed; let the grievances be remedied first, at least.

Theoretically, it seems quite as much, if not more, might be pled for the establishment of medicine as for the establishment of the church; and whereas there are distinct disadvantages of policy pertaining to the latter there are none to the former. The benefits conferred upon the taxpayer by the church are problematical and distant; those by medicine are direct, immediate, economic, in character; and, in these later days, not limited to the passing moment, but serving for future guidance. Needless to say also that the latter element must enter more and more into future practice of medicine; and that it is precisely he who recognises and carries out this element most in his practice who must

necessarily suffer most in his pocket. There is all the more reason therefore why pocket considerations should be eliminated as much as possible; and this can be only achieved by placing members of the profession upon a social and financial footing analogous to that of the clergy. Surely when attention is given to the matter the Government will discern it to be entirely in the interest of the State to recognise and endow that profession upon which the citizens rely to provide not only the best possible means for the prevention of disease but the best means of getting well when ill. The members of a profession so endowed would be set above the paltry need of competing with one another, in aught but devising means. "Salus populi, suprema est lex" should be regarded by Government as no mere truism or formalism, but, as the expression of a vital truth demanding the energetic efforts of Government to give practical attention to in legislative enactment, for the sake of the moral and economical results alone. The ground has already been cleared and the way prepared by sanitary legislation. But cure is of no less importance than prevention. Prevent by all means, but if it be the function of Government to do this, it should no less be its function to see to the cure, where it cannot prevent; and this especially so now that sanitary authorities, equally with moralists, recognise, and it is very generally admitted that there is a physical basis for morals. Theoretically, I think the argu

ments are all on one side; and, politically speaking, there can be no doubt that the party which makes this question a plank in its platform will gain the vote of the great democracy as well as that of the profession. Hereby may arise a great democratic party which, whether in power or in opposition, would be of far greater service to the State than the invertebrate and chaotic congeries presently in opposition.

But, there are practical considerations, as I have implied, which are quite as weighty argumentatively for the establishment of a State Medical Service. As to status and prestige we have the army to point to, the medical service of which is now much more contented and efficient since the concession of equivalent rank. I have no statistic of conduct and morals to refer to, but I doubt not that comparatively these must be upon a higher plane than previously. It must follow, as the night the day, that the higher