One of my perennial preoccupations here is how to encourage originality and independence among my boys.  The great danger of public-school education nowadays, as you say, is the development of a type.  It is not at all a bad type in many ways; the best specimens of the public-school type are young men who are generous, genial, unembarrassed, courageous, sensible, and active; but our system all tends to level character, and I do not feel sure whether it levels it up or levels it down.  In old days the masters concerned themselves with the work of the boys only, and did not trouble their heads about how the boys amused themselves out of school.  Vigorous boys organised games for themselves, and indolent boys loafed.  Then it came home to school authorities that there was a good deal of danger in the method; that lack of employment was an undesirable thing.  Thereupon work was increased, and, at the same time, the masters laid hands upon athletics and organised them.  Side by side with this came a great increase of wealth and leisure in England, and there sprang up that astonishing and disproportionate interest in athletic matters, which is nowadays a real problem for all sensible men.  But the result of it all has been that there has grown up a stereotyped code among the boys as to what is the right thing to do.  They are far less wilful and undisciplined than they used to be; they submit to work, as a necessary evil, far more cheerfully than they used to do; and they base their ideas of social success entirely on athletics.  And no wonder!  They find plenty of masters who are just as serious about games as they are themselves; who spend all their spare time in looking on at games, and discuss the athletic prospects of particular boys in a tone of perfectly unaffected seriousness.  The only two regions which masters have not organised are the intellectual and moral regions.  The first has been tacitly and inevitably extruded.  A good deal more work is required from the boys, and unless a boy’s ability happens to be of a definite academical order—­in which case he is well looked after—­there is no loop-hole through which intellectual interest can creep in.  A boy’s time is so much occupied by definite work and definite games that there is neither leisure nor, indeed, vigour left to follow his own pursuits.  Life is lived so much more in public that it becomes increasingly difficult for sets to exist; small associations of boys with literary tastes used to do a good deal in the direction of fostering the germs of intellectual life; the net result is, that there is now far less interest abroad in intellectual things, and such interests as do exist, exist in a solitary way, and generally mean an intellectual home in the background.