As a rule, in such books, the whole conception of boyhood seems at fault; a boy is generally represented as a generous, heedless, unworldly creature.  My experience leads me to think that this is very wide of the mark.  Boys are the most inveterate Tories.  They love monopoly and privilege, they are deeply subservient, they have little idea of tolerance or justice or fair-play, they are intensely and narrowly ambitious; they have a certain insight into character, but there are some qualities, like vulgarity, which they seem incapable of detecting.  They have a great liking for jobs and small indications of power.  They are not, as a rule, truthful; they have no compassion for weakness.  It is generally supposed that they have a strong sense of liberty, but this is not the case; they are, indeed, tenacious of their rights, or what they suppose to be their rights, but they have little idea of withstanding tyranny, they are incapable of democratic combination, and submit blindly to custom and tradition.  Neither do I think them notably affectionate or grateful; everything that is done for them within the limits of a prescribed and habitual system they accept blindly and as a matter of course, while at the same time they are profoundly affected by any civility or sympathy shown them outside the ordinary course of life.  I mean that they do not differentiate between a master who takes immense trouble over his work, and discharges his duties with laborious conscientiousness, and a master who saves himself all possible trouble; they are not grateful for labour expended on them, and they do not resent neglect.  But a master who asks boys to breakfast, talks politely to them, takes an interest in them in a sociable way, will win a popularity which a laborious and inarticulate man cannot attain to.  They are extremely amenable to any indications of personal friendship, while they are blind to the virtues of a master who only studies their best interests.  They will work, for instance, with immense vigour for a man who praises and appreciates industry; but a man who grimly insists on hard and conscientious work is looked upon as a person who finds enjoyment in a kind of slave-driving.

Boys are, in fact, profound egoists and profound individualists.  Of course there are exceptions to all this; there are boys of deep affection, scrupulous honesty, active interests, keen and far-reaching ambitions; but I am trying to sketch not the exception but the rule.

You will ask what there is left?  What there is that makes boys interesting and attractive to deal with?  I will tell you.  There is, of course, the mere charm of youthfulness and simplicity.  And the qualities that I have depicted above are really the superficial qualities, the conventions that boys adopt from the society about them.  The nobler qualities of human nature are latent in many boys; but they are for the most part superficially ruled by an intensely strong mauvaise honte, which leads