[On Monday last week we reprinted a leader deploring criticism of scholarships for poor children to secondary schools. These are two reactions.]

Sir - The real difficulty is not the social or pecuniary inferiority of the elementary boy, but his enormous moral inferiority. Most of the other boys that come to us have a very definite idea that certain actions and thoughts are "caddish" or "bad form" or "blackguardly." The knowledge of such terms help a master immensely. Their reasoning may be defective, but it is an incalculable advantage to feel that, if once you can convince a small boy that a certain action is a "blackguard" thing to do, that only a "hopeless cad" would think a certain thing, more than half your battle is over.

Now I have been dealing with a certain proportion of elementary boys for some years, and I have failed to find any parallel idea or word. I have to begin de novo. Your readers may hold up their hands in righteous indignation, but the sad truth is there for me and others that I know of my profession.

The virtues of the elementary boy are industry and obedience, which are, in our opinion, secondary virtues for a boy. For cribbing, meanness, cowardice, cruelty he has just as much feeling of abhorrence as for unpunctuality - perhaps rather less.

Yours &c.,

Head Master

Sir - I gather that it is with regret that you have noted the exclusion of Board School Boys from the University College at Hampstead - this is with no regard to the feelings of the paying boys in question. I wonder whether you have ever considered the matter from the side of a gentleman forced to come into daily contact with the innate vulgarity of the lower orders.

Is it not more probable that the sons of gentlemen will be levelled down rather than the sons of Pork Butchers levelled up by continual daily contact. The lessons of the gutter are more easily learnt than the traditions of caste.

The fact that by keeping particular secondary and Public Schools a reserve for a particular class keeps the higher walks of life in the professions and public services a preserve for the same class, is surely a great argument in its favour. The lower classes never were a Governing class and why should the master sit side by side with the servant.

Yours faithfully,

Public School Boy, Kensington, London

(Most people will be inclined to think that if his state of mind were to be taken as exemplifying the results of the system, nobody need regret not having passed through it. - Ed. 'Guard'.)