Transcribed from the 1854 John Murray edition by David Price

A LETTER TO THE VISCOUNT PALMERSTON, M.P. &c. &c. &c. ON THE MONITORIAL SYSTEM OF HARROW SCHOOL.

BY CHARLES JOHN VAUGHAN, D.D. HEAD MASTER.

LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET: CROSSLEY AND CLARKE, HARROW: MDCCCLIV.

This Letter, when first printed, was designed only for private circulation amongst those personally or officially interested in its subject. Circumstances have since arisen, which appeared to render its publication expedient.

A LETTER, &c. &c. &c.

My Lord,

I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your Lordship’s letter of the 11th instant; to which your great abilities and varied experience, as well as your affectionate attachment to Harrow as the place of your own education, give peculiar value and interest.

I am grateful for the opportunity which it affords me of briefly stating the principles of the Monitorial system as at present established at Harrow.

I do not, I think, misapprehend the precise point to which your observations are directed. It is not upon the Monitorial system itself—upon the commission of a recognized authority to the hands of the Upper Boys—but upon a particular method of enforcing it, that you comment in terms of anxiety. The principle is coeval with the School—established by the Founder. It is the universal rule of Public Schools:—until lately, when the experience of its salutary effects has led to a wider extension of it, it was the one distinguishing feature of a Public as contrasted with a Private School.

But the Monitorial system might exist without this particular method of enforcing it—the power of inflicting corporal punishment. And this is the question to which your Lordship has been good enough to call my attention.

Those who are acquainted with Dr. Arnold’s Life—a book regarded by many as one of authority upon such a subject—are aware that the right of his Sixth Form to the use of the cane was one for which he contended with the greatest earnestness, as indispensable to the efficient working of that Monitorial system to which he considered that Rugby owed so much of its well-being under his Head-Mastership. [5] And although many Masters might shrink from avowing so boldly their approbation of a power liable to so much abuse and to so much misconstruction, yet I have never heard it questioned that the same power is exercised, whether by permission or by acquiescence, in most of the great Public Schools of England, as I know that it existed at Harrow, actually if not avowedly, for very many years before I became Master.

But I have no wish to plead authority or prescription in defence of a practice which, if bad, can at any time be abolished, and for the toleration of which I do not deny that the Master under whom it exists may fairly be held responsible.

There can be no doubt that a Master who consulted merely his own ease and present popularity would at once abolish the power in dispute. The tide of public feeling is setting strongly in that direction. It would be easy to aggravate that feeling. Corporal punishment of any kind, by whomsoever administered, is inconsistent with modern notions of personal dignity, [7] and modern habits of precocious manliness; it needs nothing but a few cases of exceptional excess in the infliction of such punishment to direct against it a storm too violent to be resisted.

If, in the face of this feeling, and amidst so many temptations to yield to it, a Master still ventures to maintain that, liable as it is to abuse, open to misrepresentation, and difficult of explanation, the power of corporal punishment by the Monitors of a Public School is one not lightly to be abolished, because capable of great good and impossible to replace by any efficacious substitute; he may fail to convince—it is probable that he will fail to convince—those who judge of the system from without, and with no opportunity of calmly balancing its evil against its good; but at least he may be believed to speak honestly, and listened to as a disinterested witness.

There are in every Public School certain minor offences, against manners rather than against morals—faults of turbulence, rudeness, offensive language, annoyance of others, petty oppression and tyranny, &c.—which, as Public Schools are at present constituted, lie ordinarily out of the cognizance of the Masters, and might, so far as they are concerned, be committed with impunity. [8] Even some graver faults might, with due precautions against discovery, long escape the eye of a really vigilant Master.

To meet such cases, there is no doubt a choice of measures.

You may adopt what might with equal propriety be called the foreign School, or the Private School, system. You may create a body of Ushers; Masters of a lower order, whose business it shall be to follow Boys into their hours of recreation and rest, avowedly as spies, coercing freedom of speech and action, or reporting to their superior what such observation has gleaned. This is consistent and intelligible. Ruinous to that which has been regarded as the great glory of an English Public School—its free developement of character, its social expansiveness, in short its liberty: but yet, in itself, intelligible enough, and in theory perhaps preferable to the other.

If not this, then the alternative must be some form or other of the Monitorial principle. Ten, or twenty, or thirty, of those Boys who are (generally speaking) the elder, at all events the abler, the more diligent, the more meritorious,—selected by no favour, exempted from none of the rules and restraints of School, but yet brought by their position into a more intimate intercourse with their Master, and largely influenced (if he be what a Master ought to be) by his principles of judgment and discipline,—are empowered to exercise over their juniors a legalized and carefully regulated authority, while at the same time they are left to mix with them on terms of perfect freedom at times and in places to which no Master’s inspection could by possibility extend.

But this system is capable of at least two modifications.

The Monitors may be desired to act as the Master’s deputies; to observe for him, and to report to him. They may be charged to see nothing wrong done, to hear nothing wrong said, without hastening to his presence and invoking his interposition. They may be taught to regard themselves as the Master’s spies, informers, and creatures. Such has been made, sometimes, the theory of their office. They have been solemnly warned of the responsibility attaching to their office, as the Master’s eyes and the Master’s ears. No real power was entrusted to them. The terms of their commission were large, its tone was solemn: but the power to enforce obedience either did not exist, or existed only on sufferance and by stealth.

Now it appears to me that a Monitorial system of this nature is either nugatory, or worse. If the Monitors thus commissioned have the ordinary feelings of the sons of Gentlemen, they will virtually repudiate such an office. They will say, I was not sent here to be an Usher—a Master’s spy, a Master’s informer. They have too much self-respect, too nice a sense of honour, to live amongst their Schoolfellows on terms of unguarded equality, and then use the knowledge thus gained as a means of drawing down upon them the arm of authority and of punishment. The result will be, as it always has been wherever such a view has been taken of Monitorial duty, that the Monitors will not act for the purposes for which they were commissioned, but only for the maintenance of a selfish dignity which looks for its support to other means than those recognized by the system.

It astonishes me that those who regard submission to a corporal punishment as a degradation inconsistent with honour and self-respect, should look with toleration upon that antagonist system under which their sons might be called upon, as the reward of ability and diligence, to assume the office of a delegated spy.

The alternative—as I believe, the only alternative—is that form of Monitorial discipline which it has been my endeavour to carry into vigorous operation at Harrow during the last nine years.

I have taught the Monitors to regard their authority as emanating indeed from mine, and responsible to mine, but yet (with the limitation naturally arising from these two considerations) independent and free in its ordinary exercise. They are charged with the enforcement of an internal discipline, the object of which is the good order, the honourable conduct, the gentlemanlike tone, of the Houses and of the School. In these matters I desire that they should act for themselves; knowing well how doubly, how tenfold, valuable is that discipline which springs from within the body, in comparison with that which is imposed upon it from above. It is only on the discovery of grave and moral offences, such as would be poisonous to the whole society, and such as they may reasonably be expected to regard as discreditable and disgraceful even more than they are illegal, that I expect them to communicate to me officially the faults of which they may take notice. In certain cases, it may be optional whether an offence should be regarded as one against manners or against morals; and in these instances it will depend upon the accident of the prior discovery, whether it be taken up by the Monitors or by myself.

It follows as a matter of necessity that the Monitors should possess some means of exercising and asserting their authority.

Hence arises the old custom of fagging. It is a memento of Monitorial authority; a standing memorial of the subjection of the younger to the elder for higher purposes than any merely personal distinction. It is the daily assertion, in a form which makes it palpable and felt, of a power which has been instituted for the good not of the superior but of the inferior in the relation.

This is the ordinary assertion of Monitorial power. But there must also be some method of punishing disobedience, insubordination, turbulence, or other transgression. To give the Monitors no executive power beyond that of reporting and complaining, would be to leave them practically defenceless. Such a power would possess no influence with a community of Boys. It would be trifled with and trampled upon. Great and long must be the provocation which would overcome the natural repugnance of an honourable Boy to lodging a complaint with a Master against a Schoolfellow: and what would be the redress when it came? Such a remedy would be, in the popular feeling of a Public School, far worse than none.

Shall the power entrusted to the Monitors be that of “setting punishments” (as it is technically called)—that is, of imposing tasks of writing? Such has been the prerogative formally conferred upon the Monitors of Harrow: but it is easy to see how speedily such a right, if widely exercised, would come into collision with ordinary School duties; how impossible it would be for it to coexist with the similar power of the Masters, or even with the performance of the regular work and exercises of the several Forms.

Or shall the right of punishing be made to depend upon the physical power of the individual Monitor? Shall an older and stronger Monitor be at liberty to enforce his authority by blows, while a weaker and younger is left defenceless? Such a rule would be, in effect, an awkward and inconsistent return to a state of things which it is the one object of the Monitorial government to counteract—a system of brute force. Under any constitution of a School, the stronger can protect himself against the aggression of the weaker: it is the object of the Public School system to substitute for the brute force of the stronger the legalized power of the better and the abler. Unless therefore the power entrusted to the Monitor be something different in kind from that of physical strength, the whole system falls to the ground by losing its essential characteristic.