25 DECEMBER 1886, Page 3

The Attorney-General, Sir R. Webster, who was formerly at King's

College School, distributed the prizes to that school on Tuesday, and remarked in doing so, that "he came to that school as a very small boy of nine years of age. He supposed he should never forget the first day he spent in King's College School. The first day at a public school was not the most enjoyable that one passed in one's life." No, certainly not, where the school is one at which bullying has been a tradition as it was at King's College School, till it culminated a year or two ago in killing a healthy boy. But why were these remarks of the Attorney-General received with repeated "laughter ?" There is nothing which seems to most Englishmen so laughable as the tyranny and cruelty of boys towards each other. There is nothing that seems to us less laughable or more truly de- testable. Bullying, so far from being a forecast of manliness, seems to us, except when done in real and genuine ignorance of the pain it gives, the note of a cowardly and selfish kind of cruelty. We hope King's College men are not in the mood to " laugh " at the shocking tragedy of which their school was the scene.