A Letter to the Viscount Palmerston, M.P. &c. &c. &c. on the Monitorial System of Harrow School

Transcribed from the 1854 John Murray edition by David Price
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.
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.
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.
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.