But then upon Bosanquet's "googlies"
A volume he'd easily fill.
This was before the aeroplane and the motor had infected schoolboys with a passion for mechanics, and the view expressed is borne out by a suggestion made in 1907 by Sir J. J. Thomson, and duly noted in Punch, that boys should go to school in holiday time and during term time should "stay at home and learn something." A year earlier Punch had very properly laid his finger on a blot in the school system—the inadequate salaries of assistant masters. In "The Worm Turns" he had enlarged on the protest which one of the number had registered in the Westminster Gazette. It was all very well, as "Kappa" had done in the columns of that paper, to abuse schoolmasters, but what could you expect at the price when, at the best preparatory schools, £120 a year, resident, was considered adequate pay for a first-class man, and things were not much better in the public schools. Hence Punch's versified gloss, in which the much-maligned assistant master sums up the matter thus:—
Ah, well, it may be we are all past praying for,
But in this world one gets what one is paying for,
(That seems a fairly obvious remark);
And I for one, although exposed so crushingly,
Still mean to draw my salary unblushingly—
That of a third-rate clerk.
