You only want to have
your heads set straight, to take the right side; so bear in mind that
majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in
the wrong; and that if you see a man or boy striving earnestly on the
weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to
go and join the cry against him. If you can't join him and help him, and
make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the
world which he will fight and suffer for, which is just what you have
got to do for yourselves; and so think and speak of him tenderly.
So East and Tom, the Tadpole, and one or two more, became a sort of
young Ishmaelites, their hands against every one, and every one's hand
against them. It has been already told how they got to war with the
masters and the fifth form, and with the sixth it was much the same.
They saw the prepostors cowed by or joining with the fifth and shirking
their own duties; so they didn't respect them, and rendered no willing
obedience. It had been one thing to clean out studies for sons of heroes
like old Brooke, but was quite another to do the like for Snooks and
Green, who had never faced a good scrummage at football, and couldn't
keep the passages in order at night. So they only slurred through their
fagging just well enough to escape a licking, and not always that, and
got the character of sulky, unwilling fags.
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