In the family there is only one (or two) ruling wills without appeal; therefore justice is impossible. In the school, on the other hand, there is a continual watchful jury, which rigorously judges boys as well as teachers. The boys become more moral; brutality is tamed; social instincts awaken; they begin to see that individual interests must be generally furthered by means of compromises. There cannot be tyranny, for there usually are enough to form parties and to revolt. A teacher who is badly treated by a pupil can soonest obtain justice by appealing to the other pupils. Moreover, about this time there was much to arouse their sympathy in great universal interests.

During the Danish-German War of 1864 a fund was raised in the school for the purchase of war-telegrams. These were fastened on the blackboard and read with great interest by both teachers and pupils. They gave rise to familiar talks and reflections on the part of the teachers regarding the origin and cause of the war. They were naturally all one-sidedly Scandinavian, and the question was judged from the point of view of the students' union. Seeds of hatred towards Russia and Germany for some future war were sown, and at the burial of the popular teacher of gymnastics, Lieutenant Betzholtz, this reached a fanatical pitch.

The year of the Reform Bill,[7] 1865, approached. The teacher of history, a man of kindliness and fine feeling, and an aristocrat of high birth, tried to interest the pupils in the subject. The class had divided into opposite parties, and the son of a speaker in the Upper House, a Count S., universally popular, was the chief of the opposition against reform. He was sprung from an old German family of knightly descent; was poor, and lived on familiar terms with his classmates, but had a keen consciousness of his high birth. Battles more in sport than in earnest took place in the class, and tables and forms were thrown about indiscriminately.

The Reform Bill passed. Count S. remained away from the class. The history teacher spoke with emotion of the sacrifice which the nobility had laid upon the altar of the fatherland by renouncing their privileges. The good man did not know yet that privileges are not rights, but advantages which have been seized and which can be recovered like other property, even by illegal means.

The teacher bade the class to be modest over their victory and not to insult the defeated party. The young count on his return to the class was received with elaborate courtesy, but his feelings so overcame him at the sight of the involuntary elevation of so many pupils of humble birth, that he burst into tears and had to leave the class again.

John understood nothing of politics. As a topic of general interest, they were naturally banished from family discussions, where only topics of private interest were regarded, and that in a very one-sided way. Sons were so brought up that they might remain sons their whole lives long, without any regard to the fact that some day they might be fathers. But John already possessed the lower-class instinct which told him, with regard to the Reform Bill, that now an injustice had been done away with, and that the higher scale had been lowered, in order that it might be easier for the lower one to rise to the same level. He was, as might be expected, a liberal, but since the king was a liberal, he was also a royalist.