“The Battle of waterloo was won on the playfields of Eton.” Explain this statement.

This means that Britain’s military success was based on the values taught to schoolboys in its public schools. Eton was the most famous of these schools. Team sport like cricket and rugby were seen as organised way of teaching English boys the discipline’ the importance of hierarchy, the skills, the codes of honour and the leadership qualities that helped them build and run the British empire. Victorian empire builders justified the conquest of other countries as an act of unselfish social service, by which backward people were introduced to the civilising influence of British law and Western knowledge. Cricket helped to conform this self-image of the English elite by glorifying the amateur ideal, where cricket was played not for victory or profit, but for its own sake, in the spirit of fair play. Although the fact is that the Napoleonic wars were won due to the British trade and industry that made Britain the world’s greatest power, yet it was the superior character of its young men, built in boarding schools’ playing
gentlemanly games like cricket, that tipped the balance.