Schools and Universities on the Continent

they have abroad, and then we may take a clever boy from our elementary schools, perfected by the Revised Code, and put him at once into a special school. A study of the best continental experience will show them that the special school is the crown of a long co-ordered series, designed and graduated by the best heads in the country. A clever boy in a Prussian elementary school passes first into a Mittelschule, or higher elementary school, then into a modern, or real, school of the second class, then into a real school of the first class, and finally, after all these, into the special school. A boy who has had this preparation is able to profit by a special school; to send him there straight from the elementary school, is like sending a boy from the shell at one of our public schools to hear Professor Ritschl lecture on Latin inscriptions.

I come, lastly, to the third point for our remark in Continental education. These foreign Governments, which we think so offensively arbitrary, do at least take, when they administer education, the best educational opinion of the country into their counsels, and we do not. This comes partly from our disbelief in government, partly from our belief in machinery. Our disbelief in government makes us slow to organise government perfectly for any matter; our belief in machinery makes us think that when we have organised a department, however imperfectly, it must prove efficacious and selfacting. The result is that while, on the Continent, through Boards and Councils, the best educational opinion of the country, by which I mean the opinion of men like Sir James Shuttleworth, Mr. Mill, Dr. Temple, men who have established their right to be at least heard on these topics,necessarily reaches the Government and influences its action, in this country there are no organised means for its ever reaching our Government at all. The most important questions of educational policy may be settled without such men being even heard. A number of grave matters enumerated

in the following pages,*-our system of competitive examinations, our regulation of studies, our whole school legislation, —are at the present moment settled one hardly knows how, certainly without any care for the best counsel attainable being first taken on them. On the Continent it is not so; and the more our Government is likely, in England, to have to intervene in educational matters, the more does the continental practice, in this particular, invite and require our attention.

In conclusion. There are two chief obstacles, as it seems to me, which oppose themselves to our consulting foreign experience with profit. One is, our notion of the State as an alien intrusive power in the community, not summing up and representing the action of individuals, but thwarting it. This notion is not so strong as it once was, but still it is strong enough to make it opportune to quote some words from a foreign Report before me, which set this much obscured point in its true light :

Le Gouvernement ne représente pas un intérêt particulier, distinct, puisqu'il est au contraire la plus haute et la plus sincère expression de tous les intérêts généraux du pays.'

This is undoubtedly what a government ought to be, and if it is not this, it is the duty of its citizens to try and make it this, not to try and get rid of so powerful and essential an agency as much as possible.

The other obstacle is our high opinion of our own energy and wealth. This opinion is just, but it is possible to rely on it too long, and to strain our energy and our wealth too hard. At any rate, our energy and our wealth will be more fruitful and safer, the more we add intelligence to them; and here, if anywhere, is an occasion for applying the words of the wise man :- If the iron be blunt, and a man do not whet the edge, then must be put forth the more strength; but wisdom is profitable to direct.'

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