GOVERNMENT AIMS.

II

inadequate to meet the demands of increased population, and with important supplements and improvements continues to the present time.

It is right to indicate here the aims the Government had in view when the seeds of the present system were sown. Inspectors were told that inspection was intended to be a means of co-operation between the Government and the ministers or other managers of schools for the improvement and extension of education; that it was not intended as a means of exercising control, but of affording assistance; not for the restraint but encouragement of local efforts. The general duties of the inspector were arranged under three distinct heads: (1) furnishing information to enable the Committee of Council to determine the propriety of granting funds in aid of erecting new schools; (2) reporting on the matter and method of instruction in schools aided by public grants; and (3) furnishing information respecting the state of education in particular districts. I think it may be said that these instructions, with such additions as the fuller development of the system required, continue to describe generally the relation between the Department, inspectors, boards or other managers, and teachers.

When I joined the late Dr Middleton in 1860 there were only seven inspectors in Scotland for all classes of schools except those in connection with the Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches, which were under the charge of two inspectors, who overtook all they had to do in the course of two or three months. As a concession to ecclesiastical feeling inspection was, till the passing of the Act of 1872, strictly denominational. Schools connected with the Established and Free Churches were inspected by officers who were appointed subject to the approval of the Education Committees of the respective Churches. There were few schools connected with the United Presbyterian Church, and these, as a rule, were placed on the list of the Established Church inspector. There are now thirty inspectors and thirty sub-inspectors, and the whole sixty are kept as busy as the seven were forty years ago. The number of inspectors was not then, and is not now, a measure of the number of existing schools but of the schools taught by certificated teachers. Besides the parish and many other schools connected with the two Churches, there were smaller ones supported by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, the most of which were taught by

DENOMINATIONAL INSPECTION.

13

uncertificated teachers. The change in this respect is very striking. Schools with a Church connection have very largely disappeared; board schools have taken their place; in almost every ordinary school the teachers are certificated, and every class of school is visited by the same inspector irrespective of denomination.

Forty years ago the attainments of the teachers of schools supported by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge were slender, as their emoluments were small. A very worthy man whom I knew was being examined by the Society's committee for an appointment, and had his reading tested on the New Testament. The passage happened to be about the man sick of the palsy who was borne of four. One of the examiners, wishing to ascertain whether the candidate fully understood the scope of what he had read, asked how he would explain to a class what was meant by the sick of the palsy being borne of four, and got for a reply, that he could not explain it, for it had always seemed to him to be a "pheesical impossibility."

CHAPTER III.

WIDE RANGE OF TRAVELLING-THE DEVIL LIKE A ROARING LION HORSEBACK AND SADDLE-BAGS- AN INVOLUNTARY SWIM ON HORSEBACK UNSATISFACTORY BUILDINGS

PRIMITIVE RAILWAY MANAGEMENT.

DR MIDDLETON's district included the whole of the north of Scotland between Dundee and Shetland, with the exception of Perthshire and the Western Islands. The schools of which he had charge were those connected with the Established Church and such as were undenominational. Free Church schools in the same district were under the charge of Mr Scougal, father of the present Chief Inspector in the Western district. So thinly scattered were certificated teachers in those days that we three overtook with greater ease, but with much more travelling, the inspection of that huge district, than the seventeen officers who have it now in charge. But we were regular vagabonds, months on end away from home. Had we been asked, as was a certain personage

THE DEVIL LIKE A ROARING LION. 15

who shall be nameless, "Whence comest thou?" we could have replied as he did, "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it." I must ask my readers in their charity to believe that the analogy ends there, and that we were not like that other personage going about like roaring lions seeking whom we might devour.

The definite function of this personage was brought puzzlingly before me one Sunday evening in a Banffshire manse. All the family were sitting quietly reading in the drawing-room, when the youngest boy, with a laudable thirst for knowledge, went up to his mother and asked a question, for the answer to which she referred him to me. Coming to me, he said

"Mr Kerr, is it true that the devil goes about like a roaring lion?"

"It must," I replied, "be true, for it is in the Bible."

This was followed by another question which I did not attempt to answer, "Then wha keeps his fire in when he's gaun aboot?"

The analogy between us early inspectors and the personage already referred to does not hold in respect of walking. None of us did much of that. After I had been over the ground once