grammar school into a seven seven or eight years' course, and thus to raise the age of admission to the Universities from seventeen or eighteen to nineteen or twenty, as in England and Germany, would be a death-blow to the study of classics in Scotland altogether. The Scotch know that in former times far more Latin, and quite as much Greek and mathematics, as are requisite for entering even the English Universities now, was taught to boys long before they were seventeen. It is scarcely possible to mention a great man, either in this or any other country, previous to the present generation, who did not commence his university career two or three years earlier; and to doubt their familiarity with Latin, at any rate, is impossible, seeing that it was in Latin that the whole business of the Universities was carried on. The secret of what now seems marvellous, there can be no doubt is, that Latin was taught as a spoken tongue, and that, in so far as possible, the same method was adopted with Greek. With our present race of schoolmasters, it is probably impossible to recur to this practice, and we must not ask for impossibilities. But, even for schoolmasters less familiar with the learned languages than those who taught our great-grandfathers, to bring a substantial knowledge of these languages within the limits of a school education which shall terminate at seventeen, is not impossible; and, however difficult it may be, it is a difficulty the conquest of which is a condition of the survival of classics amongst the rival subjects which, on every side, are contending for their place. If to seventeen we add the three years' course for the Arts' degree, three or four years for professional study, and the Wanderjähre, which constitute an element in Scottish education we hope will never be abandoned, we reach the age of twenty-four or twenty-five, beyond which it is neither possible nor desirable that the education of Scotchmen, in general, even of the upper middle class, should extend.

But if the emoluments of schoolmasters can neither be increased by increasing the fees nor by extending the period of attendance at the schools, there is but one remaining alternative-they must be increased from external sources. We have already seen reason to dismiss the proposal of applying to them the principle of payment by results. The inquiry consequently limits itself to the examination of the other external sources from which increased salaries may be obtained.

In ordinary circumstances the possible sources would be twoimperial grants, and local rates; and in so far as it may be necessary ultimately to resort to either or both of them, we do not agree with Mr. Sellar, and others, in regarding them as

hopeless. Penurious as are the dealings of the Imperial Government with Scotland on all occasions, we can scarcely think that Parliament would overlook an object of such magnitude and importance for the nation as a whole; whilst an assessment, confined perhaps to persons whose incomes brought them within the class chiefly, though by no means exclusively, interested in the higher instruction would, we are convinced, be cheerfully borne. But the circumstances are not ordinary. Though the total revenues from endowments of the twelve middle class public schools amount only to the pittance of 3,980l. 19s. 10d., the total revenues from endowment for educational purposes, exclusive of University endowments, reach the prodigious sum of 174,5321. per annum - very nearly forty-four times the total revenues of the schools. About one half of this whole sum is devoted to hospitals; Edinburgh and its vicinity alone carrying off about 60,000l. per annum, whilst 42,000l. a year is doled out over the country for the support of elementary education.

To discuss the 'hospital question' with any approach to completeness would demand a separate article, but its general bearings may be stated in a few words.

By far the larger part of the whole funds of these institutions being devoted to elementary instruction have, by the operation of the Education Act, become simply a gift to the ratepayers of the districts in which they are situated. That such, at any rate, was not the design of the donors in one single instance is a fact admitted on all hands. They were intended for educational purposes-sometimes, as in the case of Heriot's Hospital, of a secondary kind, but always of a kind not within the reach of the beneficiaries by the action of the public law of the country. The Commissioners hold, that the only means of fulfilling this benevolent intention, in the altered

If the analogy of the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 (35 & 36 Vic. c. 62) were to be maintained, all that seems requisite for the endowment of the higher class schools would be, that to the enumeration of sources of emolument contained in § 62 (3) should be added:

'Such rate as the School Board (or the Court of the University 'of the District, or, better still perhaps the Education Board, if it should be made a permanent Scottish institution) may from time to time 'declare to be necessary for the purposes of the higher instruction, to be raised by the Parochial Boards (§ 44) on all lands and heritages exceeding the value of (say) 50l. annually.' Or the requisite sums might be raised, along with the income-tax, on all incomes exceeding 5001. a year.

circumstances which have arisen, is to apply these endowments to the support of the higher education for which no public provision has been made; and no application of them that had this object in view could possibly be more efficacious than making better provision for the teachers in the burgh schools. Against this most rational and, as it seems to us, inevitable suggestion, a furious outcry has arisen, and political capital has been attempted to be made out of the plea that it is a scheme to rob the poor for the benefit of the rich. In so far as the poor-meaning thereby those who are mainly interested in the primary instruction are concerned-the plea is worse than insincere, it is deceptive; because the only interest which they have in the endowments now is to see that a door to the higher instruction shall be opened to them by their means. And this is precisely what the Commissioners propose to effect by endowing the secondary schools in provincial towns, and supplying stepping stones to them from the parish schools, and from them to the universities, by means of bursaries. To offer gratuitous in place of cheap education, as to some extent the old endowments no doubt do, to the non-pauper class, is simply to degrade and pauperise them; and to the pauper class gratuitous education is not only supplied, but if need be is forced on them by the Compulsory Clause. The interest of the poor, on the other hand, whether paupers or not, in the endowment of local secondary schools is positively greater than that of the classes above them, because, at whatever inconvenience, the wealthier classes always can, and in Scotland always have, procured secondary education for their children. The poor, on the other hand, have been cut off from it altogether, except in the imperfect manner in which it was brought within their reach by the parish schools, and the preliminary classes at the universities.

But the ratepayer cry, which Mr. Maclaren, the Member for Edinburgh, has raised, and which Mr. Maitland, the Member for Kirkcudbright, has taken up, is not quite so easily disposed of, as that of those for whom the rates are paid. An endowment for the support of primary education in a district, Mr. Maitland contends, is a legacy to the ratepayers-a succession which has opened to them by the operation of the Education Act-to which they are just as much entitled as any other legatee is entitled to any other windfall. The answer is, we presume, that the ratepayers were not in the contemplation of the testators; nay, that they were expressly excluded by destinations which were essentially educational. If the fulfilment of the intentions of the founders had become

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impossible, their own heirs at law, and failing them the Crown, both of whom every testator contemplates in the background, not the ratepayers, would be entitled to take the place of the original beneficiaries. But it has not become impossible. The wills of the founders still admit of being fulfilled, though not under the conditions which they contemplated, by the means pointed out by the Commissioners. But this, though sufficient, is not all. The Legislature did not intend that the Education Act should press unequally upon the ratepayers in different districts; and if it had contemplated such a contingency as the payment of the rates out of old educational endowments, that contingency would have been provided against. If need be, the ratepayers may rest assured that they will yet be protected against the pauperising effects of paying their lawful debts out of funds which were destined for other uses. To this extent a paternal legislature will not fail to care even for them.

These considerations seem fully to justify the recommendation of the Commissioners, that wherever there are wasted endow'ments' for educational purposes, they should be applied to the development of the existing secondary schools, to the foundation of new ones, and to bringing the parish schools in Scotland generally up to the condition of those in the enjoyment of the Dick Bequest. That this latter object, at least, admits of realisation without raising the Hospital question in its wider aspects at all, is obvious when we learn that there are endowments in Scotland under 1007. a year for primary educational purposes which amount in the aggregate to 42,000l. a

year.

But the Commissioners have gone further than we have yet indicated in adapting their recommendations to the wants of the lower middle class. With reference to George Heriot's, the greatest of all the Edinburgh hospitals, of which the net revenue in 1873 was 18,9507., after suggesting that the

* In the 'Summary of the Work of the First Edinburgh School Board (1876),' we read: 'No other large Board in Scotland has been able to keep its rate for the third year as low as 1d. in the pound. < The low rate in Edinburgh is largely due to the number of children ' educated by the various Educational Trusts in the city, which thus ' render a great service to the community' (p. 19); and farther on: They,' the Board, 'have been advised that under the Statute they เ are not entitled to expend any portion of the School Fund upon the 'High School beyond meeting the expense of the Annual Examination' (Ib.). An arrangement which permits such a community as that of Edinburgh to starve its High School in order that it may enjoy an exceptionally low rate, can scarcely be long maintained.

foundationers should be restricted to sixty, that the boardingout system should be more extensively adopted, and that the University bursaries, open to candidates from all parts of Scotland, should be increased; they add: There remains for 'consideration the question whether the new public secondary 'school,' into which they propose that Heriot's should be converted, should have any distinctive character. Looking to the ample supply of education in Edinburgh of the usual type, we are disposed to recommend that the school should be so organised as to be specially adapted to the wants of the industrial and commercial classes.' After quoting from the evidence of Dr. Lyon Playfair, Professor Fleeming Jenkin, Sir Bartle Frere, the replies to Lord Stanley's circular to H.M.'s representatives abroad, in 1868, &c., the facts with which we are all so familiar, as to the inferiority of industrial training in this country, they conclude:

'We are of opinion that Heriot's Foundation offers an opportunity for establishing a school, somewhat after the model of the Real Schulen -one in which the basis of education shall be mathematical and practical to the same degree that in our ordinary secondary schools the basis is classical. Indeed, we should be disposed to recommend the exclusion of classics, believing that where a classical education is given, it is apt, as being the more fashionable, to oust or starve the modern instruction that may be given alongside of it.' *

When we reflect on the fact, to which Mr. Sellar has called attention,† that the income of Heriot's Hospital is just about the same as that of Eton, excluding the ecclesiastical benefices in the gift of the latter; and that the annual revenue of Donaldson's Hospital, which is over 10,000l. a year, is nearly twice. that of Rugby, even those of us who cannot altogether join in the panegyrics which he bestows on the English public schools

Third Report, p. 52. † Higher Education of Scotland, p. 17. The Commissioners exhibit an occasional tendency to go off into raptures about the 'great English public schools; a circumstance which probably provoked the cruel contrast which Dr. Donaldson has drawn, in his Lectures on Education,' between them and the schools of Prussia. The imitations of English schools which have been produced at Glenalmond and Fettes, as attempts to revive for the higher classes the monastic system which has been so emphatically condemned in the Edinburgh Hospitals, are very unlikely ever to be accepted as models for Scottish schools. But the organisation of some system of boarding for the children of parents who do not reside in the town in which the school is situated is surely very desirable, and, one would hope, not unattainable. The irrational opposition which has all along been offered to the establishment of places of residence under Academic