Everything about the buildings suggests the idea that they have been carefully adapted to the work to be done in them. The entrances are large, the passages broad, straight, and welllighted, and the staircases roomy and of easy slope. The Real Gymnasium of Stuttgart was only completed a year or two ago, and may be probably taken as a type of the modern German school building. It cost £44,000.* Its plan is perfectly simple; it is rectangular and threestoried, each story practically a reproduction of the others. Much attention, as will be seen, is given to gymnastics, and a large well-fitted gymnasium is attached to each school. The Real Gymnasium is the best school building in Stuttgart, but that of the Real School is, as far as utility is concerned, very little behind it. Like the Real Gymnasium, it is of massive stone, and cost, I was told, about £30,000. The Gymnasium is the oldest school, * Paid for out of the French war indemnity. and has not a good building, but a new one is in course of construction, which will not be inferior to the others. The two Burger schools are built near one another and are exactly alike. They are rectangular and four-storied, with the entrances in the centre of the ends of the rectangle. A very broad corridor runs from end to end through the middle of each floor, and there is a staircase at each end. They stand quite isolated in a large enclosure, with a gymnasium between them, which they use in common at different hours. The other girls' schools are somewhat similar in plan and general arrangements. The two types of building generally adopted are, either a rectangular building (I.), almost square in plan, with a courtyard let in behind; or a narrower building, with an entrance at the end (II.). In these higher schools of Stuttgart there is invested at least £150,000. This sum of money would not, I suppose, build such a beautiful and useful object as the Polyphemus, and it probably would not go very far if invested in 100-ton guns, but it seems open to question whether in the long run it would not be an equally good IL JF I. REAL GYMNASIUM AND REAL SCHOOL. investment of national money. We shall never get schools like these put up in our English towns unless higher education is systematically taken up by the State as it is in Germany. I have indicated the manner in which, after these schools are built, people are induced to send their children to them. The national system of education has been at work for three generations, and Germany is now a sufficiently well-educated country to appreciate the advantages offered, and every German parent who can afford it sends his children to one of the higher schools, and being educated himself, he is competent to select the school which will best prepare his children for their future occupation, He is all the more tempted to do this because he knows that the school fees only represent about one-third of the actual cost of the education given. Whether he sends his children or not, he knows that indirectly in the shape of rates and taxes he helps to pay the other twothirds, and being as a rule a man of frugal mind, he is no doubt induced to try and get as much as possible of his money back in the shape of education. This same feeling is no doubt |