suffice for town children, but will wholly fail to meet the wants of country children of promising talent. These must be prepared in loco for the grammarschool bursaries, at least up to the age of fifteen; and to secure this we must have, first, highly accomplished schoolmasters for the rural schools not only of Scotland but of England — men who know something from their own experience of university work; and, secondly, inducements by means of local endowments. or Government grants, or both, for these men to do the higher kind of work as well as the lower, and to draw pupils to their classes. This I advocate not merely for the sake of the few who get the immediate benefit, but for the sake of the many who are insensibly raised, morally and intellectually, by seeing what their schoolfellows are doing and their teachers aiming at. Nay, there are considerations of an equally vital kind which, were this the fitting place and time, I could insist on-considerations of a political and social character-which in this connection impress me deeply. It is such an educational system as exists in the three north-eastern counties of Scotland which realizes the true, and only true, democratic idea, in presence of which all questions of suffrage are superficial and trivial. It makes the clever poor contented, and thus saps the foundations of Socialism. SECONDARY EDUCATION IN SCOTLAND.* THERE can be no doubt that in pre-reformation times the number of high schools in Scotland (under the names of grammar and cathedral schools) was larger, in proportion to the population than it is now; and it is also certain that the influence of the revival of letters was felt in these schools quite as soon as in England. In those days, Scotland was in direct political and intellectual relations with the continent of Europe, and those relations were of a more friendly kind than England maintained. Accordingly, it felt the wave of continental life directly, and not only after it had first passed over England. Greek was taught at Montrose in 1534; King James V. was entertained in Aberdeen, in 1540, with orations in Græca Latinaque lingua summo artificio instructæ ; and John Knox says, in 1543, that the lay members of the Scottish Parliament knew Greek better than the clergy. It would appear, indeed, that Scotland was in the full tide of the * Read at the Social Science meeting in Aberdeen, in 1879. |