they have passed through as many transmutations as Pythagoras himself could have imagined, and improving at every turn, have at last "jumped Jim Crow," the schoolmaster, and keep each a "mathematical, classical, and commercial academy,' where proficient scholars in every branch are produced with the productiveness of steam, and the velocity of railroads.

It is not least among the services which that inimitable satirist, the author of "Nicholas Nickleby," has rendered to the cause of true knowledge and unsophisticated feeling, that in his unsparing anatomy of schools of the Greta Bridge class, he lays open Mr. Squeers' "new practical method" of teaching the sciences:

"We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular educational system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour w-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It's just the same principle as the use of the globes.-Where's the second boy?'-' Please, sir, he's weeding the garden,' replied a small voice. To be sure,' said Squeers, by no means disconcerted; so he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottiney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottiney is a knowledge of plants, he goes and knows 'em. That's our system, Nickleby; what do you think of it ?'"

It is an indication of a return to a sounder state of things, that people begin to entertain educational novelties with suspicion; and though all such terms as visionary, quixotic, and innovation, are two-edged tools, and may be made to discountenance the good as well as the bad, yet society is in a hopeful state when it becomes sensible of the impositions which are attempted to be practised upon it, and the pioneers of its way, its satirists, cover existing fudge with merited contempt.

To persons whose minds have been chiefly engaged in noting the contrast, the humiliating contrast, which exists between what is often professed, and what is effected by even the more costly of our present educational establishments, the outline I have given of a course of popular training, may well appear impracticable; and certainly I too think it impracticable with our actual instrumentality. I therefore proceed to point out what appear to me some indispensable pre-requisites. A thorough educational reform must of necessity be slow in coming, and it can never come till certain existing influences undergo an entire change.

And first, the mind of the public at large must be more enlightened than it is at present. Education is for the most part

an internal work and an internal result. Its greatest achievements are not in the dexterity of the fingers, but in the sound, vigorous and well-balanced action of the mind itself-not so much in any actual acquirement of knowledge-as the possession of internal power, of a well disciplined and a well-regulated mind-in habits of steady and sustained application, in activity and precision of thought, in the ability to investigate, acquire, to turn knowledge to account: in the language of Milton on another subject, "to know and hence to do." Now these are educational results for which an uninformed, or a superficially-informed public can have little or no estimate, and little or no appreciation. They are too much internal for them to see or value. They are therefore results for which there is no effectual demand. It is that which is palpable to sense which they admire, and what they admire they naturally seek for. Display in consequence imposes upon the public mind. Large pretensions are taken at even more than their full value. I am just old enough to remember, that at the termination of the last war, eight and twenty shillings were secretly given for a guinea. The public have often done worse in regard to education; they have paid in gold more than its current price for paper-money. Hence educational speculators swarm over the land. Imposing manners are preferred to solid acquirements, and loud professions to aptness to teach. The wider the range of knowledge offered to their acceptance, and the shorter the time required for its communication, the greater the popularity, especially if to a scorn of established methods there is added a bold claim of novelty, and around the whole is thrown a veil of German mysticism. The remedy for these current evils can be found only in an improvement of the public intelligence. Education is in its nature one of those things of which the ordinary purchasers are, in actual circumstances, least able to judge. The great patrons of education are to be found in the middle classes, among our shopkeepers, merchants-persons who for the most part possess money and good feeling-the means of usefulness which industry affords, and a wish to turn their means to a good account-but who are too generally unable to appreciate the quality of the article they desire to possess themselves and to communicate to others. Can we wonder then that the supply corresponds with the demand? and how can we improve the article brought to market, except we improve the taste and enlarge the intelligence of the customers? I do not of course mean that superior minds may not influence for the better the course of school education-but I do mean that this process of improvement is tardy and not altogether seen-while

there can be no doubt that if parents and patrons become duly sensible of the kind of education that the young ought to receive, our educators will not fail to fit themselves for the duties of their office, or give way to less incompetent men. In medicine we have a case in point. What has become of the solemn air of pretension under which ignorance not very long since veiled its insufficiency? The bag-wig, the gold-headed cane, the important and mysterious air of the old-fashioned physician, has descended into that limbo of social follies into which educational quackery is, I trust, destined to hasten. What intelligence has done in one case it will not in time fail to effect in the other. But this leads me to

A second requisite; Medical practice owes no small part of the reformation it has undergone to the prevalence of improved modes of education, and the establishment of suitable tests of ability, in the profession itself. It has done much by its own efforts to redeem its character, to raise the practice into the dignity of a profession. And so-one of our first duties will be to educate our educators, and to adopt the necessary means for ascertaining that those who aspire to the office are competent to discharge its duties. It appears from the evidence of Dr. Kay before the Educational Committee of the House of Commons, that out of 1375 teachers engaged in the towns of Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Bury, and York, in the education of the young of the poorer classes, only 130-130 out of 1375-one-tenth, had received any education for their employment. And of the comparatively few teachers that the normal school connected with the British School Society trains for the work of education, the average of time which they remain under instruction, we learn from Mr. Dunn's evidence before the same Committee, does not extend beyond three, or at the utmost four months. With great propriety might Mr. Dunn assert that such a period was quite insufficient. "The question," he goes on to say, "the question often is, shall we send out a man with four months' training, or shall we let them have a man with no training at all." Up to this time or nearly so, the education of our educators has been left almost exclusively to chance. It is true that a large share of the work of education -especially of the higher education, is in the hands of ministers of religion who are generally men of more or less knowledge and cultivation. But the cases are rare indeed in which any person is able to discharge adequately the duties of two professions; and the ministers of religion, how much soever they may labour to turn their knowledge to account in the work of education, have not received a training specifically for the pur

pose, and fully am I satisfied that a specific training is requisite for the office of an educator. There is scarcely an officenot even the ministry of religion itself-which requires more peculiar aptitudes; there is scarcely an office which involves higher or more sacred obligations; and it is indeed to be regretted, that even in the least insufficient class of instructors, the business of education should have been made a mere appendage to another profession-a means to eke out the resources which a certain position in society requires. Nor am I a believer in the doctrine that a less competent set of instructors will suffice for our popular schools. I do not indeed say that they demand the same extent and variety of knowledge as is needed in the Grammar-school. Yet in this very difficult and very important work, it is not easy to mention the branch of knowledge which may not be made serviceable even in a parish school; but the great want is of persons who have studied, carefully studied, education as a science, who have therefore made themselves well acquainted with the human mind-the material, so to say, with which they have to work-who have had what may be a natural aptitude for communicating knowledge, and training the mental and moral powers, well disciplined and developed; who have acquired that first great lesson in the art of commanding, the habit of rational obedience, and have been led to govern themselves as an essential preliminary to governing and improving others. Now if these high results, these superior accomplishments are essential requisites in a good educator, how are they to be acquired if the work of education is still left to those who have failed in other pursuits-to those who have other and most absorbing duties,-how, in short, except by the adoption of a suitable plan for educating our educators? Something may be done by indirect means. If you establish good schools here and there up and down the country, and place in them the best masters you can find, you will not fail to exert a beneficial influence in the respective neighbourhoods. But all who have made the attempt are fully aware that the great difficulty is to find teachers competent to work out the ideas they have formed, and the plans they set in action. In no one thing more than in a school does success depend on the principal who is employed in its duties. The best devised system will prove of little avail and will soon degenerate into mediocrity or worse, unless you place over it a competent head; and even a bad system in good hands shall produce better results; for in a school it is emphatically true that the government which " is best administered is best." We have then no adequate resource-we have no sure warrant for

able instructors, but in an instrumentality which shall secure a good education for our educators.

One immediate consequence of such a preparatory discipline would supply ANOTHER REQUISITE-it would tend to create a rational confidence on the part of parents and patrons. One effect of the excitement which has now for some time prevailed on the subject of education, is in the existence of a restlessness and proneness to dissatisfaction on the part of parents towards the teachers of the young. So much, and for the most part so justly, have existing modes of tuition been impeached, that parents, whether able to form a correct judgment or not, and even to some extent children themselves, have become imbued with a disposition to find fault, to doubt, distrust, and perhaps subvert the plans which in any case may be pursued. This is an unhappy state of things. I do not mean that I wish it had never existed. It is a necessary part of the transition through which we are going, from what was very bad to what I believe will prove something better; and I would far rather that the uneasiness and discontent were universal as well as intense, than that society should continue to suffer under its educational wrongs. At the same time it is an evil. It doubles the difficulties of the teacher, interferes with his plans, his discipline, his peace, and general efficiency. However enlightened he may be, however zealous in the discharge of his duties, the educator, if liable to anxious, distrustful, and perhaps unwise interference from the parent, will find in that influence his greatest impediment, and cannot fail to have no small part of his labours and hopes frustrated. Many illustrations of this remark have come within my own knowledge. I know a teacher who received charge of a boy that had been subjected to habitual flogging, in order to secure his progress in the Latin language. He was but a child, and the result, as might have been anticipated, was, a thorough dislike of the study, and an entire inaptitude for its prosecution. Acting on the judicious plan that abstinence is the best remedy for a diseased appetite, the new teacher did not allow the boy to proceed with the language, but told him that he should do so when he had made progress in other pursuits. The plan was proceeding with every promise of a good result, when the parent interfered, intimated that he "paid for a classical education, and wished his son to have it." Explanation was tendered by the instructor-but in vain. The Latin was resumed, every effort was made-but no progress. Abstinence was again ventured on-again set aside by the parent; and the final result was, that the boy acquired little more good than a slight abatement of his inveterate distaste for the