forced to widen its basis.  It has become, to a large extent, an examining body for a kind of Abenturienten certificate, and of necessity the matriculation examination which serves this purpose has had to extend over a wider area.  These two circumstances, reacting the one upon the other, have kept the school-teaching wide, whereby, of course, it loses something in depth.  Thus the master of a leading school complains of the little time that is given to classics—­only less than a quarter of the total school-hours to Latin, and no more to Greek, which is, moreover, an optional subject.

But before you begin to blame our system—­which, I may prophesy, will soon have to be adopted in England—­you must remember the central fact that nine Australian boys out of ten finish their education when they leave school, i.e. at sixteen or seventeen.  Four of the nine go into business, three into the bush, and the other two directly into professions.  Obviously the interests of the nine are of far more importance than those of the one, and it is for their benefit that the system of education must be arranged.  As the country advances in civilization, we may reduce the proportion of those who have to face the world directly they leave school to 80 or even to 75 per cent.; but even then it is only possible to consider the interests of the minority to a certain extent.  I will grant that that extent should be greater than the numerical proportion, because the aim of a school must keep a certain elevation if it intends to keep above the average of schools; but it is impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and the main bearings of the school must reflect the purpose for which the majority of boys come there, if it is to be of any service, or to achieve any legitimate success.

For my own part, I am not altogether inclined to regret the little attention that is paid to Latin and Greek.  Mr. Matthew Arnold’s complaint of half-culture has always seemed to me to savour of the pedagogue, and his school of the prig—­though I use these words in the better shade of their meaning.  It would, I believe, be a gain if the splitting of the educational system into denominational schools had not taken place.  A school with 200 boys—­the usual size of our largest—­cannot give the twofold training, classical and modern, side by side, as most of your public schools are doing now; but I am not sure that what the classical side gains by such a division, is not lost by the modern side as compared with the homogeneous system.

School-work nowadays cannot be mere training and foundation-laying.  It would be absurd to expect it to cover every department of the higher education, but there is a happy mean discoverable between the two.  A compromise can be established by which, while a preference is given to such studies as science and mathematics, which may be held to represent the inductive and deductive training, boys may yet carry away from school a reasonable