had spent months before his visit in studying the Report of the Royal Commission on our Public Schools and in making himself otherwise acquainted with what he was likely to see. Those who met him in England were astonished at the intelligence of his questions, and at the amount of knowledge which he already possessed on the subject of his inquiry. Mr. Arnold is also a man of letters, perhaps better known than M. Demogeot as such; he is also an Inspector of Primary Schools; but, to judge from his Report, he knows little or nothing of secondary education in England, and, indeed, has a contempt for the business which he takes no pains to conceal. He considers the profession of schoolmaster unattractive (p. 482); he would rather be even a professor in a French Lycée than a master in an English public school (p. 476), where he would form part of no 'hierarchy, have no position, have little or no time for study, and have no career before him' (p. 474). He evidently is entirely ignorant of the changes which have been made in English education during the last twenty years. Whenever he compares French with English teaching he can only draw on his schoolboy recollections of Winchester and Rugby, and has never regarded the matter from the master's point of view. He does not know where to look for flaws, or where to discover the deficiencies of the system he is examining. He is in consequence frequently deceived. He takes the promises of the official programme as if they were always performed. He is dazzled by the neatness and order of the household arrangements of a large Lycée, charmed, perhaps a little reproved, by the activity of its proviseur, and he comes to the conclusion that even a pion is not so bad as he is painted. His ignorance of English schools is paralleled by the apparently scanty preparation he made for visiting foreign schools. He is in a constant state of surprise, and his Report is like a traveller's tale of a newly-explored country. Englishmen, you won't believe it, but I have seen,' is the burden of his message. Mr. Arnold spent seven months abroad at the Government expense. We wish he had given us a diary of his operations, as Mr. Fearon has done of the six weeks he spent in Scotland. We find very few traces in his Report of personal experiences. By accident or design his visit was arranged during that time of the year when many of the schools he wished to visit were taking their holiday. When he got to Berlin it wanted only a fortnight of the summer vacation. In Switzerland, during the time he was there, the schools were altogether closed. He appears to have visited Rome, but he gives us no account of what he saw there, except that it reminded him of England. The instructions given him by the Commissioners

were

were most ample, too large perhaps for any single person to have executed. They sketched out the plan of an exhaustive work on foreign education, on which any labour would have been well bestowed. But the meagre Report which Mr. Arnold gives us might have been composed without any personal visit at all. Copies of all the French official programmes, and a selection from their large library of works on public instruction, a few books, such as those which Mr. Arnold quotes, the Italian Report, Sulle condizioni della Pubblica Instruzione nel regno d'Italia,' and Dr. Wiese's Das höhere Schulwesen in Preussen,' in the hands of an able literary man, would have produced a result as satisfactory as Mr. Arnold's without paying a sixpence for travelling expenses.

There is another characteristic difference between the two works. The French enquirer is, of course, strenuous for the honour of France. He admits that there is something to be learned from England, but he never forgets that he is the emissary of the great nation. Our education is treated by M. Demogeot with the highest respect, but his extreme politeness is based on a sense of superiority. We believe that M. Demogeot has the strongest wish to engraft English liberty on French method, and that to prepare the French people for such a change is an object very dear to him; but his sense of courtesy as well as of justice prevents him from giving force to his arguments by abuse of institutions of which he does not. wholly approve. Mr. Arnold has no such scruples. For once he appears in the character of the true British Philistine. His Report is a good honest grumble throughout; everything foreign is good, everything English bad. One foreign school he thinks is just like another; if he has not seen the Polytechnicum at Zürich he has seen the Polytechnicum at Stuttgard, and they are all very good whereas in England the masters are bad, and the schools are bad, and the boys are badly prepared, and they are too much crammed, they are examined at the wrong age, they have no love of literature, and even their games are not so good as the foreign gymnastics; and the whole nation is past redemption because not two hundred of us (we confess the impeachment) have read Mr. Arnold's 'Report on Primary Education,' although it has been published seven years.

:

We do not propose to accompany Mr. Arnold through the whole of his Report. The greater part of it is occupied with a statement of facts from official sources, very neatly and clearly put, about which no difference of opinion can exist. Twentyseven pages are devoted to Italy, only fifteen to Switzerland. For this we are very sorry; we believe that there is no country

where

If

where education attains so completely the end it aims at, and where the problem of giving a cheap, useful, and at the same time a free and manly education to large numbers is so successfully solved. Mr. Arnold is of course loud in its praise, but he confines himself almost entirely to the means by which schools are governed and maintained, and to knowledge which can be derived from books. Of the life of the pupils and the professors, and the relations between them, as of the full cost of an education in Switzerland - matters which he was especially instructed to examine-he tells us nothing. Switzerland is preeminently a country of schoolmasters. A history of Pestalozzi and Fellenberg would have been as valuable and as much to the point as Mr. Arnold's history of the University of Paris; and we think that Geneva and Lausanne deserve more than the passing allusion which Mr. Arnold has vouchsafed to them. Germany has sixty pages given to her, and this is the most valuable and trustworthy portion of the whole. But here we must complain of excessive meagreness. We get from Mr. Arnold's account no idea of the life of a German school. Schulpforte is dismissed in a page and a half. It is a school about which all Englishmen must feel a strong curiosity, as the boasted meeting-place of foreign systems with our own. Mr. Arnold had spent a week at Schulpforte, and given us a picture of the living action of the school, it would have been of the highest value. We believe that an article by M. Esquiros, in the Revue des Deux Mondes,' describing a week spent in the summer half at Eton or Rugby, would do more to spread abroad a knowledge of English education than any number of statistics. If Mr. Arnold had done this for us, he would find more readers. Mr. Arnold was instructed to inquire into the books and apparatus used in schools. A full report on the German school-books would be of great service. Instead of this, we have a statement which, although technically true, is misleading, and a tirade against English school-books which is unfounded and uncalled for. Mr. Arnold says that all German school-books must be approved by the Educational Council. But practically there is the most perfect freedom in the choice of school-books and editions. Every gymnasium uses its own, and there is a lively competition between rival publishers. In England he tells us, most schools make a trade of bookdealing,' which we imagine is quite untrue of all public schools. 'Half, at least, of our school-books are rubbish,' which is again untrue. Mr. Arnold will find, if he inquires, that the books used throughout our classical schools have nothing to equal them in France; that Dr. Smith's dictionaries and manuals have no

rival in Europe or America. These hasty statements can only be explained by Mr. Arnold's ignorance of the present state of English schools, and are drawn from his hazy recollections of thirty years since.

But the portion of Mr. Arnold's Report which is most characteristic is that which relates to France. The French schools received the first fruits of his attention and enthusiasm when he had not as yet lost any portion of interest in his subject. It is here, also, that the comparison with England is drawn in the deepest shadow. We have ourselves seen something of French education, and we differ very widely from the conclusions to which he would lead us. The public mind seems already to have been influenced by this account of our neighbours' institutions. M. Duruy is the model of a Minister of Education; and his extreme activity, backed by the strong personal interest of the Emperor, is likely to invite us to a similar course. There is a symmetry and preciseness about French arrangements which is tempting and alluring to the official mind. We are destined, we hope, soon to have a Minister of Education in England; and he will in all probability borrow some ideas from across the Channel. It is for this reason most important that we should get a clear conception of what French education really is. We propose, therefore, to examine Mr. Arnold's account at some length in those particulars where we dissent from him.

After a long history of education in France, and an account of the organisation of the Ministry of Instruction, Mr. Arnold gives us a description of the École Normale, the pépinière of professors, and of the professors themselves.

The Ecole

Normale is undoubtedly one of the glories of France; it provides the very best instruction which the country can give to 110 young men entirely free of charge; and the admissions to it are granted solely by competition, without favour or patronage. Mr. Arnold thinks that the establishment of such a school in England should be the first step to the improvement of our teaching staff. But we must remember that the Ecole Normale stands in place of both our Universities. The real representatives of these 110 bourses of 407. a year each are our Balliol and King's Scholarships, our Oriel and Trinity Fellowships. At Oxford alone, 90,000l. a year are given away in prizes for learning. The 12,3001. of the Ecole Normale are very poor in comparison. The professors of the École Normale, distinguished as they are, are not superior to the teachers of Oxford and Cambridge; whereas the moral education of the two places cannot be for a moment compared. The young men of the Normal School, whose ages vary from eighteen to twenty-eight, are under the very

same

same surveillance as the schoolboys of the Lycées. The place of pion is supplied by men a few years older, who wish to prosecute their studies farther, and who answer to the young fellows of our colleges who stay up for the purpose of reading. When we visited the École Normale we saw the pupils in the playground, some swinging, some playing leapfrog or prisoner'sbase, with a fair sprinkling of maîtres d'études watching them from the windows. This surveillance is continued at night. It is true that the beds in the dormitories are screened by partitions, but at the end sleeps the maître d'étude, with a window which rakes them all; and our cicerone told us that it was his duty to come out whenever they made a noise, which was not seldom. Does Mr. Arnold really prefer this to the freedom and manliness of our college life? The intelligent young man who showed us round stared in surprise at what we told him of our English liberty, he exclaimed, ‘Voilà le self-government appliqué à l'éducation.' In this matter we certainly prefer anarchy to authority. But after all, the Normal School is chiefly a political engine; the lectures, the conferences, the studies, are narrowly guarded by the Minister; and if the pupils applaud the teaching of a too liberal professor, the school is summarily broken up, and the career of so many men is ruined. We can imagine that a despot in England would be glad to collect under one roof all the holders of scholarships in Oxford and Cambridge, and to teach them contemporary history according to the interests of his dynasty.

From this school proceed the body of French professors, and there follows in Mr. Arnold's pages a comparison of French with English teachers, which is anything but complimentary to the latter, and which in our opinion is extremely unfair. He says the service of public instruction in France attracts a far greater proportion of the intellectual force of the country than in EngJand,' and quotes as examples MM. Nisard, Pasteur, and others who are professors in the Normal School, and have nothing whatever to do with the Lycees. The Professors of Oxford and Cambridge, of University College, and King's College, London, and of Owens College, Manchester, could furnish as illustrious names as those he has enumerated, and would in France be all under the Minister of Education, whereas MM. Taine and Prévost Paradol have no more to do with public teaching than Mr. Gladstone or Sir Roundell Palmer. But the masters of our chief public schools are, we should say, in ability, education, and social position decidedly superior to the similar class in France. They have gained greatly by being brought up to a late age with those who are to follow other careers, instead of being confined

to