give him a key to a world inexpressibly wider than that in which he moves. It is rare for boys to go to school possessing anything that can really be called knowledge; but those who do have, invariably got their knowledge by miscellaneous reading in books which they only half comprehended. It is not a habit that is acquired at school, where every hour has its fixed occupation; that is to say, that the average child has only five or six years, say from six to twelve, in which to form it. And I confess that I should be unwilling to postpone the chance of acquiring this habit even to the most scientific instruction in building bricks or in making mud-pies. In short I would teach a child first of all how to read, because by teaching him to read you put him in possession of the employment which of all others is the most delightful to many children, and those the most intelligent; because you enable him to amuse himself quietly, and because you give him the best chance to find out what sort of things really interest him in life. You open the door to that cultivation of his own mind by himself which is the most important of all.

The rest of education stands on a different footing. It is not an amusement, and you only do harm by pretending that it is. The young teacher nearly always sets out with a theory that his or her business is to teach boys and girls how to think. In every public school you will find young masters who neglect their proper business -with the best intentions-in order to pass the time agreeably by discoursing on subjects in which they wish their pupils to take an intelligent interest; and other masters, to whom their pupils pass on, have with much bitterness to teach the boys what they ought to have been made to learn in these agreeable half-hours. No human being can teach another how to think, any more

than he can teach him how to digest; he can, at the most, indicate the conditions of healthy digestion and clear thought. But he can, and he ought to, teach him how to learn, which is a deliberate conscious effort of the will and the memory; and to make this effort is not an easy nor a comfortable process. You may decoy a child into knowing all the names and the counties and rivers of England-and he will not be a great deal the better for the knowledge -but you cannot cajole him into learning how to learn. I see lesson-books entitled "French without Tears," and so forth, and I distrust those lesson-books. At all events, in the school-room of the best teacher I ever knew there were enough tears shed to fill many buckets, and the pupils were the teacher's own children. I do not know exactly what they learnt in that schoolroom, but they learnt how to learn, and they even gained a taste for the business. If they liked what they had to do, so much the better; if they did not they were made to do it all the same-at what a cost of energy and patience only those who have taught can realize. I read in Child Life, which is understood to be the official organ of the most enlightened Froebelians, the rebuke administered to a lecturer when she took upon herself to exhort her Kindergarten students to patience: "There was a look of surprise on every face, and at last one student spoke up, and said, 'But how can one feel impatient with a little child?" The rest of us are not so Froebelian as all that, and I am sure that the teacher of whose success I spoke had such ample cause for impatience as no animal in creation but the human child can afford. But when noses had to be kept to the grindstone, they were kept there, and the result was that in the end the reluctant intelligence made the effort which was demanded of it and learnt. Morally, it learnt that efforts had to be made;

intellectually it learnt how to make them. That is the double lesson-the necessity of learning and the way to learn-which ought to be imparted to every child before it goes to a school, where the pupil takes his or her place in a class of twenty. In such a class the teacher's business is to teach a definite thing; but the unfortunate pupil who has not learnt how to learn cannot receive the individual attention necessary to get him over this first step. Under the Kindergarten system he will have learnt only to expect that every obstacle will be smoothed away, and I suspect that he will be very like a creature who has been taught to swim on dry land and is pitched into the water. The last thing that I should be afraid of is overstraining a child's intelligence in the initial stages. Once the child has learnt how to learn there is a danger, and the anxious parent may easily do a mischief by impressing unduly upon a willing boy the transcendent importance of passing a particular examination. Even if his elders are convinced that a child's whole future is at stake upon a single success, it is both unfair and unwise to make the child share this tremendous anxiety, too heavy a strain for the young nerves. That is an error to which the modern arrangements predispose all of us; but it does not spring from a theory. What I am concerned with here is the theory which seeks to confound work with play, and to find a royal road to learning in which all the labor shall be transferred from the pupil to the teacher. I have no personal experience of the matter, and I am told, on good authority, that the pupils come from a good Kindergarten knowing what they ought to know, and knowing it well. But it seems to me that the system is deficient in the most vital point of all; that it does not enforce the lesson of personal effort, and that in laying itself out to make things

pleasant for the learner it makes them too easy, and does not make sufficient demand upon attention. If it does not call forth a conscious and deliberate concentration of memory or reason by an exercise of will in the learner, it fails in its function.

The teacher of whom I spoke already had naturally her views upon the art she practised-for teaching, with all deference to Froebel, is an art and not a science-but, like all artists, she could not define her method. The Bible, common-sense and good English poetry were the things which she laid down as a basis for elementary education; but, of course, the word "commonsense" begs the whole question. Still, there is an element of suggestion in the list. Good English poetry was ruled out by Mr. Edgeworth, on the ground that it was foolish and wrong for children to learn to repeat words of which they did not know the precise meaning; and then there is a very curious passage, in which poor Rosamund is reprimanded when she wants to repeat the opening of Gray's "Elegy," "because the lines sound so very pretty." Her mother tells her that she does not know what "curfew" means, nor a "knell;" Rosamund replies, as one would say, like a very intelligent little girl, that she cannot tell the meaning of every word, but she knows the general meaning. "It means that the day is going; that it is evening; that it is growing dark." However, this avails nothing, and she is reduced to a better frame of mind, and accepts as the most appropriate poetry for her years, a description in rhymed couplets of a weaving machine-apparently the work of her condescending father.

Mr. Edgeworth, in many ways the type of the modern parent, is not quite in the movement on this point. Everybody admits nowadays that it is well to encourage children to take pleasure in the sound of beautiful words, and

in the Froebelian system great importance is given to learning verses by heart. But the verses are verses specially composed, written down to the infant intelligence, and for that reason scarcely examples of good English poetry. It is again the method of spoon-feeding adopted, instead of letting a child learn by heart, as children will do with enthusiasm, the ringing phrases of Macaulay's "Lays" or the songs of Shakespeare, which they repeat for the mere pleasure of the sound, training their ear and their instinct insensibly to the beauties and the uses of language, which is the instrument of all human business and the material body of thought. In education, as in life, a child gains continually by contact with the unfamiliar, at whose meaning he guesses. It is from the mind's tendency to conjecture that we learn to think.

All modern theorists lay great stress, like Mr. Edgeworth, on the importance in elementary education of physical science. I confess to a prejudice on this matter. The worst educated men among men of high intelligence that I have ever met were mathematicians; and next to them, in order of deficiency, I should put men of science. Nobody disputes the value or the interest of scientific knowledge, but it seems to be an indifferent training for the mind. I can never forget that Darwin, who in his young days loved Shakespeare, when old lost all pleasure in him, but continued to delight in the commonplace novel with a happy ending. It seems as if a mind dwelling perpetually on the tangible and definite-on the thing that can be absolutely proved or disproved-lost its sense of the mystery and fascination which hang about the meaning of life. I think that by early insistence upon physical science you may develop an undue bias for the material fact, a contempt or distaste for the unascertainable; and the busi

ness of life does not deal with fixed quantities. Still there is enough in science to stimulate the imagination, heaven knows! and of the value of its study as a kind of gymnastics for the mind I have no experience. Comparatively few people have; but no doubt it will be tried. It is an age of science and experiments, and since people have made up their minds that education is a science, experiments will be tried in education.

There exists in London a club-the Sesame-which provides sitting-rooms, dinners, newspapers in the ordinary way for the ladies and gentlemen who belong to it; but in its inception it was not as other clubs. It began with an association of people for the purpose of studying and spreading knowledge on all matters relating to educational reform; it was, in short, and still is in some degree, a club for the production of the educated mother, and, if possible, of the educated father also. The Sesame Club, as I understand, issues Child Life, the paper of which I have already spoken, and identifies itself in this way with the Kindergarten system. It has even founded an ideal Kindergarten, where students may go to practise Froebelian methods upon children who receive a gratuitous schooling. Young ladies may go there in order to become educated mothers and competent in the theory and practice of "such objects as child development, natural science, hygiene and general household management," as well as education. If you ask for a more precise definition of the ideals to which the modern parent, as represented by this club, subscribes (in both senses), one is provided by Prof. Earl Barnes; "The great work of the Kindergarten is to help the child to integrate his personal, material, social and religious worlds." The definition may not be very comprehensible, but it sounds sufficiently comprehensive-too much

so for my liking. I should like to adjure the modern parent to ask a little less of education and trust a little more to nature.

It seems that the present generation -the people whose children are growing up are convinced that they themselves were extremely ill-educated, and are determined, at all events, to be wiser than their parents. Frankly, I do not think it was so bad as all that. My friends appear to me to be very agreeable and well-educated people, and I see no reason to be discontented with the bringing-up which made them what they are if indeed the system had much to say to it. My own opinion is that, in any case, being brought up among the same persons, they would have turned out much the same whatever method had been adopted. The moral part of education is a thing that can be delegated to no Kindergarten in the world. Our conduct, in so far as it does not proceed directly from our innate qualities, is governed by imitation, conscious and unconscious. The people who influence us first are our parents, with whom we must live in some degree of intimacy; afterwards we are chiefly affected by the associates whom we choose for ourselves. Admiration is at the root of it, and the natural instinct of a child is to look up to the grown-up people it lives with, and to adopt their ideas, but only on condition that the elders behave naturally. Boys do not imitate their schoolmasters, for they know perfectly well that their masters assume a behavior for their edification; perfect naturalness is hardly possible in the relation of teacher and pupil, and, the more we think about influencing our own children, the less likely we are to accomplish it. Lady Isabel Margesson, in a paper read before the Women's Con

gress (reprinted in Child Life), declares that we ought to learn how to "selfexpress ourselves." I think she is needlessly disquieted about the matter. Children understand their parents very well, and when one human being deliberately tries to explain himself or herself to another, the result is nearly always misunderstanding; this is the most fruitful source of the quarrels of lovers. The one thing to be avoided is fear-habitual fear. If you COW а puppy you can do nothing with it, and some children are cowed-oftenest by a stinging tongue. I will say this for the modern parent-that this evil is far less common than it would appear to have been even half a century ago; the father is not that awe-inspiring personage he once was. Human nature being what it is, one need not be seriously afraid of his becoming, in many cases, a sort of amateur schoolmaster, like Mr. Edgeworth, or the model Froebelian parent.

As for the intellectual side of education, I merely wish to urge that the simpler and more definite our aims are, the more probable will be their attainment. Exactly what children, boys and girls, ought to learn at school may be matter for discussion, though I can conceive of no more proper basis of study than language, which is to be the vehicle of all our ideas and our means of communicating with our fellows. But the essential thing is that they should learn what they are set to learn; and the sooner they learn that they have got to learn, the better. I do not feel convinced that this simple but invaluable knowledge will be acquired in a place that aims at integrating the material, moral, social and religious worlds of a child, and teaching him how to play.

Stephen Gwynn.

One scorching afternoon, in the days before the British Government had been roused to realize that its Gallic neighbors were quietly appropriating the West African hinterland, a little wornout French gunboat came clanking down a broad reach of the muddy Niger. The sky, suffused with heat, was the color of brass overhead, and the yellow river radiated dazzling light as it broke apart in white froth at the rusty bows, giving up a curious sour smell. Ashore, here and there a tall palm hung its green fronds over the river, then giant reed beds, covering festering muds, melted into jungly thickets, which were lost again in a haze of heat. Black smoke rolled from the funnel to hang in horizontal strata over the bubbling wake, because there was not a breath of air to carry it away; and down in the stifling depths under-deck, naked, plague-stricken negroes groaned and sweated before the sulky fires. The wreck of a white man, half frenzied with fever, alternately encouraged them and abused the fate which had sent him there.

Here was little glory, only misery, heat and death, while he knew the one hope of saving the last of the company lay in hurrying the vessel down through the reeking delta into the life-giving freshness of open sea. But the boilers were foul with stone and mud, the scaled tubes were leaky, and it was only by desperate efforts he could keep steam at all, while part of the precious vapor was blowing into stokehold and engine-room. The engineer, Marsaut, checked a burst of expletives when a dripping black man flung down his shovel, and its clatter was followed by a choking cry. Wiping the sweat out of his eyes, a Senegali fireman bent over a limp black object, with staring

eyes huddled among the coal, and a hoarse voice said:

"It is the will of Allah! Another of us is dead. How can any man labor without eating in this heat of the pit? yet until an hour ago he toiled at my side. So the white man need speak no more hard words, for we have kept our promise of service. Where are all the rest who came with me from Dakka?"

As Marsaut afterwards told Fleming, the English trader, he could find nothing to say, and mutely watched two men fasten a firebar to the black ankles. Then the tackles creaked, and a shape, with limply hanging head, rose slowly towards the gratings, while ascending after it he heard a splash and saw something cleave apart the muddy river. Meantime under the ragged bridge-awnings, which fluttered with the hot draught the steamer made, Commander Girardi lay huddled in a canvas chair, the perspiration sealed up in his burning skin, and the soiled white uniform hanging loosely about his wasted limbs. His eyes were almost blinded by the reflected glare, and he blinked uselessly at the shimmering water, which, to his disordered vision, had changed itself to fire, growing steadily brighter as the steamer panted on. That, like others made about the time, had been a disastrous expedition. It was true sundry agreements with dusky gentlemen, who represented themselves as persons of authority, written in fantastic Arabic, were securely locked in a chart-room drawer, but then each petty Moslem chieftain was fond of making treaties, which became a source of revenue to him. In return for sufficient presents he would accept European protection from every offerer, and leave the harrassed frontier officials to afterwards settle the matter.