the atmosphere was considered. I believe if I had stayed very long in it myself I should have forgotten even the course of the Thames.

My purpose was now accomplished. Next morning I set off on my journey homewards by way of Frankfort, Cologne, and Ostend.

CONCLUSION.

N the foregoing pages I have described what I saw, and only what I saw; but

in order to make my account more complete, I will add a few particulars relating to Kindergarten and elementary school teaching, and this especially because people who talk on Our platforms, and even in official reports, of promoting popular education, frequently seem as if they were unaware that something very different from what they are talking about exists out of England. They talk as if they had never reached the conception of education as development and culture, and had derived all their knowledge of it from what they see going on in our primary schools, where there is—with very rare exceptions-neither development nor culture in any true sense of the term.1 It is therefore

If this and other remarks I have made on our Revised Code system appear too sweeping, I must take refuge under Dr. Morell's apologetic

important to show-though I have already, in fact, shown it-that it is possible not only to form a theory of education as culture, but practically to carry it out, so as to embody the theory in action. Now, supposing that I had myself formed no such theory of education, but had merely, as an impartial spectator, looked at the work going on before my eyes in the Kindergarten and elementary schools I have visited, I could have evolved the theory from the practice. And, first, as to the Kindergartens. Observing the little children at their games and occupations, I could come to no other conclusion than that they were by

report for 1873 (recently published), in which he thus sums up the 'general result' of its working, which is—‘That all those elementary acquirements which are of a mechanical character, or which depend upon definite mental exercises rather than reflection (such as writing, elementary arithmetic, spelling, and the power of recognising words), are on the average well taught, but that those acquirements which depend upon thought, sentiment, reflection, or research (such as reading with expression, arithmetical problems, geography, history, literature, and so forth), take a very low and exceptional place in our present school system.' In this passage he seems to consider that 'to develop the intellect, to cultivate the imagination, to inform the understanding, to elevate both the æsthetic taste and the moral feelings," is to present an 'ideal standard' the attainment of which is quite out of the question.

Comment on these quotations is needless. They prove the position I have assumed, and show that our primary education secures neither development nor culture. It is a system of education which leaves out the very essentials of true education.

these means developing all their powers-bodily, intellectual, and moral-in a manner at once natural and healthy; and that this development was accompanied by pleasure and satisfaction. It involved, therefore, and secured, an all-sided training of the faculties, to which no other name could be given than that of culture. I observed, too, that the culture was self-culture. It consisted in the practical exercise of the children's powers by themselves. They learned to do by doing-by their own doing-not by that of the teacher. It was their own eyes that saw, their own hands that wrought, their own minds that devised, contrived, and often invented; and hence the earnest interest which they everywhere displayed. This interest, I saw, was the legitimate previous result of self-exercise, and could have been due to no other cause. No exertions on the part of the teacher, without reference to this cause, could have produced it. She might have exhorted, preached, warned, scolded, explained, told, with no other result than that of exciting vexation and disgust, without the continued self-active co-operation of the learners themselves. The work in which their education consisted was to be their work, not hers; to be done by themselves, not by the teacher.

It was easy to see that the self-action and selfexercise, on the part of the children, constituted personal experience-gained at first hand-and therefore their own. It was not the experience of the teacher 'communicated' (though such communication is really impossible) to the learner, and superseding his. It consisted rather in countless processes of seeing, hearing, feeling, performed by the children themselves, and registering themselves in their minds as ideas, or in countless actions performed by their own limbs (especially their hands), and forming habits of doing. Now the very conception of ceaseless activity of the senses, mind, and limbs, excludes the notion of idleness; and I saw without surprise no idleness in the Kindergarten. All was busy, healthy, happy life.

I could not in presence of these facts come to any other conclusion than that which was going on before my eyes was in the strictest sense of the term education, and that it consisted essentially in selfculture. It was, moreover, in a very definite sense, culture on the part of the teacher-culture of the kind that the gardener bestows on his plants and flowers. These he cultivates according to their nature -a nature which he recognises in all his treatment. He does not theoretically devise a nature for them,