"Through no other medium than a common language can ideas become common. It is impossible to open formal sluice-gates for them from one language into another. Their circulation requires a net-work of pores too minute for analysis, too numerous for special provision. Without this net-work, the ideas come into an alien atmosphere in which they are lifeless. Direct education finds no place, when indirect education is excluded by the popular language, as it were by a wall of brass. Nor can an old and cherished language be _taught down_ in schools; for so long as the children are familiar with none other, they must be educated to a considerable extent through the medium of it, even though to supersede it be the most important part of their education. Still less, out of school, can the language of lessons make head against the language of life. But schools are every day standing less alone in this contest. Along the chief lines of road, from the border counties, from the influx of English, or English-speaking labourers, into the iron and coal-fields--in short from every point of contact with modern activity, the English tongue keeps spreading, in some places rapidly, but sensibly in all. Railroads, and the fuller development of the great mineral beds, are on the eve of multiplying these points of contact. Hence the encouragement vigorously to press forward the cause of popular education in its most advanced form. Schools are not called upon to impart in a foreign, or engraft upon the ancient tongue a factitious education conceived under another set of circumstances (in either of which cases the task would be as hopeless as the end unprofitable), but to convey in a language, which is already in process of becoming the mother tongue of the country, such instruction as may put the people on a level with that position which is offered to them by the course of events. If such instruction contrasts in any points with the tendency of old ideas, such contrast will have its reflex and its justification in the visible change of surrounding circumstances." We find the same statements amply corroborated by the evidence of Mr Symons, another of her Majesty's inspectors. He observes:--