It is impossible to read these details without two reflections especially being immediately suggested to the mind. One of these is the necessary connexion between the success of any system of national education and the special circumstances of each individual state to which it may be applied. To introduce the Prussian system into Scotland, with any prospect of its working here as well as it does there, one would require to change the whole character of the government, and the whole habits, nay, the very nature of the people, to make Scotchmen Prussians and Scotland Prussia. But there is a still more important reflection forced upon us. How little mere secular education, apart from that which we hold to be an indispensable accompaniment to it--sound religious education--avails for the elevation of the people, let these statistics, read in the light of recent events, tell! The murderers of Count Latour were all well-educated persons, after that fashion which it has been proposed to introduce into this country as the national system. They had all been at schools--at schools from which religious instruction, however, was either excluded, or worse than excluded. But, to come to National Education in Scotland. On this subject there are two questions wholly distinct from each other, which at present occupy some attention. The one relates to the long-tried and approved parochial system, the other to the plans, professedly of a supplementary character, recently introduced by a committee of the Privy Council, which constitutes a government board for the application of the parliamentary grant, now voted annually for some years, for educational purposes. In a pamphlet[11] lately published by Lord Melgund, which is of some importance now, as indicating the views with which his motion in parliament is introduced, these two questions have, we think, been unfairly confounded: with the former we have particular concern at present. We agree, however, with Lord Melgund in condemning utterly the procedure of the Privy Council in regard to those schools which are at this moment rising up in almost every parish in Scotland, not for the purpose, even ostensibly, of supplying destitute localities with the means of education, but as parts of an ecclesiastical system, whose avowed object is to supersede in all its departments the Established Church. These schools receive much the greater part (in fact nearly two-thirds) of the whole sum voted for education in Scotland; that is to say, about two-thirds of the parliamentary grant, intended to promote general education in this part of the kingdom, is by the Privy Council diverted altogether from its proper object, and applied to purposes exclusively and avowedly sectarian.