Mr. Bunákov, in proof of how necessary the object instruction and development is for the children of a Russian school, with extraordinary naïveté adduces Pestalozzi's words: "Let any one who has lived among the common people," he says, "contradict my words that there is nothing more difficult than to impart any idea to these creatures. Nobody, indeed, gainsays that. The Swiss pastors affirm that when the people come to them to receive instruction they do not understand what they are told, and the pastors do not understand what the people say to them. City dwellers who settle in the country are amazed at the inability of the country population to express themselves; years pass before the country servants learn to express themselves to their masters." This relation of the common people in Switzerland to the cultured class is assumed as the foundation for just such a relation in Russia. I regard it as superfluous to expatiate on what is known to everybody, that in Germany the people speak a special language, called Plattdeutsch, and that in the German part of Switzerland this Plattdeutsch is especially far removed from the German language, whereas in Russia we frequently speak a bad language, while the masses always speak a good Russian, and that in Russia it will be more correct to put these words of Pestalozzi in the mouth of peasants speaking of the teachers. A peasant and his boy will say quite correctly that it is very hard to understand what those creatures, meaning the teachers, say. The ignorance about the masses is so complete in this world of the pedagogues that they boldly say that to the peasant school come little savages, and therefore boldly teach them what is down and what up, that a blackboard is placed on a stand, and that underneath it there is a groove. They do not know that if the pupils asked the teacher, there would turn up very many things which the teacher would not know; that, for example, if you rub off the paint from the board, nearly any boy will tell you of what kind of wood the board is made, whether of pine, linden, or aspen, which the teacher cannot tell; that a boy will always tell better than the teacher about a cat or a chicken, because he has observed them better than the teacher; that instead of the problem about the wagons the boy knows the problems about the crows, about the cattle, and about the geese. (About the crows: There flies a flock of crows, and there stand some oak-trees: if two crows alight on each, a crow will be lacking; if one on each, an oak-tree will be lacking. How many crows and how many oak-trees are there? About the cattle: For one hundred roubles buy one hundred animals,--calves at half a rouble, cows at three roubles, and oxen at ten roubles. How many oxen, cows, and calves are there?) The pedagogues of the German school do not even suspect that quickness of perception, that real vital development, that contempt for everything false, that ready ridicule of everything false, which are