Of the schools themselves there is little to be said that could interest even a professional reader. They are for the most part hampered by poverty. Not that the island is poor, though it produces little, and the harvest of the sea is sorely reduced at present; the trippers are a copper-mine of wealth. It is said that on an average each visitor spends at least a sovereign, and I have heard the income calculated at £1,500,000. A fair proportion of this must reach the farmers, but it requires a specially high tide to bring it to the door of the school. It must be remembered that the island is afflicted with Home Rule. It pays £10,000 a year to the Imperial Exchequer, and manages its own affairs. No Act of the Imperial Parliament affects it, unless it is specially named. Certain Acts are adopted by Tynwald (the Insular Parliament) when they are considered suitable. But the Education Act of 1902, substituting a central authority for the parochial organisation, and increasing the Government contribution, was not so adopted. Therefore the twenty-one School Boards, with £1,000 worth of clerks, &c., remain to manage the forty-seven schools, and teachers find their salaries so low that they seek their fortunes across the water. No doubt the island suffers, as all tourist places in our country suffer, from Parasitism; and the sentence which Mr. Drummond, in his chapter on that social disease, quotes from Professor Ray Lankester, should be pondered in all such resorts: Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to degeneration.--“Natural Law, &c.,” p. 317. For ten weeks or so there are crowded hours of prosperity: then comes the long period of retrospection, followed by a longer period of anticipation, neither being remunerative. Even in the season of prosperity I doubt if the contemplation of Lancashire trippers, frequently tripping, can be any more beneficial to the parasite than it is pleasant to the philosophic onlooker. (See T. E. Brown, _passim_.) Of other work than agriculture there is little: there is some--I know not how much--lead-mining: the herring and the mackerel have all but deserted the coasts; men say that the steam-trawlers have ruined the trade. The really serious cloud on the horizon is the want of a career open to talent: young men who have brains, or ambition--still more those who have both--seek their fortunes in a larger market, and the tendency to fill up the gaps with the weedy _poitrinaire_, and the seedy genteel indigent, is still more alarming.