a foreign land full of interest, scientific, historical, and social; for a quarter of a century hundreds of Englishmen have been there in comfortable official positions with reasonable leisure. Yet there is not a single good memoir produced, not even a hundred pages of original matter, outside of official work, by all this mass of educated minds during nearly a generation. The possibility of what might have been done in such grand opportunities has been stamped out by the education which they have suffered. They are all of regulation pattern, with as little variation as is possible between different temperaments—amiable upright men, who will leave no trace of anyone being the wiser in future for their existence. Such is the product of the numbing chill of uniformity, and the weeding out of the advancing power of diversity. We are all familiar with the epigram of England having a hundred religions but only one sauce; but we see a worse misfortune in the absurd incongruity of now having two hundred religions and only one system of elementary education. Amid the great variety of minds, which is illustrated by the free choice of religious belief and practice, we certainly require a great diversity of education to bring out the best development of each type. We require simultaneous experiment on a small scale, instead of vast experiments of Acts which apply to the whole country for a generation at a time. Every Act is only an experiment, and one which is usually spoiled by attempting too much in a compromise, which is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. Had there been in 1870 a hundred schools used for experiment, say five of twenty different types in different parts of the country, the life-history of the pupils would by now have given us a firm basis for rational adjustment of a system. It is fatuous to suppose it possible to make one Procrustean bed to fit children of the country, the mining centre, the manufacturing district, the commercial town, or the fisher folk—of the Yorkshire tyke, the Suffolk dumpling, or the Hampshire hog. Nor is it merely the success of a system in producing examination results that has to be attained. It is quite possible that the best workers in after life may not be the best to cram with temporary bookwork. Nothing short of twenty years of active life can test the value of the education on which it is based.