At Toronto I was taken over the educational department for Upper Canada. It is very ambitiously housed, and combines so many objects, namely a general library, a collection and depôt of school-books and of school apparatus, galleries of art, chiefly for copies of celebrated pictures and pieces of sculpture, and normal schools, that I spent two hours in going through it. On my making some observation on the cost of the building, and of its contents, I was told that it might appear that too much had been spent on the department, but that it had designedly been carried out on this scale, and the building made imposing, and the galleries added, in order to give dignity and elevation to the idea of education in the minds of the people. A hope had been entertained that if the normal schools were brought under the same roof, a better class of young persons would offer themselves for the position of teachers: this hope had not been disappointed. The arguments and facts which are in favour of the Canadian Common School system are to be heard at the department, the officers of which appeared to be able and zealous men. The system, however, has been very far from securing that unanimity which to the south of the great lakes exists on the subject of common schools. I will state this difference of opinion, and some of its causes, in the words of one of the leading men in the province, used in conversation with me on the subject. He said, ‘that throughout Upper Canada their common schools had quite failed in winning anything at all like general approval. The Grand Jury of Toronto have for several years past made a presentment against the system, hanging the expression of their dissatisfaction on the peg of their visitation and inspection of the jail. Their dissatisfaction is shared very largely by the upper class, who pay a heavy tax for the schools, and yet find that those for whose benefit and elevation they were willing to be taxed do not send their children to the schools; but that, instead of this, the well-to-do tradesmen who could very well afford to pay for their children’s education are now provided with it, almost gratuitously, at the expense of the community. ‘Some towns in Upper Canada, as for instance Hamilton, have all along refused to establish common schools. [Sidenote: _A Canadian on Common Schools._] ‘Another difficulty about the system, besides its injustice, and its failure in its true object, is that it extinguishes private schools. When all the schools become of one kind, competition in excellence ceases, and everyone is content with a low standard of mediocrity. Every master knows that, so long as he is not more inefficient than his neighbours, his position is safe; and that his salary, which is all that he at last cares about, will be paid him. ‘The local superintendents, who are almost universally clergymen, have other things to attend to, and carry out their inspection in the most perfunctory manner.