if you inquire into him, you will find that he has spent three years at a Government training college, and that prior to this experience he was for some years a pupil teacher; also that he is a son of the people, and that his father drove an engine or kept a shop. In these latter circumstances he was, perhaps, fortunate. The marvellous fact about him is that, in spite of his years of pupil-teachership and of his three years at a Government training college, he is not a man of either learning or culture. I am told that an English pupil teacher is not expected to fash himself by the study of either Latin or Greek. Two books of Euclid will see him through the stiffest of his examinations. He does not need to have even a nodding acquaintance with modern languages; and as for science, if he really wants some, he must pick it up at evening classes. Even when he passes into the Government training college,--where, by the way, he is instructed and boarded and lodged gratis,--his studies do not become in any way profound. The history of England, the geography of the world, arithmetic according to Barnard Smith, algebra according to Dr. Todhunter, Latin and Greek according to Dr. William Smith (Part I.), with a little French,--a very little French,--bring him to the end of his tether. Really, the whole business is childish. Any youth of average capacity should get through the entire three years' course in six weeks. Of course, there is the so-called technical training to reckon with; that is to say, a man at one of these colleges is supposed to spend a great deal of his time, and no doubt does, in perfecting himself as a teacher; but one would have thought that actual practice in an ordinary school would be the best instructor in this respect. In any case, nobody can consider closely the English schoolmaster as manufactured at Government training colleges without perceiving that the Government turns out a very remarkable article indeed. I have no desire to belittle a hard-worked, and probably underpaid, body of public servants. Their profession is a thankless one. I do not think for a moment a single man of them went into it with his eyes open, and I know for a certainty that the school boards and the Government between them have so hedged it round with petty annoyances that a man possessed of feeling must loathe it. It is probably this feeling of loathing of his work that keeps the English schoolmaster down. He knows that it is vain for him to go a hair's-breadth out of the beaten tracks. The school boards must have grants; the Government inspectors must be satisfied. There is only one method of ensuring these desirable consummations: that one way amounts to sheer mechanism and slog. The English schoolmaster must have no temperament. If he possess such a thing, he is bound to come to great grief. Hence the whole weight of the English system is, from first to last, employed in the work of knocking temperament out of him and keeping it out.