Such is the ideal; how far is it reflected by the reality? Of actual results it is too soon to speak, since the oldest school is not yet five years old, and the numbers in them are so small that the whole eighty-four now in existence, including boys and girls, have not together as many pupils as the thirty-four schools of the Girls’ Public Day-School Company. There were many difficulties to be met. The ground was new and unbroken, the meaning of secondary education, except in so far as it was expressed by a higher grade school, was hardly understood by the mass of the people. Some schools won a too hasty popularity, owing to the impression that they were ‘finishing’ institutions for elementary scholars, hence the one-year or one-term pupils of whom so much has been heard. This mistaken notion will be but slowly dispelled, and it is not impossible that in a few years’ time, should the Central Board prove successful in its attempts to ‘level up,’ the number of schools may prove too large for the demand. Many boys and girls who must begin to prepare for their life work at fourteen or fifteen would be better off in a higher grade school than struggling to find their depth in these new waters. The elimination of these would prove no serious loss, and it would clear the ground for a fairer treatment of those pupils, whether from elementary or other schools, who are really able to profit by secondary education. The Welsh system cannot be considered complete while so many of the well-to-do and educated classes hold aloof, helping, it is true, with money and sympathy, but sending their children to be educated across the border. Who shall blame them for not offering up their own boys and girls as _corpora vilia_? Yet, until the schools can offer something to such pupils as well, they must remain one-sided. Still, with all its flaws, and they are not a few, the system has something to teach England. The love of knowledge, noted even in the days of darkness, the willingness to make sacrifices, evinced by gifts of land and money to new schools, the keen interest in their welfare felt by all grades of the community, and the absence of that class jealousy which tends to check the spread of popular education in England—all these we should do well to note, and copy if we can. Then we may be prepared to thank Wales for teaching us both what to do and what to avoid. CHAPTER XII 1898