X\ail. SOUTH AFRICAN ASSOCIATION FOR ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. 



Carlyle, of whom Professor Tyndall in his Address to the British 

 Association at Belfast said that " far more than any other of his 

 age he aroused whatever of life and nobleness lay latent in its most 

 gifted minds." Carlyle, as all the world knows, was the son of a 

 stone mason. Would " Sartor " or the " French Revolution " have 

 ever been written if there had been no Edinburgh University to open 

 its doors to a poor man's son 1 It is for the children of the poor 

 that we plead, when we ask for educational facilities in South 

 Africa equal to those of Europe and America. Our boys have 

 already to comj^ete with the best brains in the world, trained in the 

 best schools of the world; as the years go by that competition will 

 become not less but more keen. It is our duty to see them fitly 

 equipped, so that they may hold their own, and rise to be masters 

 instead of servants in the land of their birth. And we want to 

 give them and their sisters something in addition to this, something 

 which only great disinterested centres of teaching impart, some 

 sympathy with the "nobler loves and nobler cares" which spring 

 from a wide knowledge of the past history and aspirations of 

 mankind. 



Ten years ago a thoughtful citizen of this town, Mr. H. S. Calde- 

 cott, delivered an address on " Our Boys and Girls," which revealed 

 such a callous or ineffective attitude on the part of the State towards 

 one of its most sacred duties, that a number of public-spirited men 

 decided to take the matter into- their own hands. The lapse of ten 

 years in the life of a young community like this is a 

 sufficiently long period to be counted as an important milestone 

 in its progress. It is all the more deserving of being recorded since 

 the " Council of Education, Witwatersrand," which was the im- 

 mediate outcome of Mr. Caldecott's paper, has celebrated its tenth 

 anniversary by setting aside a sum of over £100,000 towards im- 

 proving secondary and higher education in this Colony, and towards 

 providing opportunities for those young men and young women, 

 whose elementary education has been neglected, to retrieve the 

 disabilities under which they suffer, by means of evening classes and 

 day continuation classes. The moment seems opportune for 

 asking the question : to what extent should the whole burden of 

 education, from the lowest to the highest branches, be borne by the 

 State? I will at once allay the alarm I see on your faces by dis- 

 claiming any intention at this late hour of attempting to supply the 

 answer. But as paving the way towards an answer, I may mention 

 the fact that out of the twenty millions sterling expended annually 

 by the four Colonial Governments, less than one million is devoted to 

 education. The proportion of State education to total expenditure 

 in the Orange River Colony in the financial year 1903-4 was 12 per 

 cent., in the Transvaal in 1904-5 nearly 8 per cent., and in each of 

 the two coastal Colonies in the year 1902-3 less than 3 per cent. 

 That does seem to leave some margin for increased education votes, 

 and substantial increases will undoubtedly continue to be voted 

 every year. For purposes of comparison I may add that last year 



