Fi{OM A Tkachkh'.s Window. 301 



tliat the 01(1 Country bo}-, qKa boy, is the intellectual .superior of the 

 colonial boy. He may or he may not be. The startling difFerence lies 

 in the environment, to use a phrase which exactly expresses my 

 meaning. 



In England the young idea is taught to shoot very early, too 

 earlv, I am inclined to think, in many cases ; before he is out of the 

 nursery he is under the hands of a governess, or possibly sent to a 

 little select day school. At the mature age of eight or nine the jn-ocess 

 of forcing the hothouse plant begins in real earnest. Our young hope- 

 ful goes to one or other of the preparatory schools, which are dotted 

 thickly all over England, and within the last fifty years or so have 

 supplied, and well supplied, the first rung in tlie ladder of education. 

 Hei-e the boy is thoroughly grounded in grammar and the elements of 

 Latin and mathematics. At the age of ten he prol)ably begins Greek, 

 and to such an extent is the system carried that I have personally 

 known numbers of cases of clever boys, who at the age of twelve or 

 thirteen have read two or three Greek plays, some Thucydides, Homer, 

 Yirgil, Horace and so on. Of course this would be the case principally 

 of " scholarship " boys, but at any rate, to my own personal knowledge, 

 this is quite a common experience. Latin prose, of course, with all its 

 subtleties, presents few difficulties to the youngster in the highest form 

 at a preparatory school, and machine-made Latin verses are also turned 

 out to order. The boy in question is thoroughly well grounded in the 

 classics and possibly in a modern language, though he is profoundly 

 ignorant of his mother tongue, from an educational point of view ; but 

 of this more anon. Well, then, this finished article of thirteen or 

 fourteen goes on in due course to a public school, where he goes 

 through the regular mill of a classical training, and later on he pro- 

 ceeds to the university, perhaps finishing off his career with a first-class 

 in litterae humaniores at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three. This, 

 of course, is only a rough sketch, and has in view mainly the clever 

 boy. 



iSTow, compare with this his confrere in South Africa. The latter 

 is, say, born and bred up on a farm many miles from a town or I'ailway 

 station. His earl}' education is perforce, in the nature of things, a 

 mere smattering, perhaps not that. He may attend a farm school, or 

 he may get some rudiments of education at the hands of his parents, 

 when they have time to attend to this ; but in .South Africa the 

 struggle for existence is a hard one, and little time can be spared. 

 Education is a luxury. The enviroimient of home life on the veld 

 seriously militates against intellectual progress. People live out-of- 

 doors in South Africa, and education — I mean, of course, intellectual 

 education — suffers thereby. Our boy, perhaps, for financial or other 

 reasons, lingers on at the home till he is fourteen, fifteen or sixteen 

 before he begins his regular school life. He has no intermediate 

 stepping-stone or training ground in the shape of a preparatory 

 school, so that when he arrives at a big school, what wonder that at 

 the age of fifteen or sixteen he is behind intellectually the small 

 English school-bov who has emerged from a six years' course at a 



