and the Best Means of Promoting it. 85 



27,000 committed in 1850, 14,000 were foreigners. In that educated 

 country, the uneducated foreign element, which comprises only one- 

 tenth of the population, appears to produce half the crime. 



After giving an account of several of the foreign systems of education, 

 taking Prussia as the type of the compulsory system, and Massachusetts 

 as the type of the voluntary, the paper proceeds — 



Pboposed Remedial Expbeiments. 



With such figures as the educational statistics of England give us, 

 the friends of education can have very little doubt as to the urgent 

 necessity for some change. This necessity has been long felt, and many 

 schemes have been propounded to meet the evil, but hitherto these 

 efforts have been made under the belief that there was a great deficiency 

 in school supply, rather than a want of school demand. Statistics do 

 not, however, bear out this view very fully, but rather point to another 

 cause — to the total apathy and indifference to education, on the part of 

 those for whom schools and teachers have been already provided. 



Turning to the Minutes of Council for 1856, I find that the schools 

 examined by Her Majesty's inspectors over the whole country numbered 

 4,800, -vvith 3,069 teachers, and 8,465 pupil-teachers. At the very ample 

 allowance of eight square feet of area for each scholar, these schools were 

 sufficient for 811,794 children, while there were in attendance only 

 537,583, only two-thirds of what they might have accommodated. 



Now, as the schools inspected by Her Majesty's inspectoi's represent 

 only about one-fifth of the whole scholars in the country, and as we find 

 in that fifth a surplus school accommodation for 274,211 children, it 

 may be supposed that there is, over the whole country, a surplus of 

 accommodation for a million and a-quarter of children. There are no 

 certain data to go by, and this may be an over-estimate, as much of the 

 surplus accommodation may be so situated as not to be available ; but, 

 making every fair allowance, there remains the undoubted fact, that 

 there is in the country greatly more school accommodation than is taken 

 advantage of. 



The Reports of Her Majesty's inspectors are nearly unanimous on 

 this point ; but I will only give one quotation. It is from the Report 

 by Mr. Marshall : — 



" There is one evil more in need of remedy than all others put 

 together, which the measures adopted by the Committee of Council have 

 done nothing to relieve — one obstacle more fatal to the further progress 

 of public education than any other which experience has detected, 

 towards the removal of which not even the first step has yet been taken. 

 Immense progress has everywhere been made in the extension and 



