HUMANISM AND REALISM. 549 
upon as anti-German and Bonapartist, and for a time no school 
teaching after the new system was encouraged by any of the 
German Governments. However, with the fall of Napoleon, 
with the newly-awakened national life of Germany, the wishes 
and aspirations of the people were led into new and wider chan- 
nels, and the wish for the creation of secondary schools of an- 
other type than the Gymnasium or Classical School came again 
to the foreground. 
Perhaps it will be useful to allude here to one of the principal 
causes that stimulated a large section of the German communi- 
ties to have such schools established. Owing to the peculiar 
position of all higher civil servants in Germany, who in most 
cases could only obtain their appointments after having passed 
through the Gymnasium, remained three or four years at the 
University, and then successfully passed their rigorous State 
examination, the whole nation became now divided into two 
castes, those who had studied at a University and those who had 
not. The great bulk of the citizens, merchants, manufacturers, 
engineers, artists, farmers, and the rest, stood apart from those 
who had received a purely classical education, and who looked 
as it were with a certain degree of contempt upon the former as 
being uneducated. All those young men who did not intend to 
select a learned profession, who wished to be manufacturers, 
merchants, &c., and who were now educated at the Gymnasium 
for the want of a more suitable institution, felt that they had 
not learnt what was most needed by them, but that the methods 
by which they weretaught in some respects incapacitated them for 
devoting their intellects to the pursuits they had selected for their 
future career. Thus, as the communities grew larger and richer, 
as education became more diffused amongst the middle classes, 
as either religious or political liberty was gained, the want of 
secondary schools for all those who were not desirous of becom- 
ing civil servants grew more manifest every day. As the State 
in almost every instance could not assist in creating schools by 
which the existing Gymnasium might be injured, and the clergy 
were equally adverse to seeing schools established in which there 
was not exclusively humanistic teaching, the task devolved upon 
the communities themselves to establish these institutions with 
their own means and to protect them against ill-will and injury, 
often only too ready to work against them from humanistic and 
conservative quarters. 
Men of the highest intelligence, though brought up in strictly 
humanistic establishments, having the welfare of the community 
at heart, and feeling deeply its wants, now went to work and 
created the so-called Hohere Biirgerschulen (higher citizens’ 
schools), the forerunners of Realschulen. Foremost amongst 
these energetic and public-spirited men were W. Spilleke, 
director of a gymnasium in Berlin, who, with his excellent work, 
“Ueber das Wesen der Buergerschule” (On the character of the 
citizens’ school), appearing in 1822; and W. C. Mager with his 
equally earnest and powerful work, “Die deutsche Buerger- 
