Education as connected with Agriculture. 
61 
and a private school, the property of its master, there are inter- 
mediate schools, partly public and partly private. They are the 
property neither of the masters who conduct them, nor of trustees, 
but of" proprietors who have established them, cither as commer- 
cial enterprises or for the benefit of certain localities, professions, 
or occupations. In these the public or the private character may 
preponderate. The views of the original proprietors, the restric- 
tions they may by trust or otherwise impose upon the conduct of 
their institution, the realization of immediate or more remote 
advantages, will all go to determine whether they should be con- 
sidered more as public or as private establishments. 
This rough classification of schools into public, private, and 
intermediate, will be of service to us in determining whether 
existing schools supply the practical requirements for the farmer's 
family, or whether new schools should be established, and, if so, 
what should be their character. 
VVc may suppose then that, as in the higher ranks, so among 
the middle classes, the preference will be given to public schools, 
the more education is valued and its permanent interests con- 
sidered. But the best of the foundation schools of the country 
are already more than filled by the sons of the gentry. Nor has 
it hitherto appeared easy to adapt those that are not thus mono- 
polised by the candidates for the Universities and higher profes- 
sions to the practical requirements of modern English education. 
This is not indeed to be despaired of, and the 500 endowed 
grammar-schools of England may yet have a great future. But 
their reformation and revival will follow, I think, rather than 
precede the establishment of a thorough system of public English 
education, which, imitating that of which the English gentry are 
so proud, and which has made their own country proud and other 
countries emulous of them, shall yet embrace and satisfy the far 
more numerous class connected with the commerce, manufacture, 
and agriculture of our country. Of the means of establishing 
such a system I shall presently say more. Here I can only 
repeat the opinion that the renewal or revivification of stagnant 
grammar-schools has seemed hitherto a more difficult task than 
the establishment of new institutions primarily devised for the 
objects and circumstances of the present generation. And since 
we live in an age more impatient for immediate results than 
prepared, like our forefathers, to sow the seed of a long-distant 
harvest, 1 am inclined to think that we should look to a large 
development of those proprietary schools which I have described 
as intermediate between- the purely public and strictly private 
schools. Only from the very outset it will be no injury to the 
immediate results, but a provision for permanent effects, if every 
