I'd it ration as connected with Agriculture. 
03 
five years ago, to its present development with some sixty boarders 
and fifteen day-boys, has been between 6000/. and 7000/., and 
that a rate of payment averaging 23/. per boarder is found to 
rover the whole annual expenditure. In some counties the cost 
of building, the price of land, and the rate of wages may be so 
much higher as to raise the .average cost of establishing such 
schools, and the average rate of payment necessary to make them 
self-supporting. But even higher sums would be very far from 
putting such schools out of the reach of the average English 
farmer. 
What, then, would be the nature of the teaching and training 
the farmer's son should expect to find in these schools ? and how 
far would they be suited equally to the son who is intended to be 
a farmer, and to his brothers who are to go into other trades and 
professions? These questions lead us to a farther step in our 
discussion. The character of the education given in a public 
school depends not only, as in a private school, on the acquire- 
ment and ability of the master at its head, but also on the general 
system of education according to which the master himself has 
been trained, and on the public competitive tests by which attain- 
ment is certified, and the merit both of the school and of indi- 
vidual pupils made known. 
The education of the higher and lower ranks is regulated and 
maintained in each case by such a system. I will not do more 
than allude to the effect which, on the one hand, the Universities 
by their degrees and honours have upon the great public schools 
and subsidiary system of private tuition by which the majority 
of the English gentry are brought up ; and, on the other, to the 
influence which the Government grant in aid of local contri- 
butions, as administered by the Privy Council, exercises upon 
the education of the lower class. This reference is not intended 
to imply any approval of the State grant, and still less to decide 
whether in principle or results, its action is worthy of com- 
parison with the independent working of the University system, 
but simply as an illustration of the proposition, that both the 
teaching and discipline — that is, the education — of a public 
school must depend upon the system to which it belongs, and 
not only to the accidental merit of its master. 
The comparative deficiencies of middle-class education may 
be attributed to the fact, that neither in the development during 
this century of the higher system, nor in the establishment of 
the lower, has there as yet been provision made for the large 
intermediate class who can neither aspire to the former nor con- 
descend to the latter. There are indeed many advocates for so 
extending these two systems as to embrace all the upper middle 
class in the educational system of the gentry, and to absorb the 
