310 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
without any desire for progress, there have always been progressive 
races who have respectively devoted themselves to working out 
different problems of civilisation. Among these is the problem of 
national education, for the working out of which Prussia has made 
great, and, as it is generally thought, successful efforts. At all 
events, she has accumulated so great a mass of experience on the sub- 
ject, as to make the history of her efforts worthy of being studied. 
It is a common, but erroneous, notion to suppose that education 
in Prussia is the product of the arbitrary will of modern despotic 
governments — that it was conceived as a whole by some Minister 
of Instruction, drawn out on the foolscap paper of a bureau, and 
then issued by the fiat of the State to be accepted by the people. 
Such an account would be as far as possible from historical truth. 
Put some notion of the kind has obtained currency, perhaps partly 
under the authority of M. Cousin, who visited Prussia in 1831, 
and made a report on the state of education there for the French 
Government. His account of the primary educational system was 
translated by Mrs Austin, and so became tolerably well known in 
this country. M. Cousin got hold of a scheme for the organisation 
of education throughout Prussia, which had been drawn up in 
1819 by Yon Altenstein, then Minister of Instruction. Viewing 
matters rather superficially, Cousin referred 'all he saw to this 
scheme, as if it had been the cause and origin of the school system 
which he found. But the fact is that Yon Altenstein’s document 
was merely what we would call a a draft bill.” It was never 
carried in the Chambers, and never became law, and it had no 
more influence on education in Prussia than the several abortive 
bills for education in Scotland have had on our parochial schools. 
The curious thing is that Prussia, up to the present day, has never 
had a substantive Educational Act. Several bills have been drawn 
up, as for instance in 1819, in 1850, and in 1869, but they have 
always been ultimately rejected. And the Liberals in Germany 
are looking forward to the actual passing of an educational law, 
after more than fifty years of unsuccessful attempts at legislation 
in this department, as one of the first internal results which will 
be achieved after- the conclusion of the present war. 
It is true that the administration of public instruction in Prussia 
is bureaucratic in the extreme ; but this is not the same as saying 
