USE AND ABUSE OF EXAMINATIONS. 
851 
.anguage, at mathematics, at strict science— is drudgery and fag 
such as the boy’s soul abhors. To make the work tolerable at all, 
it should be in the hands of a man who interests his class not so much 
in the subject as in himself. A man of this rare but highly desirable 
kind pulls the work along ; but a rigid discipline, a known liability to 
punishment and loss, do more. They urge a boy to apply himself to 
what he finds distasteful, and the most valuable of all school learning 
is to learn to do with cheerfulness what one finds distasteful. Sooner 
or later, under the spur of necessity, the disagreeable stands in the 
road. There is much testimony to show that the average man considers 
the primeval curse on labour to mean specifically that all labour is a 
curse. Should this be true of the average man, it is likely to be true 
of the average boy. In this view of the matter the present value of 
examinations for disciplining purposes is very considerable. What is 
to be substituted for them is not obvious. In Prance, where corporal 
punishment is not allowed, boys are put upon short diet, and interned 
or gated by way of penalty.* In Germany, unless a boy pass by 
examination into the highest class but one of the school — unless he 
continue in that class for one year, conducting himself with diligence 
and propriety — he is compelled to serve three years in a barracks away 
from home as a private soldier. On the other hand, should he comply 
with the conditions, he serves only for one year, and that in the town in 
which his parents reside. These regulations account for the crowded 
state of the German gymnasia; yet as soon as this exemption is 
attained 75 per cent, of the boys quit school.f Neither the French 
device of the empty stomach nor the German threat of the barrack- 
yard are likely to be adopted anywhere by the English people. The 
examination mill is about the most potent machine for enforcing 
industry that remains to us. 
The present influence of examinations owes much to the expulsive 
force of the system in its early stages. If there were favouritism 
in the bestowal of lucrative posts, examinations largely discredited 
favouritism. They did much to extirpate the svstem of close scholar- 
ships. They aided in extinguishing sectarian differences within 
university walls by bringing into disrepute the notion that the mathe- 
matics of a Baptist should be less profitable to him because his view 
of Christianity is a view that the university should discountenance. 
Examinations abolished commission by purchase, because as soon as 
examinations became the test of a minimum of indispensable knowledge 
and merit it was felt to be monstrous that a meritorious but money- 
less young man should be disqualified in favour of a moneyed but 
possibly unmeritorious young man. And finally, when public opinion 
began to demand that public patronage in the vast services of the 
British Empire should be controlled according to some principle, and 
Lord Macaulay came forty ard to recommend the principle of competi- 
tion by examination, the public accepted the suggestion as the only 
reasonable solution of a very complex problem. 
In such matters the public is very hard to move, and equally hard 
to stop. Having accepted the principle of competition by examination, 
* .Latham, p. 01. 
f Id., p. 03 : In Germany the number of persons attending places of higher 
education is said to be about 50 per 1,000 ; in Great Britain, about 15 ; in New 
Zealand, about 5. The German 50 are mostly males'; the |New Zealand 5 are about 
equally distributed between the two sexes. 
