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clothing club.' What wonder, too, if the visitor, seeing such things and hearing such demands, goes away somewhat discontented, somewhat inclined to give up faith in the Mission, and, what is worse, ready to believe that there is no way by which the best can be given to the poor. (It is to members of the Universities anxious to unite in a common purpose of bettering the lives of the people, that I make the suggestion that University Settlements will better express their idea. College Missions have done some of the work on which they have been sent, but in their very nature their field is limited. It is in no opposition to these missions, but rather with a view to more fully cover their idea, that I propose the new scheme. The details of the plan may be shortly stated.

The place of settlement must of course first be fixed. It will be in some such poor quarter as that of East London, where a house can be taken in which there shall be both habitable chambers and large reception rooms. A man must be chosen to be the chief of the Settlement; he must receive a salary which, like that of the Mission curate, will be guaranteed by the college, and he must make his home in the house. He must have taken a good degree, be qualified to teach, and be endowed with the enthusiasm of humanity. Such men are not hard to find; men who under a wiser Church government would be clergymen, and serve the people as the nation's ministers; but who, under a Church government which in an age of reform has remained unreformed, are kept outside, and fret in other service. One of these, qualified by training to teach, qualified by character to organise and command, qualified by disposition to make friends with all sorts of men, would gladly accept a position in which he could both earn a livelihood and fulfil his calling. He would be the centre of the University Settlement. Men fresh from college or old University men would come to occupy the chambers. Lecturers in connection with the University Extension Society would be his fellow-lecturers in the reception rooms. As the head of such a Settlement he would be welcomed by all such classes in his new neighbourhood.

The old Universities exercise a strange charm, and the Oxford or Cambridge man is still held to possess some peculiar knowledge; the fact that three of the most democratic boroughs are represented by University professors has its explanation. He speaks beautiful German, but of course those University gentlemen ought to,' was a man's reflection to me after a talk with a Cambridge professor. Those, too, who may be supposed to know what draws in an advertising poster, are always glad to print after the name of a speaker his degree and college. Thus it would be that the head of the Settlement would find himself as closely related to his new surroundings as to his old. The same reputation, which would draw to him fellow-scholars or old pupils, would put him in a position to discover

the work and thought going on around him. He would become familiar with the teachers in the elementary and middle-class schools, he would measure the work done by clergy and missionaries, he would be in touch with the details of local politics; and more than all, he would come into sympathy with the hope, the unnamed hope, which is moving in the masses.

In the The Settlement would be common ground for all classes. lecture room the knowledge gathered at the highest sources would, night after night, be freely given. In the conversation rooms the students would exchange ideas and form friendships. At the weekly receptions of all sorts and conditions of men the settlers would mingle freely in the crowd.

Some

The internal arrangements would be simple enough. The Head would undertake the domestic details and fix the price which settlers would pay for board and lodging. He would admit new members and judge if the intentions of those who offered were honest. would come for their vacations; others occupied during the daytime would come to live there. University men, barristers, Government clerks, curates, medical students, or business men, each would have opportunity both for solitary and for associated life, and the expense would be various to suit their various means. The one uniting bond would be the common purpose, 'not without action to die fruitless,' but to do something to improve the condition of the people. It would be the duty of the Head to keep alive among his fellows the freshness of their purpose, to recall the stragglers, refresh the outworn, praise and reinspire the brave.' He would have, therefore, to judge of the powers of each to fill places to which he could introduce them. To some he would recommend official positions, to some teaching, to some the organisation of relief, to some the visiting of the sick, and thus infuse new life into existing churches, chapels, and institutions. Others he would introduce as members of Co-operative Societies, Friendly Societies, or Political Clubs. He would so arrange that all should occupy positions in which they would become friends of his neighbours, and discover, perhaps as none have yet discovered, how to meet their needs.

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To such an institution it is easy to see how development might be immeasurable. A born leader of men surrounded by a group of intelligent and earnest friends, pledged not to go round in an eddy of purposeless dust,' and placed face to face with the misery and apathy they know to be wrong, would of necessity discover means beyond our present vision. They would bind themselves by sympathy and service to the lives of the people; they would bring the light and strength of intelligence to bear on their government, and they would give a voice both to their needs and their wrongs. It is easy to imagine what such settlers in a great town might do, but it will be more to the point to consider how they may express the idea which

underlies the College Mission, the interest of centres of education in the centres of industry, and the will of University men to improve the condition of the people.

If it be that the Missionary's account of his Mission district fails at last to rouse the interest of his hearers, and if his work seems to be absorbed in the effort to keep going his parochial machinery, amid a host of like machines, the same cannot be the fate of the Settlement.

Some of the settlers will settle themselves for longer periods, and those who are occupied during the daytime will find it as possible to live among the poor as among the rich; but there must also be room for those who can spend only a few weeks or months in the Settlement, so that men may come, as some already have come, to spend part of a vacation in serving the people. This interchange of life between the University and the Settlement will keep up between the two a living tie. Each term will bring, not a set speech about the work of the Mission, but the many chats on the wonders of human life. The condition of the English people will come to be a fact more familiar than that of the Grecian or Roman, and the history of the College Settlement will be better known than that of the boat or the eleven. Thoughts, too, and feelings now too often spent in vain talks at debating societies, will go up to refresh those who are spent by labour, or find an outlet in action. There is no fear that the College Settlement will fail to rouse interest. Its life will be the life of the College. As long as both draw their strength from the common source, from the same body of members, the sympathy of the College will be with the people. Nor is there any fear lest the work of the settlers become stereotyped, as is often the case with the work of Missions and Societies. Each year, each term, would alter the constitution of the Settlement as other settlers brought in other characters and the results of other knowledge, or as their ideas became modified by common work with the various religious and secular organisations of the neighbourhood. The danger, indeed, would not be from uniformity of method or narrowness of aim; rather would it be the endeavour of the Head to limit the diversity which many minds would introduce, and restrain a liberality willing to see good in every form of earnestness. The variety of work which would embrace the most varied effort, and enlist its members in every movement for the common good, would keep about the Settlement the beauty of a perpetual promise.

If we go further and ask how this plan reaches deeper than others which have gone before, the question is not so easily answered, because it is impossible to prophesy that a University Settlement will make the poor rich or give them the necessaries of true life. Inasmuch, though, as poverty-poverty in its large sense including poverty of the knowledge of God and man-is largely due to the division of classes, a University Settlement does provide a remedy

which goes deeper than that provided by popular philanthropy. The poor man of modern days has to live in a quarter of the town where he cannot even try to live with those superior to himself. Around him are thousands educated as he has been educated, with taste and The demand for low things with knowledge on a level with his own. has created a supply of low satisfactions. Thus it is that the amusements are unrecreative, the lectures uninstructive, and the religion uninspiring. It is not possible for the inhabitant of the poor quarter to come into casual intercourse with the higher manners of life and thought except at a cost which would constitute a large percentage of his income.

I am afraid that it is long before we can expect the rich and poor again to live as neighbours: for good or evil they have been divided, and other means must, for the present, be found for making common the property of knowledge. One such means is the University Settlement. Men who have the knowledge may become friends of the poor; they may share that knowledge and its fruit as, day by day, they meet in their common rooms for talk or for instruction, for music or for play. The settlers may join in all that is done by other societies, but they, as members of no other society, may share all their best with the poor, and in the highest sense make their property common. They may be the best charity agents, for they will have an experience out of the reach of others, which they will have accumulated through their different agencies. Members of various secular and religious organisations, they may be able to compare notes after the day's work, and offer evidence as to how the poor live which, in days to come, will be invaluable. They may be the best educators, for bringing, ever-fresh stores of thought, they will see the weak spots in a routine which daily tires a child because it does so little to teach him, and they will have an opinion on national education better worth considering than the grumbles of those wearied with most things, or the congratulations of officials who judge by examinations. They may be the best Church reformers, for they will make more and more manifest how it is not institutions but righteousness which exalts a nation; how, one after another, all reforms fail because men lie and love self; and how, therefore, the first of all reforms is the reform of the Church, whose mission for the nation is that it create righteousness.

There is, then, for the settler of a University Settlement an ideal worthy of his sacrifice. He looks not to a Church buttressed by party spirit, nor to a community founded on self-helped respectability. He looks rather to a community where the best is most common, where there is no more hunger and misery, because there is no more ignorance and sin-a community in which the poor have all that gives value to wealth, in which beauty, knowledge, and righteousness are nationalised.

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

'CRAMMING' IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.

THE justly called Revised Code' of the Committee of Council on Education, which has never, from its birth in 1862, ceased from annual revision, seems at length to have thrown out, by the mere force of nature, a symptom of a simpler method, which has lain hidden under the mass of mistaken experiments. Let us see if it may be capable of further development.

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As Vice-President in 1859 I collected together, and arranged in order, all the Minutes of Council by which the Office had made its first attempts to meet the new desire of the country to aid with public money the voluntary efforts of societies to educate the poorer and neglected classes. Lord Sherbrooke, then Mr. Robert Lowe, succeeded to the office, and in 1862 introduced the Revised Code,' which was a body of regulations on a new principle, namely, the payment of aid to national schools by a series of little grants. on results of the instruction of each individual child, ascertained by annual examinations of inspectors. The original system had been chiefly by an augmentation of the salaries of teachers given by voluntary societies.

The general principle of the public aid was admitted to remain unaltered by Mr. Lowe in his speech introducing his revision of the mode. He stated, February 13, 1862, the object to be

to promote education among the labouring poor by means of giving public assistance to voluntary efforts in schools connected with some recognised religious denominations, in which, besides secular instruction, the Scriptures are read daily from the Authorised Version.

He added: "The religious element underlies the whole system of Privy Council education.'

I do not quote this language here by way of raising any question as to the subsequent departure from this principle both as to the class of children dealt with, and the religious instruction required; but only that, in discussing the new mode of payment for education by numerous little instalments on individual results of secular instruction, it may be borne in mind that this novelty has grown up with a departure from the original principle.

Mr. Lowe gave as the reason for his change in the mode of payment, that