poverty is the sins of the people; another to find it in intemperance; a third to trace its origin to the inherent greed of employers; others to thriftlessness, the lack of provision for old age, high rents, dear food, and what not. As a result, we are told seriously that the righteous man shall never want bread; that the abolition of drink will secure national prosperity; that the only panaceas are trades unionism, penny banks, old age pensions, and land law reform. All these ideals are excellent enough as local or palliative treatment, and the energy expended upon them in attacking poverty from these various points of view must of course tend in the direction of progress. But they do not touch the root of the disease; the treatment is not organic. The immediate symptoms are reduced, but they break out in fresh forms in fresh places.

Moreover the system involves an immense waste of energy. It is the case of a dozen doctors treating a patient by various methods at the same time; some by lotions, others by poultices, fomentations, stimulants or narcotics; but none devoting their energies to the discovery of the source of the trouble with a view to its removal. The best examples we have of the way to collect the facts with regard to poverty are the results of the labours of Messrs. Booth and Rowntree, and especially the latter. If Rowntree's work could be repeated in a number of towns we should have a mass of invaluable material upon which we could proceed to investigate the causes of distress, and the origin of the great class which is often dubiously referred to as the Residuum. Even this material could not of course be considered permanent, and new investigations would have to be made from time to time, according to the changes in the conditions of life and the foundations of society.

It is no part of the object of this paper to formulate a detailed scheme of reform; and my whole point is that instead of tinkering with the surface of social difficulties as we are too fond of doing we should endeavour to ascertain and deal with the causes underlying them. But I would suggest that beginnings might be made in the direction of the grouping of the facts relating to the feeding of children; the spread of knowledge relating to the wise selection and cooking of the cheapest food-stuffs; the possibility of the formation of labour schools such as are being introduced into Germany; the question of the abolition of unskilled labour. Great encouragement should also be given to the study of political economy, and especially to that branch of it which seeks to discover the laws relating to the distribution of wealth. These are mere indications of some of the directions which scientific inquiry would take. Perhaps they are not the most urgent, but of one thing I am sure, and that is the vital necessity of concentrating upon the effort to collect material facts and to discover their relation to other facts and to one another.

Speculation is important enough in its place, but the collection of facts is the essential thing, inasmuch as we may expect the true theories to arise out of our facts when we have obtained them. The whole question is one of the health and strength of the commonwealth. It must be clearly understood that the progress of the nation rests primarily upon a physical basis; its efficiency and solidity depend upon the maintenance of a large population of wellfed and contented people. It is too often the case that we wait for the people themselves to give voice to their sufferings before going to their assistance, and we then flatter ourselves that we are humanitarians. Science, which is the true humanitarianism, enables us to perceive that the existence of this dangerous disease of poverty in the national organism threatens our very life and continuance.

The mode of inquiry advocated will not, perhaps, commend itself to the ardent reformer. The reforming spirit is usually an impatient one. But scientific investigation will teach us the necessity of patience in reform; it will help us to appreciate the difficulty of being satisfied that our pet cures are steps forward and not backward; it will teach us the great care and caution needed before embarking upon costly experiments which may only aggravate the trouble we set out to remove. Reform is a matter of time, and much time; but the more earnestly we concentrate upon the data of sociology, and the more carefully we investigate such facts as we can gather together, the nearer we shall be to the discovery of the true foundations of law and order and systematic progress in human society, and the deeper will be the gratitude of our posterity, to whom perhaps the problem of poverty may become one of merely historic interest.

W. H. CHAMPNESS.

EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA.

READERS of the WESTMINSTER REVIEW may, perhaps, recollect two papers which appeared in the numbers for December 1902 and February 1903,1 advocating the establishment in South Africa of a school somewhat on the lines of the Royal Canadian Military College at Kingston, Ontario. It was suggested that this school should be started by a colony of masters and boys from some English public school, and that a thorough technical education should be given not only in mining engineering, but in agriculture, and possibly in other professional subjects.

By the kindness of Dr. Parkin, headmaster of the Upper Canada College at Toronto, and agent to the Rhodes Trustees for the Rhodes scholarships, these papers were submitted to Lord Milner; whilst Mr. Longlands, editor of the Natal Witness, brought them under the notice of nearly every other leading personage in South Africa and also of Mr. Chamberlain, As a result many of the suggestions contained in them were embodied in the Report of the Transvaal Commission on Technical Education issued in July 1903.

By a very curious coincidence, Mr. E. B. Sargant, Adviser on Education to H.E. the High Commissioner in South Africa, had simultaneously been led to form a project almost identical with that framed by the writer.

Mr. E. B. Sargant, an old Balliol man, had been employed under the Civil Service Examination Commissioners in England from 1882 to 1899. He had subsequently travelled in Rhodesia, in Canada, and in Australia, in order to study the systems of education in use in the British Empire, and before the war had drawn up plans for the settlement of various educational difficulties in Rhodesia, which were put into force by Mr. Rhodes. In 1900 he was appointed by Lord Milner to reorganise the educational system in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony. He has now issued a Report covering the whole of his work which will be of the greatest interest in the future as marking the steps by which the new life of South Africa was called into being, and of this Report we intend to give some account to the readers of the WESTMINSTER REVIEW.2

1 "A Transvaal Eton," December 1902; "All Souls, Transvaal," February 1903. 2 Transvaal and Orange River Colony. Public Education. Report of the Director of Education for the Period November 1900 to February_1904. Prepared by command of his Excellency the Governor. Johannesburg: Esson & Perkins. 1904. Pp. 39

and 164.

To commence with the subject of Higher Education, Mr. Sargant was brought to his conclusions by his observations on the methods employed by the Roman Catholic Teaching Orders, more especially in Canada. He embodied his proposals in a letter published in the London Times of April 23, 1903, under the heading of "Public Schools and College Extension throughout the Empire."

To use a homely comparison, the Roman Catholics have taken the bees as their masters. A mother house is founded in some new country. From this brothers are sent off in twos and threes to found schools in various localities. Some of these schools develop into monasteries, and in their turn send off fresh swarms to colonise still newer lands. Thus from one Colony in Nova Scotia, itself the daughter of a mother house near New York, the Marist Brothers have spread into the furthest west of Canada. The system is not a new one either in monastic or in educational life. From the mother houses in Marseilles and on the Lérins, Monachism colonised all Western Europe in two or three generations. The Jesuit Order was brought into being by seven men who settled in five different countries. When Henry VI. founded Eton, he brought a colony of masters and boys from Winchester under William of Waynflete to start his work the Reformation was introduced into Oxford by the Cantabrigians whom Cardinal Wolsley sent from Cambridge to be the first fellows of Christchurch. Stonyhurst, as it is to-day, is the child of boys who fled, unguided by a master, from St. Omer's to Liège on the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, and whose successors were chased from Belgium to England by the outbreak of the French Revolution.

But this system of educational colonisation died out at the Reformation. Thanks in the main to Queen Elizabeth, Protestant England became a nation which cut herself off from almost all the intellectual life of the Continent, whether in Church or State. English schools and colleges found their work in training the men who were to govern England herself. They did not even seek to extend their influence over England's Colonies. Harvard was the work of a private man, unaided by his old University of Cambridge. The colleges in Virginia and the West Indies were the State foundations of a Dutchman, William III. The educational dreams of a Whitfield and of a Bishop Berkeley, dreams of individuals intended only to promote religious effort in no very wide sense, remained but dreams. During 340 years the Universities Mission is the one token to show that English universities or English public schools took the slightest interest in the spiritual or intellectual life of those Greater Britains which lie beyond the narrow seas.

Mr. Sargant thinks that the time has now come when English public schools may once more take up that secular missionary work which they wrought in the fifteenth century. He realises the part which English public schools have played in shaping English public

life, and he is, before all things, anxious that the same influences should be brought to bear upon the public life of England's daughter States. At present the wealthier colonists who wish to educate their children on English public school lines are forced either to bring them or to send them home for the purpose. In either case the student tends to become detached from the life of the Colony in which his parents gained their wealth. This would not be the case if public schools on the English model, and large enough to be national, not merely sectarian institutions, could be founded in Canada, in Australia, and in South Africa. In South Africa, at all events, the material which these schools would have to work upon is, as Mr. Sargant points out, not wholly dissimilar to that on which Eton, Harrow, and Winchester are reared. Thanks to the presence of the coloured element, by whom the rough work of life is done, every white boy and girl in South Africa enters life, not as an employé, but as a potential employer or foreman on however small a scale. In other words, for all their hatred of social distinctions, the South African democracy is, like the Athenians of Pericles or the pre-war Southerners in America, in reality an aristocracy of masters.

As the governing body of Winchester appeared anxious to inquire further into the possibility of realising Mr. Sargant's plan, the Transvaal Government offered to pay the expenses of their Headmaster, Dr. Burge, if he would come out to South Africa to see if a daughter Winchester could be founded on the Veldt. For private reasons he has had to postpone his journey; but Mr. Sargant does not regret this, as he thinks that when the financial conditions of South Africa improve, it will be far easier to secure those private contributions which he believes will be more advantageous for his project than Government aid.1

That such an institution would tend to promote racial good feeling may be readily proved by reference to Mr. Sargant's remarks on the results already obtained at the Grey College in Bloemfontein, the leading school in the Orange River Colony :

"As regards the addition to the playing fields of the Grey College, the action of the Government necessitates a corresponding movement on the part of the college authorities in the direction of a more careful organisation of the games. The 'loafer' should be no more in evidence in a South African High School than in such a school as Westminster or Clifton College. When beside the Anglican hostel in connection with the Grey College, there are others promoted by the Wesleyans, the Presbyterians, and the Dutch Reformed Church, the house-matches should prove as interesting as in the schools named. For, in regard to all kinds of athletic contests, there is no difference in prowess or enthusiasm between Briton and Boer. If I were to name any single course which will do much in the future to make a homogeneous nation of South Africans, it would be rivalry upon the cricket and football fields."'

We must not forget that the Olympic Games were the great bond 1 Report quoted, p. 23. 2 Report quoted, Appendix xv., pp. 64, 65.