support of those processes which were
to work their own desolation. Landlords were {72} made bankrupt and
tenants ruined that bloated cities might grow more and more.

Every development of the great national machinery designed for the
intellectual illumination of the people has wrought more and more
desolation in the country places. The last of these has been the
worst. In Scotland the parish school since the days of Knox was the
centre of intellectual activity, and the parish schoolmasters were able
to send their scholars straight to the University. But the pundits at
last decreed that this must cease. Secondary education was banished
from the parish schools. The teachers who formerly had scope for, and
joy in, the higher spheres of teaching were consigned one and all to
the withered fields of elementary education. All the secondary
teaching was concentrated in the towns where central schools were
established, to which promising children who desired such training were
collected.

The result has been disastrous. The light of higher education in each
rural {73} parish has been quenched. The secondary education has been
concentrated in towns, and only a few parents could face the additional
burden of providing lodgings for their children. The pundits made no
provision for the proper accommodation for boys and girls at the most
critical period of their lives. No hostels were built for them. In
insanitary villages they were left to whatever provision decayed houses
could provide for them. In these schools religious and moral training
was banned. After school hours boys and girls, removed from the
salutary influences of their homes, were left to the social joys of the
street corners. The main industry of many of these towns was that of
the hotel and public-house. The result has been that a large
proportion of boys and girls who in the shelter of their homes would
have grown into a worthy and useful citizenship have been utterly
ruined. The system was devised that the few might be pushed up the
ladder into the region of the higher {74} knowledge, leaving all record
of God and moral duty behind with their elementary textbooks; and no
provision whatever was made to safeguard them, in the course of the
giddy ascent, from toppling over and falling into the mud. And the
great system, instead of elevating, crashed them into the mire. And
this devastating process still goes on. The rising generation in the
cou