. She may get windfalls of single teachers for a few months or
years: superior young men may occasionally make a brief stay in her
schools, in the course of their progress to something better,--as
Pilgrim rested for a while in the half-way recess hollowed in the side
of the Hill Difficulty; but only very mediocre men, devoid of energy
enough of body or mind to make good masons or carpenters, will stick
fast in them. We have learned that, in one northern locality, no
fewer than eight Free Church teachers have since Martinmas last either
tendered their resignations, or are on the eve of doing so. These, it
will be found, are superior men, who rationally aspire to something
better than mere ploughman's wages; but there will of course be no
resignations tendered by the class who, in even the lowest depths of
the Scheme, have found but their proper level. These, as the more
active spirits fly off, will flow in and fill up their places, till,
wherever the L10 and L13 salaries prevail,--and in what rural
district do they not prevail?--the general pedagogical acquirements of
our teachers will present a surface as flat, dull, and unprofitable
as ditch-water. For what, we again ask, can be expected for L10 or
L13? And let the reader but mark the effect of such teaching. We have
seen placed side by side, in the same burgh town, an English school,
in which what are deemed the branches suitable for mechanics and
their children, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, were
energetically taught, and a grammar school in which a university-bred
schoolmaster laboured, with really not much energy, especially in
those lower departments in which his rival excelled, but who was fitted
to prepare his pupils for college, and not devoid of the classical
enthusiasm. And it struck us as a significant and instructive fact,
that while the good English school, though it turned out smart
readers and clever arithmeticians, failed to elevate a single man from
the lower to the middle or higher walks of life, the grammar school
was successful in elevating a great many. The principle on which such a
difference of result should have been obtained is so obvious, that it
can scarce be necessary to point it out. The teaching of the one
school was a narrow lane, trim, 'tis true, and well kept, but which led
to only workshops, brick-kilns, and quarries; whereas that of the
other was a broad, partially-neglected avenue, which opened into the
great professional