n preparing for and accentuating
the political agitation.

Education had a history rather of good intentions than of brilliant
achievement. At different times in the earlier nineteenth century,
schemes for district grammar schools and general common schools were
prepared, and sums of money, unhappily not in increasing amounts, were
voted for educational purposes. But, apart from the doubtful
enthusiasm of the legislators, the education {33} of the British
settlers was hampered by an absence of suitable teachers, and the
difficulty of letting children, who were often the only farm assistants
at hand, attend school for any length of time. According to good
evidence, half of the true school population never saw the schools, and
the other half could give only seven months in the year to their
training.[31]

In most country districts, the settlers had to trust to luck both for
teachers and for schoolhouses, and beginnings which promised better
things too often ended in blank failure. There is both humour and
romance in these early struggles after education. In Ekfried, by the
Thames, in Western Canada, there had been no school, till the arrival
of an honest Scot, Robert Campbell, and the backwardness of the season
in 1842, gave the settlement a schoolmaster, and the new settler some
ready money. "I get a dollar and a half, a quarter per scholar," he
wrote to his friends in Scotland, "and seeing that the wheat did
little, I am glad I did engage, for we got plenty of provisions."[32]
In Perth, a more ambitious start {34} met with a tragic end. The
Scottish clergyman, appointed to the district by government, opened a
school at the request of the inhabitants. All went well, and a
generous government provided fifty pounds by way of annual stipend;
until a licentiate of the Anglican Church arrived. By virtue of the
standing of his church, the newcomer took precedence of the Scottish
minister and displaced him as educational leader. But, says the Scot,
with an irony, unchristian but excusable, "the school under the
direction of my clerical successor, soon after died of a consumption,
and the school-house has been for sometime empty."[33]

The main difficulty in education was to provide an adequate supply of
competent teachers. Complaints against those who offered their
services were almost universal. According to a Niagara witness, not
more than one out of ten teachers in the district was competent to
instruct his p