gant was invited by Lord Milner to organise the
work of educational reconstruction in the new colonies in the autumn
of 1900. He was then travelling in Canada, in the course of a journey
through the empire undertaken for the purpose of investigating the
methods and conditions of education in the several British colonies;
and he reached Capetown on November 6th, 1900. At that time the
headquarters of the new Transvaal Administration had not been
established in Pretoria; but in the Orange River Colony certain
schools along the railway line and elsewhere had been opened under the
military Government. From observations made in December in the two new
colonies, Mr. Sargant had begun to fear that the work of educational
reorganisation would have to be indefinitely postponed, when a visit
to the Boer prisoners' camp at Seapoint, Capetown, gave him the idea
from which the whole system of the camp schools was subsequently
evolved. Here he found that a school for boys and young men had been
provided by the prisoners themselves, but that it was destitute of
books and of almost all the necessary appliances. Mr. Sargant's appeal
on behalf of this school met with a ready response from the Cape
Government. What could be done here, he thought, could be done
elsewhere. The nearest refugee camp to Capetown was at Norval's Pont,
on the borders of the Orange River Colony; and it was here that Mr.
Sargant determined to make his first experiment.

[Footnote 305: This Report was issued (June 14th, 1904) from
the Education Adviser's Office, Johannesburg, on "The
Development of Education in the Transvaal and Orange River
Colony." It is one of the many contributions of permanent
value to political and economic science that mark the second
period of Lord Milner's Administration in South Africa.
_E.g._, in Appendix XXX. of this Report, the various
solutions of the much-vexed question of religious instruction
in State Schools, severally adopted by the self-governing
colonies of the empire, are excellently presented in tabular
form.]

[Sidenote: Origin of the camp schools.]

"Having provided myself," Mr. Sargant says, "with several boxes
of school books, I left Capetown on the last day of January and
took up my quarters in the camp already named. The Military
Commandant threw himself heartily into the experiment, although
a