learning, and fit them for college. And
with this central institute every parish must also possess its
supplementary English schools, efficient of their kind, though of
a lower standing, and sufficiently numerous to receive all the
youthful population of the district which fails to be accommodated in
the other. In these, the child of the labourer or mechanic--if,
possessed of but ordinary powers, he looked no higher than the
profession of his father--could be taught to read, write, and figure.
If, however, there awakened within him during the process, the
stirrings of those impulses which characterize the superior mind,
he could remove to his proper place--the central school--mayhap, in
country districts, some two or three miles away; but when the
intellectual impulses are genuine, two or three miles in such cases
are easily got over.

We would fix for the teachers, in the first instance, on no very
extravagant rate of remuneration; for it might prove bad policy in
this, as in other departments, to set a man above his work. The
salaries attached at present to our parish schools vary from a minimum
of L25 to a maximum of about L34. Let us suppose that they varied,
instead, from a minimum of L60 to a maximum of L80--not large sums,
certainly, but which, with the fees and a free house, would render
every parochial schoolmaster in Scotland worth about from L80 to L100
per annum, and in some cases--dependent, of course, on professional
efficiency and the population of the locality--worth considerably
more. The supplementary English schools we would place on the average
level maintained at present by our parish schools, by providing the
teachers with free houses, and yearly salaries of a minimum of L30 and
a maximum of L40. And as it is of great importance that men should not
fall asleep at their posts, and as tutors never teach more efficiently
than when straining to keep ahead of their pupils, we would fain have
provision made that, by a permitted use of occasional substitutes,
this lower order of schoolmasters should be enabled to prepare
themselves, by attendance at college, for competing, as vacancies
occurred, for the higher schools. It would be an arrangement worth L20
additional salary to every school in Scotland, that the channels of
preferment should be ever kept open to useful talent and honest
diligence, so that the humblest English teacher in the land might
rise, in the course of years, to be at the head of its