n in the district, let us suppose that they
select _their_ names, and to the number of some two, three, four, or
more, submit them, with the necessary credentials, to their
constituents the householders. And these assemble on some fixed day,
and, from the number placed on the list, select their men. Such,
in the business of electing a schoolmaster, would, we hold, be the
proper work of a committee. In all other seasons, the committee
might be recognised as vested in some of the functions now exercised
by the Established presbyteries, such as that of presiding, in
behalf of the parentage of the locality, at yearly or half-yearly
examinations of the schools, and of watching over the general
morals and official conduct of the teacher. But the power of trial
and dismission, which, of course, would need to exist somewhere, we
would vest in other hands. Let us remark, in the passing, that
much might come to depend ultimately on the portioning out of the
localities into electoral districts of a proper size, and that it
would be perhaps well, as a general rule, that there should be no
subdivisions made of the old parishes. There are few parishes in
Scotland in which the materials of a good committee might not be
found; but there are perhaps many half, and third, and quarter
parishes in which no such materials exist. Further, the householders
of some country hamlet or degraded town-suburb, populous enough to
require its school, might be yet very unfit of themselves to choose
for it a schoolmaster. And hence the necessity for maintaining a
local breadth of representation sufficient to do justice to the
principle of the scheme, and to prevent it, if we may so speak, from
sinking in the less solid parts of the kingdom. A parochial
breadth of base would serve as if to plank over the unsounder portions
of the general surface, and give footing to a system of schools and
teachers worthy, as a whole, of the character and the necessities
of a country wise and enlightened in the main, but that totters on
the brink of a bottomless abyss.

The power of trying, and, if necessary, of dismissing from his charge,
an offending teacher, would, however, as we have said, require to exist
somewhere. Every official, whether of the State or Church, or whether
dependent on a single employer or on a corporation or company, bears
always a twofold character. He is a subject of the realm, and, as
such, amenable to its laws; he has also an official respons