ibility,
and may be reprimanded or dismissed for offences against the
requirements and duties of his office. A tradesman or mechanic may
go on tippling for years, wasting his means and neglecting his business,
untouched by any law save that great economic law of Providence which
dooms the waster to ultimate want; but for the excise officer, or bank
accountant, or railway clerk, who pursues a similar course, there
exists a court of official responsibility, which anticipates the slow
operation of the natural law, by at once divesting the offender of
his office. And the State-paid schoolmaster must have also his official
responsibility. But it would serve neither the ends of justice nor
the interests of a sound policy to erect his immediate employers into a
court competent to try and condemn: their proper place would be rather
that of parties than of judges; and as parties, we would permit them
simply to conduct against him any case for which they might hold there
existed proper grounds. A schoolmaster chosen by a not large majority,
might find in a few years that his supporters had dwindled into a
positive minority: parents whose boys were careless, or naturally
thick-headed, would of course arrive at the opinion that it was the
teacher who was in fault; nay, a parent who had fallen into arrears
with his fees might come to entertain the design of discharging the
account simply by discharging the schoolmaster; and thus great
injustice might be done to worthy and efficient men, and one of the
most important classes of the community placed in circumstances of a
shackled dependency, which no right-minded teacher could submit to
occupy. What we would propose, then, is, that the power of trial, and
of dismission if necessary, should be vested in a central national
board, furnished with one or more salaried functionaries to record
its sentences and do its drudgery, but consisting mainly of unpaid
members of high character and standing,--some of them, mayhap, members
_ex officio_; the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, let us suppose--the
Principal and some of the Professors of the Edinburgh University--the
Rector, shall we say, of the High School--the Lord Advocate, and
mayhap the Dean of Faculty. And as it would be of importance that there
should be as little new machinery created as possible, the evidence,
criminatory or exculpatory, on which such a board would have to decide
could be taken before the Sheriff Courts of the provinces, a