has to live, the marvelous forces among which he has to act, the humanity of which he forms part, and thus of preparing a life of mental activity and happiness for himself, and of enlightened usefulness to others; but this influence is almost entirely set aside by the prize system. Only too often the greater part of the knowledge acquired for an examination, and the life which the student has presently to lead, are to him as matters separated by a great gulf, almost without connection with each other. We can not help asking why we should thus throw away the noblest and most enduring inducements that we possess, and put in their place motives which, except for the desperate effort of the moment, must be poor and unfruitful. We can find no good grounds for believing that the simple love of knowledge for its own sake, which at different periods of the world has acted so powerfully upon young and ardent minds, has in itself lost any of the old sacred fire; nor can we for a moment admit that the boys and young men of higher aspirations, who would be ready to follow Knowledge in a high and worthy spirit, should be sacrificed by an ignobly conceived system to the inferior-minded—if there are such—who can only be tempted to follow her because she means a sum of money, the public triumph of a successful class, or the gaining of a place. For those who can only be induced to work for such motives, let their friends provide in some special fashion such rewards and stimulants as they may find necessary; but for the higher type of boys and young men (and we believe they will gradually prove to be far the larger number, when we have once shaken ourselves free from the corrupting influences of the present system) let the effort be to offer the only true kind of teaching—the teaching of those who are in love with their subjects, and would, if allowed, devote themselves to calling out the same feeling in their pupils. At the present moment both teacher and pupil are morally depressed and incapacitated by a system that deliberately sets itself to appeal to the lower side of human nature. Again and again brilliant young men, once full of early promise, go down from the universities as the great prize-winners, and do little or nothing in the after-years. They have lived their mental life before they are five-and-twenty. The victory of life has seemed to them gained, and knowledge exhausted, almost before the threshold of either has been crossed.
It can not be too often insisted on that examination is a good educational servant, but a bad master. It is a useful instrument in the hand of a teacher to test his own work, and to know how far his pupils have followed and profited by his teaching. But it necessarily exerts a fatal influence whenever it is made of such importance that teachers simply conform to an external standard, lose faith in themselves, sink into the position of their own text-
