soon be a unity of language. I visited all the schools that are supported or assisted by Government, as I did also those which have been set on foot by English enterprise. In the former almost as fully as in the latter English seemed to be the medium of communication between scholar and teacher. In all the public schools the Head Teacher was either English or Scotch. The inspector of schools for the Republic is a Scotch gentleman, Mr. Brebner, who is giving himself heart and soul to the subject he has in hand and is prospering admirably. Even in the infant school I found that English was the language of the great majority of the children. In the upper schools, both of the boys and girls, I went through the whole establishment, visiting the bedrooms of the pupils. As I did so I took the opportunity of looking at the private books of the boys and girls. The books which I took off the shelves were all without exception English. When I mentioned this to one of the teachers who was with me in the compartment used by a lad who had well provided himself with a little library, he made a search to show me that I was wrong, and convicted me by finding—a Dutch dictionary. I pointed out that the dictionary joined to the fact that the other books were English would seem to indicate that the boy was learning Dutch rather than reading it. I have no hesitation in saying that in these Dutch schools,—for Dutch they are as being supported in a Dutch Republic by grants of Dutch money voted by an exclusively Dutch Volksraad,—English is the more important language of the two and the one the best understood.
I say this rather in a desire to tell the truth than in a
