me, a native of a country where its preservation to the greatest possible extent was a fundamental principle of the law, was very painful. No old Hulean, e.g., was permitted to live after he had become incapable of work, and every one taken with a chronic or infectious disorder was in like manner soon put out of the way. In short, human life, like every other kind of property, was regarded as belonging exclusively to the State. As long as a man was considered to be useful to the community he was permitted to live; as soon as he became useless, from whatever cause, he was without hesitation put to death. I need hardly say that, acting up to this rule, there were no rich, and therefore idle people in Hulee; all that a man acquired above and beyond his daily means of support was claimed by the State for educational, sanitary, and other purposes.

The system of education in Hulee was in harmony with its laws and tendencies. I need not say that it was entirely in the hands of the State, and was quite compulsory. Their children and young people were especially instructed in the laws of Hulee and Dunamis, in the structure of their own bodies regarded as machines, and in the formation and mode of working of all the other machines, vital or non-vital, by which they were surrounded. One characteristic of the educational system of Hulee was its eminent patriotism. The literature, arts, and languages of other nations and countries were jealously excluded both from the elementary education and from the riper thought of the country, and hence the rising generation of Huleans imbibed the devoted attachment to it which generally characterised their elders almost with their mothers' milk.

From the low situation of Hulee I expected to find a great deal of disease among its inhabitants. I

was, therefore, surprised to find that (owing, perchance, to the short and easy method of treatment customary here) there was little or no sickness in Hulee. All curable cases were promptly and decidedly healed. The few cases which were incurable were immediately given up to the medical authorities, and a series of antemortem examinations, conducted for years with the greatest skill and caution, was not the least of the means by which the learned faculty of medicine had attained to its present high position. Besides which they enjoyed other opportunities for improvement from their office of public executioners, for every incurable offender was delivered up to them to be dealt with as they thought fit, i.e. either to be first infected with some disease and then experimented upon with drugs, or to have some new kind of surgical operation performed upon him, it being understood that the conclusion in every such case was to be death. It need hardly be pointed out,' as a warm advocate of Hulean institutions once said to me,

how much this mode of utilising criminals is better than that which is in use in some countries of hanging them up on a scaffold without a thought of those valuable ganisations which are thus absolutely wasted, so far as rendering any service to humanity is concerned.'

or

I have now, I think, sufficiently described those features of Hulee which seemed to me most remarkable during my sojourn there. Although many of the things I saw there filled me with astonishment by their strangeness, I was not long in arriving at the conclusion that neither Hulee nor its institutions were altogether suited to my taste. I perceived that the lowness of the country affected my health, while the manners and customs of the people had an equally prejudicial

sisted merely in a substitution of one kind of slavery for another; for the average Hulean professor was just as dogmatic in the promulgation of his theories and opinions as the most bigoted hierarch could be; and that, too, in cases where there was no possibility of demonstrating fully the truth of what he maintained. On the whole, then, I could not but conclude that the advantages which were supposed to belong to Hulee were of a fictitious character, and that neither the country nor its institutions answered to the fame they had acquired in other lands.

effect on my spirits. I therefore made up my mind, as soon as I had seen all that seemed to be worth seeing, to leave Hulee, and journey back again whence I came. How far my distaste for the land and its institutions was owing to the habit I adopted during my stay there of occasionally removing my Hulean spectacles, and looking at things with my naked eyes, I will not undertake to say; but it certainly seemed to me that nearly all those advantages which Huleans had boasted of possessing, and on which they were content to stake the very existence of their empire, were rather imaginary than real. The mystery surrounding and interpenetrating all things, to obtain freedom from which their empire was established, I found, though unrecognised, still existing. It seemed to me to make but little difference whether it was found in Hulee and Dunamis, or whether it was to be attributed to a still higher power, to which, as the men of my own country believe, both Hulee and Dunamis owe their existence; and though I could not but admire the ingenuity of their professors, their intense, but perhaps somewhat narrow devotion to the interests of their rulers and divinities, the skill of native Huleans in constructing and managing all kinds of machinery, yet these excellences were, in my estimation, more than counterbalanced by a strange want of feeling, sympathy, love, and, in short, the softer and kindlier aspects of existence, which we sum up in the word humanity. There was a selfishness, a harshness in their ideas, not unsuited, perhaps, to their conceptions of themselves as organisms or machines, but which to me at least was most repulsive ; and though the savans of Hulee boasted of their freedom from mental slavery and prejudice, I could not help inferring that the freedom con

After a residence in the heart of Hulee of about twelve months, I resolved to turn my steps homeward; and just as I found in starting for Hulee that I got over the ground more rapidly than I expected, so now, having made up my mind to leave it, I soon found myself verging close on its boundaries. I overtook on my road homewards a few of my fellow-travellers to Hulee. These, like myself, were dissatisfied with the country and its laws, and were wending their way back to the homes they had left. On comparing my own impression with theirs, I found that we were quite agreed as to the defects of Hulee; whence I was assured that the opinions I had formed were not so strange or erroneous that others did not share them. When I had once more re-ascended the long hill which led homewards, and when I had rid myself of the last trace of Hulean prepossessions by giving up my spectacles to the officers on the boundaries, great was my delight

to

survey the well-remembered scenery through which I had travelled to Hulee. So great, indeed, was the joy I felt at the prospect of nearing home, that I ran up the steeper parts of the hill without feeling any sense of fatigue. The atmosphere, too, becoming rarer,

together with my joyful feelings, produced in me a feeling of buoyancy and exhilaration to which I had long been a stranger. At last my own home was happily reached, where at least for some time to come I was determined to stay. I found, however, that my long sojourn in Hulee had estranged many of my older companions, and thrown some doubt on my patriotism. This I was not unwilling to encounter, being confident that my journey to Hulee had not been unattended with benefits; for, firstly, I had thereby satisfied my traveller's curiosity to see and investigate new lands. I had thereby enlarged my knowledge of men and their modes of thought. I had, moreover, returned with a greater respect for

the laws and usages of my own country than I had ever felt before, and with a full conviction that the mysteries underlying all things are the same in every country, and are not affected by institutions or modes of government; and last, though not least, I was now convinced that the fears which some of my countrymen entertained, that the insti tutions and manners of Hulee were destined some day or other to extend themselves into other lands, were without real foundation. I felt confident that, though Hulee might always attract to it men of a particular disposition, yet, for the bulk of the human race, it could never have more than a mere intellectual and speculative interest.

THE

HE Elementary Education Bill having been passed, there is room for the happy hope that few of the poorest will seek in vain for a neighbouring school in which their children may, during some part of the day, learn reading and writing, arithmetic enough for ordinary marketing, and possibly as much of physical and political geography as most of the middle class seem able to retain. To educational enthusiasts, indeed, this curriculum appears sadly small; but we must confess our unromantic notion that, having regard to the children to whom it is stipulated that the present State-aided schools shall be limited, viz. those of the classes who support themselves by manual labour,' the course is as extensive as we need seek to force them through.

Apparently under a similar impression, the moderate advocates of that compulsion which is so desirable in theory and so difficult in practice, have contented themselves with the wish that as soon as a child might pass an examination in one or other of the higher of the six standards of the Revised Code, his compulsory attendances at school should be reduced in number or should altogether cease. But Mr. Fawcett, as reported in the Times May 28, 1870, deemed this a fatal principle which would drag all children to a dead level, and would defeat one grand end of education, which is to discover and develop talent, and to enable the clever boy to advance from the National School to the University. The proposition bears a mild resemblance to the Imperial boast, that every French soldier carries in his knapsack the materials for a marshal's bâton; but we notice the similarity only to protest against it. The bravery and good conduct by which it is conceivable that this

prize may be reached, are virtues which it is not less for the good of the nation than for that of the individual soldier that he should practise throughout his course; and the hope, however vain, of attaining the distinction tempts him to no deflection from his true path. But to hold out to the children of our national schools the prospect of obtaining university distinctions is to put into their heads a very mischievous notion. It is not simply that the prospect is scarcely less illusive in this case than in the other, but the allurement is thoroughly meretricious. It is not good for the nation that the hope set before these children should be that of passing by education into a totally different sphere from the one in which they are born; it is not good that time and thought, which might be happily and usefully given to the class of work that is open to poor boys, should be wasted by them in an almost hopeless struggle to get into ranks which are naturally already thronged by the children born in them. Short of criminal remorse, there is no more galling pain than that of many a man who has been educated much above the level of those with whom his lot is cast, or the requirements of the work which his misconceived book-learning has rendered utterly distasteful to him, but which he can yet only quit to starve. The great aim of national education we take to be the refinement of classes, and not the elevation of individuals; to give to the masses, however gra dually, finer feelings and a taste for more reasonable enjoyments than heretofore. If they are only able to turn to their books for an occasional hour or so after a day of manual labour, still this restriction is not without its advantage; for they can do so with some of that

clear and bounding thought which those who spend their lives in incessant mental fag may remember to have enjoyed in their youth, but now covet in despair. The industry and resolution which make up the published biographies of the comparatively very few who have raised themselves to a greatly different position from that in which they were born, is not in all cases the whole of the truth, but (independently of the accidents of patronage) there is much untold that has gone to make up the characters of the men and the nature of the course they have taken. There is to our thinking a far greater prima facie reason for respecting the man who, instead of seeking to climb, with the high probability of a miserable disappointment, has been content to follow the path which was open to him, and which therefore presented a very good prospect of success; and who, while neglecting no reasonable opportunity of mental improvement, has applied his intellect to the bettering of his natural work, and has softened and benefited his class by the abiding presence of his higher example.

This view is indeed in accordance with that which has been expressed, irrespectively of the question of education, by some of the school to which Mr. Fawcett belongs. Mr. Mill, in his Principles of Political Economy, quotes approvingly the following words of Sismondi:

The head of a family thinks with reason that his children may be contented with the condition in which he himself has lived, and his desire will be that the rising generation should represent exactly the departing one.

Yet, regardless of this sufficiently reasonable statement of the case, young people are everywhere found to attach such an exaggerated importance to the circumstance of their having received more booklearning than their parents, that the tendency in each class is to seek

to move, as a necessary consequence of this book-learning, into a sphere different from that which the parents have occupied. In the educational movement, as in every good work, there is a degree of attendant evil: the leaders will ride their hobbies to death; and this struggle after displacement of classes is the evil which requires correction in the educational movement of our times.

Deluded by a mistaken notion of the purpose which their education should serve, numbers of tradesmen's sons have crushed into the fearfully overstocked ranks of professions. They have despised buying and selling as vulgarities unfitted for educated gentlemen;' much as a girl in a drapery shop could not write to a newspaper the other day to make a reasonable complaint of long hours without speaking of herself and her companions in work as 'young ladies.' Going a little lower, are there not numbers led by a false notion of the superiority conferred upon them by their pennyworths of education to disdain the rougher menial labour of their parents, and to prefer the starvation pay and confined fag of dressmaking by hand or machine to the better living obtainable in the humbler, though far healthier, and not harder work of domestic service? In this last class, competition is quite disappearing; and those who still take situations behave in them with an independence and defiant nonchalance to which people engaged in shops and offices cannot approach even in thought. Do not let it be rejoined that this difference of conduct is owing to the better education of the latter. Independence will be asserted wherever it exists, and education merely varies the form of expression. The independence upon which domestic servants are to be congratulated-we do not for a moment say to be blamed-is the