4 FEBRUARY 1888, Page 2

Mr. Goschen also maintained that Sc3tland does not need the

lesson he was enforcing half as much as England. The Scotch education is from the first more "rousing." Youthful dialectics began in Scotland at an earlier age than in England. "I have been astonished myself at the successful attempts to elicit genuine intellectual interest in very young scholars which I have seen in middle-class schools in Edinburgh. For my own part,. I like to see scholars rattled about. I like to see their competi- tive eagerness. Heaven forbid that we should like an argumen- tative child; but the capacity for following a train of thought cannot begin too early." Here, surely, there is room for doubt. Sir Walter's Andrew Fairservice is not a bad specimen of the pragmatic temper which such an education produces. We might reasonably prefer a population of Dorsetshire peasants such as Mr. Hardy paints for us, to a population of Andrew Fairservices.