Mr. E. B. Sargant, Director of Education in the Transvaal
and Orange River Colonies, lately contributed a remarkable letter to the Times under the heading of " Public School and College Extension throughout the Empire." In view of the pressing need for the rapid development of higher education in the two new Colonies, Mr. Sargant propounds a scheme for the establishment of " genuinely English public schools and Colleges " by a system of Colonial settlements from the home centres. The idea, Mr. Sargent frankly admits, is borrowed from the Roman Church, which has, " by means of colonising settlements of men and women belonging to one or other of the religious Orders, provided throughout our Colonies and for all classes of the population educational facilities of every description." But their schools and Colleges, admirable in many ways, "do not supply for our Colonial youth the type of education characteristic of English public schools and Colleges." The settlements conceived by Mr. Sargent must be founded in the interests of the whole Empire. We have not space to go into the details of Mr. Sargant's scheme, which advocates, within certain limits, the migration of boys from the home to the Colonial schools, and thus forms a sort of corollary to Mr. Rhodes's bequest; but we can say at once that it demands sympathetic attention as a bold and compre- hensive plan of meeting an Imperial need.
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