CHAPTER VIII.
NEXT morning the party was out in good season. It had an appointment with a professor attached to the University of St. Petersburg for a visit to that institution. He was to take breakfast with them, and afterwards would escort them through the library and other rooms of the establishment. While they were at breakfast the professor entertained the youths with an account of the educational condition of Russia, which we will endeavor to repeat as nearly as it was remembered by Frank and Fred.
"On behalf of my country," said the professor, "I am sorry to say that we are behind England, Germany, Austria, and most other nations of Europe in the matter of general education, but not nearly as backward as we were in past years. We have no system of common-schools such as you have in the United States, and the mass of the population is practically without instruction beyond what they receive from the village priests. Down to the time of Alexander II. the village schools were controlled by the priests, and no one else could be a teacher in them. That progressive monarch issued an order requiring the schools to be given to the most capable applicants, whether priests or not. This was a great step in advance, as the priests were not unfrequently nearly as illiterate as the people they were set to instruct.
"To show how we are progressing, let me say that in 1860 only two out of every hundred recruits levied for the army were able to read and write; in 1870 the proportion had increased to eleven in a hundred, and in 1882 to nineteen in a hundred. In 1880 there were 22,770 primary-schools in the villages, with 1,140,915 pupils: 904,918 boys and 235,997 girls. The teachers were 19,511 men and 4878 women. Some of the
