"our little gardeners" soon begin to pull up the young plants to see if they are growing: or they like to put in large plants in full leaf, that they may see the fruit come soon. "Learn to labour and to wait," is the lesson needed by all who have to do with schools, as well as with farms and gardens.
Men of business are very apt to look with some degree of suspicion on the work of the brain, of which they do not see the immediate results. This is painfully discouraging to men of science, who are devoting their best energies to the advancement of agriculture; they feel that they are neither trusted nor paid as they ought to be, and they are tempted to turn away in disgust to more lucrative pursuits. Depend upon it the professional labour of educated men is worth paying for, and the interest of the public lies not in getting it done cheap, but In getting it done well. For this end there is only one course to be pursued. Keep up a high standard of honour in the profession, whatever that profession may be.
Besides the difficulties inherent in the management of all public institutions there are peculiar circumstances connected with matters of opinion on which parents feel very deeply. Into these I will not enter. But before a College for the middle classes could be founded, they would have to be seriously and calmly looked in the face, and the result must be a division of power as well as of labour, consequent on the multiplication of rival institutions, unless mutual forbearance Is exercised to an extent, of which, in the existing temper of the public mind, I see little prospect. I cannot say that I think the present a favourable time for any such project.
It may be well to advert to the fact that there are already some important public institutions established on definite principles. The Wesley an body have a very flourishing College at Taunton, erected at a cost of twelve thousand pounds, and containing accommodation for about 150 pupils, which is fully occupied. The Independents have a college at the same place with the particulars of which I am not acquainted, and there are several other special institutions in the West of England, The Diocesan Training College at Exeter offers an example of sound English education (apart from its special purpose of training teachers), which deserves the attention of farmers and others in the middle classes who wish to know what good teaching is; I can only say, with all sincerity, that I have heard the elements of knowledge conveyed within those walls with a clearness and soundness to which, with few exceptions, my own school and college experience gives no parallel.
But before such institutions can be founded for the middle classes, and by the middle classes themselves (for no one else can do it), those who originate them must fully count the cost.
