desks the boys occupy one side of the school and the girls the other. The school furniture is fully up to modern requirements. All the teachers I met—and I tried to get speech of as many as I could—were very intelligent, and possessed of considerable esprit de corps. In such cities as Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, &c., the high schools were indeed quite palatial looking, and some of the private educational institutions were not more admirable in their interior arrangements for the comfort and health of the pupils, than imposing externally from an architectural point of view.
I had the privilege and good fortune to meet some of the highest and most honoured authorities on educational subjects in the colony. I found a very generally expressed opinion that the existing system errs on the side of liberality. The burden of the educational impost presses heavier on the people every year. In fact, free education is felt by many now to have been a political blunder. It was never wanted. In the bitter outcry against sectarian teaching on the part of large masses, the advocates of free education stole a march, and succeeded in getting their whole programme of free, secular, and compulsory education swallowed entire, like a bolus. Many now think that the giving up of the revenue derived from fees was a useless, nay, a harmful surrender. What costs nothing, say they, is generally not valued much by the recipient, and anything which tends to sap the citadel of personal responsibility and individual
