The Evening Star TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1869.

Evening Star, Volume VII, Issue 2038, 16 November 1869, Page 2

The Evening Star TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1869.

The people of this Province have every reason to he satisfied -with the steps hitherto taken by the Council of the University to supply the want that is generally felt of an Institution capable of completing the liberal education commenced and carried out to a certain length in our District and High Schools. The Council have certainly acted wisely in endeavoring to give the University a Scotch rather than an English complexion. We have not here, and are not likely to have for generations, a class of young men whom it is desirable to send to a place where they may be tolerably idle for three years without great danger of their becoming bad men. Neither, on the other hand, do we require an institution that shall lie able to supply us with Porsons, Elsmleys, Gaisfords, and eminent men of that class. If wc had had an

idle class amongst us, and if it had been desirable that we should turn out scholars of the very highest rank, like the honour men of the English Universities, then undoubtedly Oxford or Cambridge should have been our model j but as matters are, it is for every reason preferable that the Scotch plan should be followed. What is required in the educational institutions of a young and rising community is, as we take it, an aptitude for turning out as large a number as possible of well-informed men ; a high average of attainments shonld be aimed at rather than the production of brilliant single scholars. The Province would be far more benefited by i-eceiv-ing from home a hundred well-educated men as immigrants than if the three best scholars in Europe were to come and take up their abode here. Every one of those hundred immigrants would lx; a sort of centre from which would radiate intelligence and information, to the manifest advantage morally, politically, and intellectually, of the circles over which their influence extended ; while it is very doubtful whether the influence of a very few first-class men could make itself felt in any appreciable degree. This being the case, it is plain that a cheap University education, of which all may avail themselves, is greatly to be preferred to an expensive one which could do good to only a few. The Scotch system has always been remai'kable for the wide diffusion of the benefits derived from it. At the English Universities nearly all the students are the sons of persons of independent means. Now and then the son of a poor tradesman or mechanic may be found there, but his is always an exceptional case. In the Scottish Universities, on the contrary, may be found in considerable numbers, very poor men, shepherds, ploughmen, mechanics, men who work hard with their hands during six months of the year that they may be able to get their minds cultivated during the other six. As a notable example of the men of this class we may mention the great missionary explorer. Oxford or Cambridge could never have produced a Di. Livingstone. Had that gentleman been born at the south of the Tweed, he would in all probability have been at the present time engaged in weaving, instead of rendering, as he is, the most important services to humanity and to science. To the Scotch system of University education, and more especially, to the facilities which it affords to all sorts of people of obtaining an education more or less liberal, is undoubtedly due the intellectual superiority which the lower classes—if they must be so called —have over people of the same rank in other countries. It is hai'dly possible to find a Scotchman who has not a brother, or a cousin, or some relative that has been to the University, and there can be no doubt that one member of a family who is educated well exercises a direct though not always a very perceptible influence over all those who are connected with him, in raising their general tone of feeling, thinking, and speaking. This sort of thing is exactly what we require here. We are a tremendously democratic people. Let us by all means adopt every possible appliance that is likely to make us able well and woi’thily to use our political power. That the University of Otago will be such an appliance we have every reason to believe.