One Touch of Nature.

Hastings Standard, Issue 151, 21 October 1896, Page 4

One Touch of Nature.

The late Mr J. A. Hartley, InspectorGeneral of State Schools in South Australia, appears to have been well beloved beyond most men. While he was lying unconscious between life and death, the following notice appeared as an advertisement in the public journals :—" The Minister of Education would be glad if any teacher of the State schools who felt so disposed would, to-day, one minute before or one minute after regular school hours, write on the blackboard and permit as many children as are willing to do so to repeat with him these words, or words to a similar effect: ' Our Father which art in Heaven, grant that our dear master and beloved friend, Mr Hartley, may be restored to health.' " That advertisement, remarked the Australasian editor of the Review of Reviews, is, perhaps, Mr Ilartly's best epitaph. An official who could be described as ' our dear master and beloved friend ' by tLc cLildren of a whole colony was evidently a man of a rare and noble type. 15ut the advertisement is significant on another account. The school system of South Australia, like that of the other colonic*, is austerely secular. It treats religion as non-existent. On the official theory the South Australian child is a being without a soul, and in no need of morals. A headmaster who dared, say, to repeat the Lord's Prayer with Lis children would be regarded as little less than a criminal. Shakespeare's " one touch of nature," however, is too much for official theories, and when the figure best known in the school world of South Australia was lying under the shadow of death, even the Minister of Public Instruction forgot liis secularism, and in hundreds of State schools throughout the colony the children, with a strange hush, watched their master trace this prayer on the blackboard, and thousands of childish voices murmured its syllables. The prayer, it is to be noted, was to be offered ' one minute before or one minute after' regular school hours. The partition, however, has grown thin, when a narrow interval of ' one minute ' separates prayer from the State school course !