THE ELECTION—NELSON COLLEGE.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIV, Issue 208, 3 September 1879, Page 2

THE ELECTION— NELSON COLLEGE.

To the Editor of the ' Evening Mail.' Sir— The somewhat abrupt call for the show of hands at the nomination yesterday prevented me from putting a question to one and all of the candidates; which I will therefore transfer to your columns, with a request that those gentlemen will be so good as to notice it in the speeches they have still to deliver. Every Nelson man is justly proud of Nelson College, an institution which has, for a lengthened period, provided an excellent education in the higher branches for the youth of this and other provinces, and by its system of free scholarships has furnished a powerful incentive to the pupils, and indirectly to the teachers also, of our Government schools. It is well kuown that the proportion of boys hailing from Nelson who have shown themselves qualified to pass the Civil Service examinations is much larger than that reached in the other educational districts of the colony, and this distinction is manifestly owing to the excellence of the teaching in our College. It will, however, not long be possible for Nelson to maintain the lead she now possesses unless provision is made for the teaching of Science, — which is becoming year by year better recognised as forming an essential part of every liberal scheme of education — for the endowments in money and land with which Nelson College has been provided are much too slender to enable the Governors to provide either teachers or apparatus for science-teaching beyond the most elementary stages. It cannot be the wish of the public here that this meritorious institution should be thus crippled for want of means when it would be so easy to provide a substantial landed endowment for it in a province in which three-fourths of the public domain is still in the hands of the Crown. It is not possible, it is true, to endow the College with a hundred thousand acres of good land, as was done by the Provinces of Canterbury and Otago for their respective Colleges, but a grant of an equal or greater area of land now waste, but which will gradually come into occupation, might surely be obtained from Parliament were it strenuously demanded by our members. Commending this subject to the earnest attention of all concerned, I am, &c, F. W. Irvine. Nelson, Sept. 2 1879.