Vaud, and Valais-when the state of things is carefully explained, and a proposal made to found a League of French-speaking Cantons to defend themselves against the ever-increasing German force. But how are they to hold their own? By artifice, corruption, violence? Not a dream of such things clouds their minds. The meeting sees and says it is a question of the public schools. French education is below the mark;-it ought to be improved; and the Société Intercantonale proposes to revise and widen the superior education in the three French-speaking cities of Lausanne, Geneva, and Neufchatel. But how? By means, says Rambert, of a French University in Celtic Switzerland. Professor Rambert is a native of Lausanne, and he proposes to erect this Federal University in Lausanne. But here creeps in once more the sign of race. Instead of urging that the three French-speaking cities should subscribe the money and begin the work, these Celtic Switzers ask their common countryin the main Teutonic-to provide the means. The League, they say, is rich; the Canton poor. The Communes are already taxed beyond their strength; the Cantons can not bear fresh burthens; let a generous country pay.

School Festival and Holiday.

A band, a line of flags, much patter of small feet, with now and then a swell of fervid song; some fifteen hundred girls in white; a troop of magistrates and councilors, pastors, teachers, foreign consuls; then a second band, with firemen in their casques, and landwehr in their uniforms; some fifteen hundred boys in line of march; soft babble of young voices, in the intervals of drums and trumpets.

Scene The English Garden at Geneva. Time-the afternoon of Tuesday, June the twenty-seventh. Group-the pupils of the primary schools. Occasion-the completion of the half-year's school work. Prizes have been given to the deserving scholars. Lists of those most worthy of such honors have been read aloud. The magistrates of the republic have addressed the mall in cheery and exciting words. It is a great day in their lives. They are the heroes of one happy hour; and all their faces glow with inner fire. A word is given the bugles sound-the lines begin to move; and soon the English Garden is behind us.

For the last three days the skies have opened all their gates; this morning brought a pause in the great roar of rain, and as the heads of columus quit the ground a gleam of sunshine shoots to right and left, and soon the city and the lake are bathed in golden light. The Canton is agog with joy. All men make way for the procession. Ha! the merry ones! Good children! Soldiers of the Lord! are some of many greetings, as the boys and girls troop forward, pass the quays, and winding by the Molard, up the Rue Corraterie, reach the Electoral palace, where the magistrates receive them, and regale them. After honest fare and kindly speech, the children march to the theatre, where conjurors and showmen entertain them; then to the Plainpalais, where all the city goes to meet them; and a happy day is ended with a wonderful discharge of fireworks, rockets, wheels, and detonating stars. Much glory to the boys and girls; but glory earned by weeks of earnest work.

The festivals and holidays of a Switzer are connected with his life at school. Each change is made the pretext for a feast. On going to school there is a feast; on leaving school there is a feast at every stage of his advance there is a feast. There is vacation feast, assembling feast; when a new teacher comes there is a feast, and when a teacher leaves there is a feast. The school is made to him, by public and by private acts, a centre of all happy thoughts and times. It shares the joys of home and the rewards of Church. At school, a Swiss boy finds his mates, with whom he learns to sing and play, to drill and shoot. The teacher is to him a father. With this teacher he will grow into a man, assisted on his way with care and love, unmixed with either foolish fondness or paternal pride. With him, and with his mates, the lad will take his country strolls, collecting rocks and plants; will push his boat across the lake, and dive into the secrets of the ancient water-folk; will pass by train into some neighboring Commune, where the arts are other than he sees at home. All bright and pleasant things are grouped about him; and in after-time, when farm and counter occupy his cares, these school days will seem to him the merriest of his life.

The school, the pupil, and the teacher, are forever in the public eye. The scholars promenade the streets with music, flags, and songs. All men make room for them, salute them, glory in them, as the highest product of their State.

Gymnastic and Military Drill.

A

The elements of drill begin the very first week of a scholar's course. teacher sets his pupils in a row; he makes them stand erect; he moves their limbs together; has them bend, recover, stretch the hands, march, leap and jump. All kinds of games are practiced in the play-ground. Every game that tends to open and expand the chest, to nerve the limbs, and give a carriage to the frame, is studied, and if need be, introduced. From six to eight a lad is exercised in simple motions of the body; at the age of nine he learns to hold a pole, to run with ropes, and swing on bars. From ten to thirteen, harder things, made easy by the previous training, are commenced. The lines are formed like regular squads; the exercise is but another name for drill. In walking, running, hopping. every one obeys the word; whirls, changes front, and halts, as he is told. All exercise is orderly and rhythmical. Much care is taken with the halting, turning round, and facing to the right and left. The squads are put through many exercises in bending, twisting, reaching, and recovering at ease. Long jumps, and high jumps, every sort of sport on foot, with hanging by the hands and feet from rings, with climbing poles and ropes, with bounding from a spring-board, and a hundred games that strengthen, temper, and adjust the frames. On leaving one of these rural schools, at fifteen years of age, a lad is fit for any part that he is likely to obtain; is fit to be a waiter, farmer, boatman, fruiterer, and so on; and is also fit to exercise his, public rights-to hold his rifle, and cast his vote. For such a lad can read and write, can sing and shoot; he knows the constitution of his country, and can follow with a free intelligence the politics of his city and his State.

The only folk you see in these free Cantons clothed in uniforms, are students coming from the public schools, and yet this League of free republics is not unprepared for war. You find no soldiers in the street, because these Cantons have no separate military class; but every man you see, in shop or field, would start into a soldier if his bugle called; a soldier, armed, equipped, and ready for the march. The groom who feeds your horse may be a corporal; the doctor who prepares your draught may be a captain of the line. No power is wasted by these Cantons. Every man is trained to face his duties, when the trumpet sounds.

Come with me to the Cantonal drill-ground; that of Zurich, for example. In a broad, green meadow, called the Wollis Hofen, lying at the foot of Uetliberg, the boys of Zurich drill and shoot on summer days. The meadow is an ancient river-bed, now soft and grassy, with a ridge of ground about it, shutting off the lake; four miles in distance from the Polytechnic and the Cantonal schools. Hither march the boys on certain days with fife and drum, with glittering steel and mounted guns; the linesmen carrying rifles, the artillery wearing swords. Some companies of Cantonal troops are in advance; going out to practice at the range. A group of teachers and professors-men whose names are known to Europe-Kinkel, Vögelin, and Behn-Eschenburg—are with the boys, and will be followed, later in the day, by groups of parents, sisters, and it may be sweethearts, ready with their cheering cries and waving hands, to mark each movement in the field. Arrived at Wollis Hofen, the procession halts, a line is formed, the names are called, the arms and uniforms are noted, and the several companies told off to drill and shoot. A little drill suffices for the younger fry; who march, and wheel, and skirmish, and are then dismissed for play. But play itself is part of drill. These youngsters race and leap, and throw the ball, and try to catch their comrades in a coil of rope. Two swords are stuck into the ground as barriers, and the urchins chase each other around these shining points. More work is given to boys of riper age; the full battalion drill, and firing, company by company, at a range of butts. A volunteer myself, I note the doings of these lads, and find in them a good deal to approve; though much of it is better for the field than for parade. The wheeling is a little loose; the line is sometimes bent; and here and there a lad falls out of

step. But these are faults of that loose system which the Zurichers have borrowed from the French. The skirmishing is quick and steady; the recovery into time alert. Still better is the firing at a mark. I should not like to be a Zouave, clambering up a rock, with one of those young marksmen of fifteen behind the ledge.

A park of guns is on the ground. The Cantonal schoolboys form the line; the Polytechnic students serve the guns. Except that many of the lads wear glasses, they have very much the look of youths who will be soldiers by and by. A canteen is erected on the meadow, but no sign of drink being close at hand is seen. A thin red wine is sold to such as want it; but the boys prefer their grapes and apples-fruit of which they seem to have abundant crops. One corner of the meadow is enlivened by a band, round which the ladies and performers sit; and at the butts a rifle-match is on between two Cantonal shooting clubs. The boys observe this shooting with intense delight; a cry of rapture greets each score; and men of every age, from eight to eighty, and of every rank, from laborers to professors—stand together on this Zurich drillground, foot to foot, and wrist to wrist, as it were, in the freemasonry of arms. Some cheap and homely prizes-canes, and drinking mugs, and albums-are distributed by a city magistrate, to such as have done well. The band strikes up the Rhine Watch, and the youngsters shout hurrah, and toss their caps in the sky. A great professor speaks a few warm words; and the business of the day is done. A bugle calls, and the homeward march begins. Half Zurich comes to greet us on the quays and in the streets, and having spent ten hours in the open field, we all feel ready for a frugal supper and a dreamless sleep.

In every Canton of the League you find such schools of arms as that of Wollis Hofen; drill and shooting grounds belonging to the State, and reckoned as the necessary adjuncts of a public school. For with every Switzer drill begins as soon as he can stand erect and poise a stick. In many Cantons drill begins at six; in others it begins at seven; of course in very simple sort, as moving at word, as beating time, as carrying satchel on the back. At ten the work becomes more serious; there is wheeling, skirmishing, recovering, forming squares, deploying into line, and marching, both in columns and in files. As they grow up, the pupils drill with arms; and in the fullness of their teens they practice firing at a mark. A field-day in the drill-ground is regarded by the scholars as a play-day. Every one is eager for a prize. The thing itself is nothing, for the glory is enough. Some magistrate of the republic gives away the prize; the Cantonal Journal registers the fact; a hundred friends and neighbors praise the happy shot. To be a marksman in the village is to bear away the palm. Thus every male you meet above the age of seventeen is a soldier, ready in the hour to take the field.

Our

It was in view of this national armament that General Dufour wrote to the French Minister of War, in 1870 in view of the complication of military preparation, and the desire not to be embroiled in the adventures of either side: "We have an army more than 100,000 strong, well drilled and armed, supported by a landwehr, numbering very nearly a hundred thousand more. guns are ready for the field; our rifles are as good as we can find. We have our camp for tactics, and our schools for exercise. We have among us many military circles; but beyond all these defenses, we can count on the national spirit in the heart of every citizen-a resolution to protect our independence and neutrality, let the storm break on us from whatever side it may."

LATER SCHOOL REFORMERS.

Johannes Sieber.

JOHANNES SIEBER was the master of a village school at Uster, on the Griefen Lake, some dozen miles from Zurich. Uster was a feudal hamlet, now it is a weaving station. On the knoll above the weavers' houses rests the remnants of a castle, which are turned to use as court-house, jail, and inn. A tower, on which the weavers drink their beer, commands the lake below, and in the distance sweeps the peaks and crests of Schwyz. Near by a group of factories frets the sky and smoking chimneys overtop both feudal tower and Gothic spire. In Uster, Sieber was employed in teaching rustics how to read

and sing. Like nearly all his class he was a politician of advancing views. His school was in the shadow of that ancient pile; a living proof that victory is with the popular cause. He was no learned pundit; he had taken no degree; but he was full of speech and pluck; and, more than all, he had the sense to see that this great struggle of the popular and conservative parties turned upon the public schools.

"You see the fruit but not the root," my host explains to me, as we were driving past. "These youngsters streaming from the Cantonal school steps, are like the vines on yonder wall; they flourish in our soil, but draw their being from a distant source. We Switzers are not poets and inventors; we are homely folk; but then we know a good thing when we see it, and are quick to try if it will suit us. I am not an old man yet; but in my youth you might have passed from Basel to Ticino and not have seen a decent public school."

"You have not let the grass grow under your feet, then?"

"Not only is our scheme of State instruction new, it is Germanic, and not Latin in its origin, its spirit, and its plan. We date our University in Zurich from an early time; but in that early time the church was always in a teacher's mind. A teacher seldom thought of civil life. He was a priest; he wished to make his pupils priests. His school was a part of some religious house; some priory, some abbey, where the ruler was in holy orders. His instruction was devoted to a single purpose. Priests required some letters, and they got some. Girls required no letters, and they got none. Females had no chance of learning how to read and write, except through private means and at enormous cost. A man who wished his girls to learn, was forced to hire a priest and lodge him in his house!

"The change came on, you think, with the revolt from Rome?"

"With Martin Luther. Rome was pagan in her spirit. She would never give her system of instruction to all classes. Luther was our source of civic life. He was the first to claim that public teaching should extend to all; to rich and poor, to male and female, and to bond and free. Yes, Luther is the father of democracy. He, more than any Switzer, shaped our politics and framed our laws."

Thomas Scherr.

Who is Thomas Scherr, some reader asks, that he should stand in line with Luther? Scherr is not a man of name, and yet his work was good and he performed it well. In Zurich he is dearly loved. As Luther gave to public teaching a popular spirit, Scherr endowed it with a popular form. Scherr is the actual founder of the system now prevailing in Canton Zurich; and in no. slight measure is the author of her wealth, intelligence, and fame. She loves him all the more that she was cruel to him while he lived, and torn with anguish for him when he died. Born in the small village of Hohenrechberg, in the Kingdom of Wurtemberg, Thomas Scherr received his training in the public school, and feeling a vocation for the teacher's office, studied pedagogy as an art, and got appointed to a desk. His fame soon spread abroad; for he was not a teacher only, but a special teacher, with ideas of his own. Promoted to the mastership of a deaf and dumb institution, he arrested wide attention by his plan for teaching mutes how to speak. At twenty-four he came to Zurich, where the state of Education was below the mark. Here he got appointed to the Blind School, which he thoroughly reformed, and with such full approval of the city that the Government increased his school by adding to it a department for the deaf and dumb, in order that his theories of teaching might be fully tried. Before that day, the time was 1825 to 1836, all teachers of the deaf and dumb had been content with the opinion of De l' Epéo and the Abbé Sicard, that the only way to teach a mute is by the hand. Watson in England, Heinicke in Germany, Clerc in the United States, were followers of that method. Scherr had other thoughts. No man, he found, is naturally mute. A child is dumb because he is first deaf and does not hear articulate sounds. But may he not be taught articulation through the eye? Scherr thought he might. He dropped the finger-alphabet and tried to teach his pupils to articulate in letters, syllables and words. Articulate sounds are formed by breathing through the lips and teeth, along the palate and the

tongue, and all the movements of these organs, while the sounds are issuing may be seen. A little care and patience, and the pupil imitates these movements, and acquires the gift of speech. A double end is gained; for while he learns the art of breathing words, he also learns the art of reading them. A class of mutes who can distinguish what the master says, can also train the accents on each other's lips, by sight. The power of interchanging thought, if not so rapid as in men with all their senses, is complete. A great success attended Scherr. Some pupils learned to speak with ease, and many learned to speak a bit. In six years he had made his ground so sure that, when the Canton wished to frame a better code, he was elected to the Education Council, and intrusted by that Council with the task of drawing up a general law. Public codes are common now, for every Canton in the League has framed a public code; but in the days of Scherr such things were new and strange, and the Federal party, urged by Dr. Bluntschli (one of the aristocrats, whose ancestors had governed Zurich long before she joined the Forest Cantons), led the innovator an uneasy life.

Scherr wished this business of education to be made a business of the State. He held that every one should go to school, that every village should provide a school, that every citizen should take his share in managing a school, and that the parents should be pressed to visit and inspect the school. He wished to see the school a liome, and hoped to call the family spirit to his help. To him no subject was so serious as the school. He meant the world to see things as he saw them; and he hoped by means of public festivals to bring the highest interests of the Canton on the public schools. One part of his reform the Canton put in force without delay. The want of Zurich was the want of Europe— teachers who were fit to teach. Except in Germany, no such artists in tuition could be found; and Scherr proposed to found a training college near the city, where selected youths of either sex might be instructed in this difficult and important art.

Four miles from Zurich city, on a slip of vineyard mirrored in the waters, stands the pretty thorp of Küsnacht. In this pretty thorp his training college was erected. Three years later, Küsnacht was a place of name and fame, and men from every part of Europe flocked to see the master at his work.* An impetus was given to teaching in all countries, more than all in the Teutonic Cantons of the League. As teacher, Scherr was very great. His lessons on the forms of speech, and on the graces of expression, were remarkable for neatness, brilliancy, and point. With boys and girls he had a vast success; his manner was convincing, and his power of illustration and comparison was endless. Scherr was happy in his work, and all, except the Federal party, who hire open enemies of public education, were extremely proud of Scherr. The wider grew his fame the sharper grew his pain. A cry rose up against him that he wished to ruin trade by driving every boy and girl to school. A hundred manufacturers declared that they would have to close their shops. They could not carry on their works. Their industry would perish, and their capital be lost. If Scherr were suffered to go on they must remove their mills to Cantons where such fools were not allowed to tamper with the laws of trade. They might be driven away to France.

Scherr answered that the city was extending on all sides; five hundred new houses were being built; the streets were cleaner, quieter than of yore; the port was filled with an increasing fleet of boats; and thousands of foreign artists were coming to the town for work. New public buildings were commenced; the ancient walls were overthrown; new terraces and gardens rose on either side the lake; new book-shops opened; singing clubs were formed; a theatre was built; some fine hotels were added to the town: the Dom was put into repair; a higher plane was reached. The Feudal party were convicted, not convinced; and when the next reflux of passion brought them into power they wreaked their hatred on the man, although they were not strong enough to stay his work. Scherr died in exile from the Canton he had made his own.

* Prof. Bache made the Normal School at Küsnacht known to American teachers, in his Report on Education in Europe in 1838, and an account of his visit was published in Barnard's Normal Schools in 1846, and in the American Journal of Education in 1858.