to make this element triumph is the necessity of the present moment for them. Thus the right of inspection of private schools, which in France is construed not to extend to their instruction, and therefore, except in the case of some signal offence against health, morality, or the law of the land (the three matters which the inspection of private schools is defined as regarding), remains practically unexercised,* and could not be exercised without exciting discontent and opposition, is in Italy construed, and with acquiescence and applause on the part of the public, to extend to the instruction, and to authorise the same examination as is practised by the State in the public schools. Unless we see what the lessons are, say the government authorities, how are we to satisfy ourselves that they do not contravene morality or the laws? A similar argument might be used in France; but in truth it is public opinion, and the national sense of what the wants of the nation are, that determines, for such a State right as the right of school inspection, the exact limits of its exercise. Only, if this right itself is not written in the laws, abuses of the gravest kind may prevail in the education of a country, and things may even come to a dead lock, whatever the wants of the nation may meanwhile be, without the possibility of applying a remedy.

The Superior Council recommends, for the universities and lay schools, reforms hardly less thorough than those which the minister recommends for the seminaries. The Council insists, in the first place, on the necessity of one organic education law for the kingdom,--una legge universalmente accettata, e non derogata con provvedimenti transitori e particolari. Recognising the expediency of interesting the provinces and communes in the secondary and primary schools by giving them a share in the supervision and management of them, it yet maintains that with the State, represented by the Minister of Public Instruction, rests the supreme duty of seeing that the whole concern of national education is properly and efficiently worked. It proposes to reduce the 59 provveditori to 10 or 14, to make the 59 provinces into 10 or 14 school

* It must be remembered, however, that the preliminary guarantee is taken of requiring titles of his capacity from every head of such schools.

districts by grouping several provinces together for each district, and to put at the disposal of each provveditore two or more visitors, or, as we should say, inspectors. These provveditori are the delegates of the State in the provinces, and, with their inspectors, answer in the main to the rectors and academy inspectors of France. As in France, there is to be at headquarters a body of inspectors general, who are to make annual tours of inspection and annual reports. Their reports are to be published. It is calculated that this organisation, while it will enable the government to have for its ten or fourteen provincial delegates men of real weight and reputation, and while it will provide what is wanting at present, an effective inspection, will cost only half as much as the present system. The delegates who exercise inspection on behalf of the local powers, the Provincial School Council and the communes, are to be appointed by them and unpaid.

The Council further proposes that all teachers in the secondary schools shall be required to hold a diploma from a normal school. The only exceptions are teachers of arithmetic, who are to undergo an esame d'abilitazione before appointment. No equipollent titles are in future to be admitted, except works of approved merit published by the candidate on the subjects he is to teach, and recognised as of approved merit by the Superior Council of Public Instruction.

New programmes are to be drawn up by different commissions for the different branches of instruction, and after being adjusted to one another, and revised by a single commission formed by representatives from all the separate commissions, are to replace the present programmes, thrown together piecemeal, from different quarters and different hands, and without unity of aim.

For text-books used in the public schools approval by the Superior Council is to be strictly required. Only one grammar is to be used; for other matters more than one text-book may be used, but no text-book which has not had the Council's sanction.

The leaving examination at the ginnasio* is to have for a counterpart and check to it an entrance examination at the * Licenza ginnasiale.

liceo turning on exactly the same matters* and of exactly the same degree of difficulty. In like manner, the sincerity of the leaving examination at the liceot is to be tested by an exactly corresponding entrance examination at the university. The candidate must get seven-tenths of the allotted number of marks in each matter on which he proposes to follow lectures at the university. An attentive study of German schools and universities is visible in this and other parts of the Italian report.

Finally, to check cram for single examinations, and to check, in general, the scamped and hurried work which is laid to the charge of private schools, the Council proposes that the boy who comes from a private school or a private tutor to try for the licenza liceale shall undergo, besides the leaving examination for the licence itself, the two examinations which the public school boy has had to undergo at the end of his first and second school years.

Abroad far more than in England, where university instruction is the privilege of comparatively few, secondary instruction leads to superior or university instruction. For good superior instruction, says Signor Matteucci most truly, the two great requisites are, first, good secondary schools; secondly, first-rate men in the university chairs. It is the professor and not the charter which really makes the university, il successo di siffatti istituzioni riposa interamente sulla celebrità degli insegnanti. Only the presence of such men can create that interest, that glow of intellectual life, which constitutes what the Italians, with their love of fine culture, happily call an atmosfera intellettuale propizia agli studi. To have their chairs filled by first-rate professors the Italian universities are at present far too numerous. The Council proposes to retain but three faculties of letters for all Italy. These faculties are at the same time to be normal schools to

*These are, on paper, translation from Latin, and composition in Italian; viva voce, Latin, Greek, and Italian grammar, elementary mathematics, history, and geography.

† Licenza liceale.

These are, on paper, translation from Greek into Latin, and an Italian essay; viva voce, Greek, Latin, and Italian authors, philosophy, mathematics, physics, and natural history.

L

form schoolmasters for secondary instruction; their degrees are to be the schoolmaster's certificate, and the special examination for agrégation and the title of agrégé, of which I have spoken at length in my account of France, are to be introduced, and are to form, in Italy as in France, the schoolmaster's honours, and his title to the higher posts in his profession. The universities of Turin, Pisa, and Naples are to be the seats of these faculties. Pisa already possesses a normal school, which now in fact comprises, one may say, the whole body of students following the faculty of letters at Pisa. Turin has in its Collegio delle Provincie an institution just suitable to be amalgamated, for normal school purposes, with the faculty of letters at the university. Naples is so great a university that the literary normal school for southern Italy must clearly be placed there; and the new institution may probably awaken some of that zeal for the study of letters which at present is wanting in the Neapolitan university.

Similarly there are to be but three high faculties or superior normal schools for the mathematical and natural sciences. These are to be in connection with the universities of Naples and Turin and the Museum of Florence. These three schools will alone examine and give degrees in mathematics and natural sciences, as the three schools or faculties of Turin, Pisa, and Naples will alone examine and give degrees in letters.

The remaining universities will only preserve two faculties, those of law and medicine. The government will maintain eleven of each; it will maintain faculties both of law and medicine at Naples, Turin, Bologna, Pisa, Pavia, Palermo, Genoa, Catania, Parma, and Modena; a faculty of law at Sassari, and one of medicine at Cagliari.

The reorganisation of theological study is left for a future occasion. At present the seminaries have possession of this study. It will be desirable, say the authorities, to connect it, in part at least, with the universities, the dogmatic part being still left to the seminary, the auxiliary parts of a theological training being committed to the university, and university degrees being required in them. But this connection of the clergy with the universities,-from the point

of view of a nation's civil interests, at any rate, so desirable, -has not yet been accomplished even in France.

Provinces, communes, and private associations are still to be at liberty to maintain free universities; and the Council recommends that the government should cede to them, on application, the buildings, collections, and scientific apparatus of the faculties which it abandons. These free universities, however, are only to admit students who pass the entrance examination to be fixed by an organic law for the whole kingdom, which examination is henceforth to be required of every university student; and they are not to confer degrees, which will only be conferred by examining commissions in connection with the faculties maintained by the State.

These examining commissions are to be named by the Minister of Public Instruction, and to consist of university professors and members of the principal literary and scientific bodies of the kingdom. The programmes of examination are to be approved by the Superior Council of Public Instruction.

English university men will be astonished at hearing that an Italian student's average yearly cost for maintaining himself at the university is calculated at 800 fr. (321.) It is proposed that the State should found a certain number of scholarships of this value, and of half this value, to be obtained by competitive examination. These scholarships are to be in connection with free universities, as well as with those of government. The fees for university lectures are to be raised. These fees have been reduced very low, without any corresponding increase in the number of students frequenting the lectures. The duration of the university courses, the number of lectures in them, the periods at which the preparatory examination and the final degree examination. for the laurea, or doctorate, shall occur, are all to be fixed by the organic law. All university examinations are to be per materia, and not, like ours at Oxford and the old examinations in Italy, in several matters lumped together.

The Council proposes, in order to complete the organisation of superior instruction for the kingdom, certain high schools for practical and professional instruction also. The