110
EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
tain steps forward, his lieutenants are ready to help him, and an army is at hand, almost as great as himself, and without whom he would be powerless to carry out the ideas he conceives for his country’s good.
However galling it may be to our feelings, we must admit that in many things the people of Europe are ahead of us, as we surpass them in others. The Vienna Exposition showed that we are, at least, behind in the matter of education—not that imparted in our common schools and colleges, for as far as they extend they are unsurpassed in their teaching ; but the education that makes fairly-rounded men and women, not one-sided individuals, who, when they really enter life have to unlearn much and learn more ere their labors are of any account.
We have a broad basis to build upon, yet it is not so broad or so comprehensive a system as that established by Austria for her subjects.. Like her German neighbors, she recognizes the fact that there is no royal or easy road to learning ; hence she begins low down, the school law framed in 1869 marking her "new departure.”
Mr. Lytton, an attaché of the British Legation at Vienna writes of this law :—
“ One of the greatest benefits conferred upon the working classes of Austria is the General School Code of the 14th May, 1869, which renders national education compulsory, and greatly elevates the standard of it. In accordance with this law, compulsory attendance at school begins with every child at the age of six, and is continued uninterruptedly to the age of fourteen. But even then (that is to sa}’, at the end of his fourteenth year) the child is only allowed to leave school on production of certified proof that he has thoroughly acquired the full amount of information which this great law fixes as the sine qua non minimum of education for every Austrian citizen.
“ The prescribed educational course comprises reading, writing and arithmetic; history—chiefly although not exclusively that of the native country, embracing the political constitution and general social structure of it ; geography in the same sense ; all the more important branches of physical science, geometry, geometrical and free-hand drawing, singing, athletic exercise.
. “ Children employed in large factories or prevented by special
circumstances from attending the communal school, may complete or continue their education at any special school supported by their