THE AGES OF PRUSSIAN TEACHERS.

Governmental statistics for 1908 state the ages of teachers in elementary or common schools in Prussia to be as follows:

The per cent column does not give a total of 100, owing to the fact that some teachers of primary grades (about 0.24 per cent) are less than 20 years of age.

ILLITERACY IN EUROPE.

The third edition of the Handwörterbuch für Staatswissenschaften (1908) gives a statistical review of illiteracy in European countries. In every country (except in Great Britain and Ireland, where inability to sign the marriage register is taken as the measure of illiteracy), illiterates are counted among the army and navy recruits. The following facts are stated:

Number of illiterates in every 10,000 recruits in various European countries.

As a rule there are more illiterate women than men.

In Germany,

in every 10,000 couples signing the marriage contract there were in

the five years from 1881 to 1885, 362 men and 699 women illiterate; in the period 1892-1896 the number of men had decreased to 130, that of the women to 213; in the period 1901-1905 the numbers were 45 men and 73 women.

ILLITERACY AND INVENTIVENESS.

Professor Du Bois-Reymond, of Berlin, in his work on Inventions and Inventors, attempts to prove that inventive productivity in different countries depends upon social factors. Inventive productivity is, he claims, not a spontaneous expression of life, but is influenced to a very large degree by suggestions from without, especially by the environment. General education, density of population, transportation facilities, social organization, etc., determine this productivity, and hence it is explained that despite the participation of the working people in state affairs comparatively few patent applications come from laboring men. The following table is the result of an inquiry made in 1900:

a Of white population over 10 years of age (census of 1900).

One glance at the foregoing figures shows that race characteristics do not predetermine the inventive productivity of a country, nor does the high proportion of literates, but social factors, especially the high status of industry, do determine it. England, the United States, and Germany, the countries having the best developed systems of industry, are the most productive in inventions. Germany alone had, in 1900, 1,500 patent applications concerning technical contrivances relating to electricity.

THE EDUCATIONAL SITUATION IN HUNGARY.

In Hungary differences arising from friction between nationalities and from denominational religious friction retard the schools in their beneficent work. It is doubtless the case that these chaotic educational conditions in Hungary are the cause of the high per cent

of illiteracy found in that country. Hübner's Geographic Statistical Tables credit Hungary with 476 illiterates to every 1,000 inhabitants, according to the census of 1900, and with 149 illiterates to every 1,000 recruits.

The following facts and historical allusions are taken from Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerzeitung, Leipzig:

An unprejudiced observer must admit that the Hungarian (or Magyaric) element in Transleithania (Hungary) has no easy position. According to the census of 1900, Hungary had 8,742,301 Hungarians or Magyars; 2,799,479 Roumanians; 2,135,181 Germans; 2,018,641 Slavonians; 1,678,569 Croatians; 1,052,180 Servians; 429,447 Ruthenians, and 397,761 other elements; hence 8,742,301 Hungarians against 10,512,258 representatives of other nationalities. It would be folly to speak of Hungarian hegemony if each of the other elements formed a compact nationality or a state within a state.

The independent political existence of Hungary dates from the year 1867, when Cisleithania, the Austrian crown lands, were separated from Hungary to form a separate union, connected with Hungary only through the person of the Emperor, who is both Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. After the independence of Hungary was constitutionally guaranteed, the Government aimed at making the people homogeneous, a difficult matter, since the to a certain degree antagonistic elements live in groups, one portion of the Kingdom being predominatingly Roumanian, another Servian, or Croatian, or Magyaric, or German, as the case may be. Nowhere were the Government's efforts at welding the population more successful than in southern Hungary, inhabited chiefly by Germans (Suabians). This part of the monarchy is called, not improperly, the "Hungarian Canaan," the promised land. The city of Temesvar, which used to be an exclusively German town, and still is inhabited chiefly by Germans, permitted its German theater to be closed for want of support. Communities which had but a small Magyaric representation in their councils allowed their German schools to be changed to Magyaric schools, without even being urged to do so by the Government.

But the situation has changed radically in recent years among the Germans, as well as among all the other nationalities, in southern and western Hungary. The national aspirations of the Poles, Bohemians, Italians, and other competent races of the Austrian Empire, have been copied by the various national fragments in Transleithania. The propaganda in favor of retaining their several languages, customs, etc., has had a surprising success. Schools which had been Magyarized are being changed by again employing teachers who use the mother tongue in school. Many parents prohibit the use of the

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Hungarian language at home and on the playground. German theaters are opened. The village and city councils are using German, Roumanian, or other mother tongues as mediums of intercourse. Casinos, reading circles, agricultural societies, library clubs, and other gatherings are being organized, from which Hungarian periodicals and books are banished. Singing societies are called into life, in which never a Magyaric song or composition is heard.

Ever since the Poles in Galicia (Austria) and the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia (Austria) succeeded in securing for themselves local autonomy, the Roumanians, Servians, Germans, Croatians, Slavonians, and other nationalities in Hungary are imbued with the idea of preserving their national individualities, and it is difficult to foresee where the chaotic condition will end, or what will be the upshot of it for the Empire.

The Hungarian state educational system was regulated, as was that of all Austrian crown lands, up to 1848, by a law promulgated by Emperor-King Francis in 1805. This law was called "Ratio Educationis," the principles of which are still in force. At present there are five laws concerning the lower public schools: (1) The law of 1868, which deals with the internal management of the schools; (2) the law of 1876, which regulates the election of local school authorities; (3) the law of 1893, which determines the teachers' salaries of both communal and denominational schools; (4) the law of 1897, which deals with the state's participation in school expenditures, especially salaries; and (5) the law of 1908, which decrees the abolishment of tuition fees for elementary schools.

In 1907 the Hungarian legislature discussed an amendment to the law of 1897, which subsequently passed, dealing with the state's participation in school expenditures; but the bill nearly failed to pass, owing to the antipathy of the non-Magyaric nationalities, who opposed it, fearing that the Magyars would suppress their languages. The Hungarians emphatically state that it is not their object to suppress the various mother tongues of the other nationalities, but that they must insist that to the Magyaric language, as the official language of the country, a certain number of hours a day be devoted in every school, since in non-Magyaric communities the official language is frequently neglected. All the Hungarian Government wants is a proper representation of the national language in the curriculum, otherwise the state as such could not be called upon to aid in keeping the schools open.

Another cause for opposing the school legislation of the Government lies in the fact that the various religious denominations and their clergy suspect the Government of trying to injure them through the influence exerted upon the school children by state-subsidized teachers.

All these currents and counter currents the present minister of public instruction, Count Apponyi, has led into one channel by his success in having the law so interpreted that every school for which a community claims a state subsidy or grant must devote a part of the day to the study of Hungarian, the official language, while the mother tongue, or local language of the district, may be used for all the rest of the day.

Whether the Government's hope to supplant the languages of other nationalities will be realized does not, as experience in other countries has demonstrated, depend upon any money spent or withheld by the state, nor upon the greater or lower degree of local patriotism, but simply and solely upon the ease with which the one or the other language, can be learned and spoken. The Saxon farmers in Siebenbürgen (in southeastern Hungary) have for over seven hundred years maintained their mother tongue, a German dialect, after having stripped it of all troublesome inflections and grammatical difficulties, as the Anglo-Saxons did with the language they took with them into Great Britain. The ease with which the English language can be used secured it the victory over Celtic, Latin, and Norman-French. Though it has absorbed innumerable words of Latin, French, and Greek origin, its structure is still Anglo-Saxon, and the uneducated use words of Anglo-Saxon origin almost exclusively. A similar victory was won in Siebenbürgen. Magyaric, on the other hand, is a language resembling the Latin in its rigidity of grammatical inflection and construction. Its difficult grammar will probably be its own bitterest enemy, not the clergy of this or that church, nor the local patriotism of the communities of Roumanian, Servian, German, Slavonian, Croatian, or Ruthenian extraction. Man is apt to use the tool that is handiest for use and most practicable for the work in hand, and likewise the language which requires least exertion in learning and using will win in the linguistic race in Hungary, as everywhere else.

ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS IN BUDAPEST.

The Hungarian ministry of education published recently a report of the statistical and historical development of the elementary school system of the capital of Hungary, which dealt with the period from 1871 to 1900, inclusive. The document was prepared by the noted Hungarian educator, Joseph von Körösis, and shows that the favorable economic development of the city during these thirty years is paralleled by the development of the schools. In 1871 there were for about 10,000 pupils only 32 schoolhouses, with 129 rooms for 146