to a very large extent, 6 or 7 per cent. being quite a common charge against the tenant upon loans got at not exceeding 3 per cent. I have not been able to obtain anything like a complete estimate of the amount of public money applied to land improvements in Aberdeenshire during the period under notice; but am able to say that, on estates representing an annual rental of £143,000 the amount of such expenditure, within less than the whole period under consideration, has been £630,000, and as the gross rental of Aberdeenshire is £668,000, it is not difficult to believe that the gross total borrowed for improvements at low interest, which the tenant has been asked to do something more than cover, has amounted to a very large sum. One better able to estimate it than myself has put it at not less than a couple of millions.

But apart altogether from Government grants, or other aid, the tenants of Aberdeenshire have to be credited with a substantial contribution to the making of the county. Under improving leases many hundreds of acres were reclaimed and made arable by tenants, larger and smaller, whose only inducement was the security of possession given by an ordinary nineteen years' lease entered upon at the full value of the holding at the date of entry, while in not a few cases the capital they could command, apart from their own habits of indomitable industry and rigid thrift, was marvellously small. I may best illustrate this point, perhaps, by briefly narrating a case, the main facts of which are known to me personally. In 1832 a tenant entered upon a holding not inappropriately known as the Reisk. The extent in arable laud of very poor quality was about 20 acres, and there was double that extent in heather, whins, and wet clayey waste. The rent was £15. His capital consisted of a halfworn mare and cart, a couple of cows, and less than £10 in cash. He had a wife and child, and the farm-steading of thatched clay-walled buildings, which were far from new, had certainly not cost over £30 in their original construction. The tenant, who spent several years towards the close of his life in Aberdeen, and died not many months ago, an octogenarian and something more, sat in his holding for something over "two nineteens." Before the end of his first lease, by almost incredible personal industry-literally keeping his own hand incessantly at plough, pick, or spade-with what help his growing young family could give him, he had extended his arable area from twenty to nearly sixty acres. The annual value had been raised from £15 to £60, in other words, from five shillings to twenty shillings an acre, without a penny of expenditure to the landlord. And so long as matters went

on upon the old lines, the laird not pushing too closely for his rent when seasons were backward, the tenant, by his own admission, continued not only to make ends meet, but gradually to "fog" a little. The times were good, and if his reclaimed land was but thin, it was still "sharp," and for the time "answered" well to a little extra manuring. It was only when he and the laird, by common agreement, burdened the Reisk with the annual interest charge applicable to the capital outlay necessary in providing a slated dwelling-house and new steading that matters began to get too tight, and that then rather than see his capital gradually diminishing, as his own physical strength had now begun to do, he gave up the lease and realised what was his by a displenish sale.

The case which I have narrated in brief outline, with as near as may be literal adherence to the facts, was, perhaps, above average notable as regards the amount of hard labour performed by the tenant with his own hands, for no man who had not more than average power of physical endurance could ever have gone through it. But in its main features it was in all respects typical of hundreds of similar cases. In the same parish, indeed, they could be traced out by the dozen, and if in many of the cases the tenants failed to come quite up to the same standard as makers of their holdings, they as a rule realised correspondingly smaller returns. The tenant I have specified retired an old man, with a capital of some £300; not a few of his contemporaries reached the close of the working period of an industrious and thrifty life, largely spent in improving farming, without being able to do more than barely hold their own; and an appreciable proportion did not find it possible to do even as much as that. I know what can be said, generally, on behalf of the lairds on this head; but may not enter upon that at length. I therefore content myself by saying, that while freely admitting the claim of not a few landed proprietors of the present and recently past times to have discharged their duty towards the land and towards their tenants in a spirited, equitable, and even generous manner, I must still stand by my contention that for the past three quarters of a century the tenants have either directly carried out, or borne the charge of carrying out, the greater part of the improvements effected. A glance at the figures will show that the increase in the valuation of land in the county in the thirty years 1842-72 was very great, amounting to fully £200,000, or not much short of a half added to the previous rental. The apparent prosperity was not well guided for either landlord or tenant. As it concerns the latter he went blindly. on under the exhilaration of rising prices, making himself bound for

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too much in rent and otherwise, in view of his limited tenure, and the one sided state of the statute law affecting landlord and tenant. And the natural result was that he often did not obtain the just return to which his enterprise and active exertions entitled him; with the general consequence that at the present hour our tenant farmers, as a class, are much poorer than they ought to have been. In the case of the landlords the temptation to take the highest rents offered was undoubtedly great -not to say irresistible, where the money was pressingly wanted. So also was the temptation to spend too freely personally, and in the maintenance of establishments, and to do certain other things not too wise in their way, as persisting in the obnoxious, unjust, and destructive policy of close game preserving on arable land, and, in a not inconsiderable number of instances, making a disproportionate expenditure on the erection of modernised farm steadings. When the principle of the Agricultural Holdings Act was first spoken of, it was roundly denounced from the landlord side as an intolerable interference with what was called "freedom of contract." When the principle found embodiment in an Act of Parliament it was denounced from the tenants' side as a pure sham." My own opinion is that had the Act in question become law, precisely as it stands, a quarter of a century earlier than it did, it would have served the true interests of both proprietor and tenant very materially, by sensibly moderating the unwise competition for farms, and correspondingly checking undue inflation of rents; thus leaving the tenants in better heart in a pecuniary sense, and abler to meet the pressure of the times than they are, and in like manner improving the laird's chances of getting his rent regularly paid without serious reduction in the amount. Recent experience has not been of the pleasantest to either proprietor or tenant farmer. But if the lessons of the past generally are properly laid to heart, there ought to be no cause for taking an unduly pessimistic view of the situation. For their respective parts in the making of Aberdeenshire, proprietor and tenant may each in turn claim a goodly measure of credit; and now that it has been made in a sense peculiar to itself as regards the large area reclaimed, and the division into holdings of limited size, occupied by skilful and industrious working farmers, chiefly engaged in the rearing of cattle, it seems to me that, with a moderate reduction on existing rents, say 20 to 25 per cent. on an average, and due security for tenants' improvements, no county in Scotland is in a better position than Aberdeenshire to hold on its way successfully under a lower range of prices such as seems likely to be now permanently established.

April 3, 1888-Rev. J. M. DANSON, M.A., in the Chair.

ALEXANDER M. WILLIAMS, M.A., F.E.I.S., read a paper entitled, "The Training of Boys in Ancient Athens."

The Training of Boys in Ancient Athens.

By ALEXANDER M. WILLIAMS, M.A., F.E.I.S.

THE training of our own boys has become so serious a question that we cannot regard as without some degree of practical interest the example of any other people, however remote from our own time. The old Greek education is especially worthy of careful examination, for, though precedence in time belongs to the systems of China, India, Egypt, and the Jews, Greece can claim to have first put education on a scientific basis, and to have nursed till the revival of learning the influences that were then to change the whole state of European education. These influences and many others born since the palmy days of Greece have done their part in determining the education of to-day, which is indeed "the heir of all the ages." This intimate connection between our own period and the bygone centuries is happily expressed by Lowell, in his poem, "To the Past" :

"Here, 'mid the bleak waves of our own strife and care,

Float the green fortunate Isles

Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share

Our martyrdoms and toils;

The present moves attended

With all of brave and excellent and fair

That made the old time splendid."

The very fact, however, that to-day is the integration of all the yesterdays obscures the force of each separate influence, and I propose, therefore, to pick out the first of the great impulses and to consider it by itself. I must premise that, at present, I say nothing of the higher education of the Sophists and of the theories of education set forth by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle; my paper is limited to the actual training through which the boys of ancient Athens passed.

The independence of action on the part of the Athenian parent is in strong contrast to the State-regulated action of the Spartan parent. "The absolute right," says Professor Wilkins, "of the State to dispose of its members as seemed to it best was not allowed to remain a theory at Sparta. From their birth through all the successive stages of infancy, childhood, youth, and manhood, its authority never ceased to be seen and felt. In fact it may be said to have commenced even before their appearance in the world; for it was the State which determined what marriages should be sanctioned or forbidden." At Athens, on the other hand, parents were allowed a very large measure of freedom in dealing with their family. Not that even at Athens the liberty of the parent as a parent was absolute. In a society, indeed, there cannot be perfect individual freedom in any direction. And so we find that the Athenian parent was controlled in the training of his children not only by public opinion, but to some extent by law. What was nevertheless a large liberty was used in the first instance to limit the size of the family, with the result that the average number in a family was under four. To attain this, the Athenian parent did not hesitate to expose newborn children, a custom wholly revolting to modern ideas, but a custom nevertheless generally practised throughout Greece. At Thebes, it is true and noteworthy, the custom was expressly forbidden by law; in that city provision was made by the State for the support of those children whose parents were unable to keep them.* The contempt in which commerce was held had the effect of limiting the number of directions in which people could find employment, and thus tended to make a large family a heavy burden. Infantile diseases would of course co-operate in reducing the juvenile population; the destruction wrought to-day by children's diseases was done upon the Athenian children by other agencies, such as plagues.

In their earliest years, children were looked after by their mothers and by their nurses. Little is known of them during this period. Spartan nurses seem to have been valued because they hampered the child less with swaddling bands and bandages, and thus gave free play to the limbs. This was part of the regular Spartan training for children with a view to making them healthy and vigorous. It may be noted, however, that the employment of foreign nurses for the purpose of teaching foreign languages to the young Athenians was rot a part of the educational economy. With very young Athenians,

· Such children were sold as slaves.