Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎485r] (94/238)

1 h e Prince of IVales Professorship of History. 307
As a college doing university work, the South African
ollege stands at the highest point of the educational system
of South Africa, nor can the one be properly understood
without understanding the other. In Cape Colony and
Natal the ideal of a complete scheme of national education
is being progressively realized under the powerful direction
of the Superintendents General of Education, Dr. Muir and
Mr. Russell. It is such a scheme as that which has already
been long at work in Scotland with beneficial results which
are beyond dispute, or as that which has more recently
been introduced into Wales as the result of a genuine
national movement in favour of education ; and we may
notice, in passing, the closeness of the parallel which might
be drawn between the special problems of Wales and of
South Africa. The ideal is to place sound elementary
education within reach of all the inhabitants of the country,
to establish higher schools at the great centres, to provide
for the highest university education of which the country is
capable, and, finally, to establish a ladder of scholarships and
bursaries by which every student who is able to survive at
the greater altitude may climb to the highest grade of
education. This is not the place to attempt an appreciation
of the success which has hitherto attended the efforts to
construct a perfect scheme of national education in South
Africa ; it is enough to say that this ideal not only exists
in many minds, but may already be said to have been
realized in outline. The special point which we desire to
emphasize here is that in South Africa, far more even
than in Scotland or in Wales, the higher education
ceases to be merely local, and the best schools and
colleges of South Africa attract students from all parts of
the country, as the great Public Schools or the Universities
of Oxford and Cambridge do in the United Kingdom, and
as the University of Paris does in France. No one can
advance a step in the direction of understanding South
Afncan affairs until he has mastered the cardinal fact that,
whatever its political divisions, South Africa is socially and
u 2