The most conclusive evidence that could be advanced respecting the serious disadvantage of maintaining Gaelic as an exclusively common language is that offered by Mr Simon S. Laurie, the accomplished Professor of Education in the University of Edinburgh, who lately delivered an Address on the subject of Education in the Highlands. According to a newspaper report of his address, he said in reference to the Highlanders: ‘One thing needful was to secure for them freedom of locomotion; so that when the pressure on one district became too great, the people might move to another. Without a knowledge of the English language, the country of the Highlander was bound round him as with a brazen wall. He need not try to get out of it, because his native language put him at such a disadvantage with other men that he had no chance against them.... There was no doubt that the teaching of Gaelic should be subordinate to the teaching of English. If they trained a boy in a Highland school to read, write, and speak Gaelic, what were they to do with him? How would we like to be in that position ourselves? Fancy a boy at the age of fifteen or sixteen able only to point out in Gaelic to a stranger the way he should take; would they not find that he had been miseducated—in fact cut off from being a member of the British Empire altogether? At the same time, while he held that, he was of opinion that they could not teach English to the Highlanders well except through the Gaelic. The Highland children learned very quickly—more quickly than the Lowland children—they could soon read with perfect fluency such a book as M’Culloch’s _Course of Reading_, and yet not understand a single word; shewing that they would not learn English well except through Gaelic. The aim of the whole teaching should be to make the pupils thoroughly acquainted with English.’
With such a concurrence of evidence, and with the knowledge that there is a School Act of six years’ standing, why, it will be asked, are children in the Highlands and Islands still left to remain untaught in the elements of education? That is a question that could perhaps best be answered by the Education Board for Scotland. We can only conjecture that the educational deficiency in various quarters is due to the difficulty, for pecuniary reasons, in establishing and maintaining schools on a proper footing consistently with the obligations of the statute. Mr Laurie mentions that the school-rates press with a severity which in some places is perfectly paralysing. ‘In Shetland, for example, the School Boards were brought to a stand-still. They could not face a rate of four shillings a pound; the same proprietors having to pay not less than four shillings a pound for poor-rate and other burdens besides.’ This agrees with what we have privately heard of Shetland, where the rates of one kind or other very nearly swallow up the whole rental drawn by proprietors. Mr Laurie states emphatically as to this difficulty of school-rates, that ‘unless the government paid what was necessary above fifteen-pence per pound, the Highlands and Islands would not have the full benefit of the Act of 1872.’