Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/107

 Rh in a fairly level condition seemed to be all that it had to do.

As regards education, the maintenance of the urban primary schools generally falls in part at least upon the urban local authority. In a town where wood is cheap, a low wooden building with desks and forms can be erected for a couple of hundred roubles and the only charge on the district is for repairs and the purchase of books, while teachers' salaries are found by the local branch of the Imperial treasury. And so the seeds of enlightenment are sown in these remote corners of the Empire, and the children of the citizens and of the local peasants learn to read and write their mother tongue. But the march of progress is slow, and in a town like Minusinsk with 15,000 inhabitants only five per cent, of the children are at school, and about that percentage of the whole population are literate.

In the middle school or "gymnasium," of which there was a boys' and girls' branch at Minusinsk, a more advanced education is given for the payment of £15 to £20 per year per pupil. In company with a Russian gentleman I visited it one day and found a large two-storeyed building, with spacious class-rooms and modern appointments. This was the only middle school for the whole of the southern part of the Yenisei Government of Siberia, and held at that time about 400 boys and girls. The expense of this establishment is met partly by the pupils' fees and partly by Government grants, and the whole administration of the middle school education is under the education authority in Krasnoyarsk, which in tum is directly under the Minister of Education in St Petersburg. In this school I found boys