Stamp Collecting as a Pastime | Page 5

every stopping-place en route.
International jealousies are forgotten, and even the barriers of race, and
creed, and politics, in the pleasant freemasonry of philatelic
friendships.
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V.
Its Geographical Interest.
A few years ago many heads of colleges prohibited stamp collecting
amongst their boys. They found they were carrying it too far, and were
being made the easy prey of a certain class of rapacious dealers. Now
the pendulum is swinging in a more rational direction, and many
masters themselves having become enthusiastic collectors, judiciously
encourage the boys under their care to collect and study stamps as
interesting aids to their general studies. They watch over their
collecting, and protect them from wasteful buying. In some schools the
masters have given or arranged lectures on stamps and stamp collecting,
and the boys have voted such entertainments as ranking next to a jolly
holiday.
The up-to-date master, who can associate work and play, study and
entertainment, is much more likely to register successes than the frigid
dominie who will hear of nothing but a rigid attention to the tasks of
the day. In the one case the lessons are presented in their most repellent
form, in the other they are made part and parcel of each day's pleasant
round of interesting study.
The genuine success of the Kindergarten system in captivating the little
ones lies in its association of play with work. The same principle holds

good even to a much later age. The more pleasant the task can be made,
the more ready will be the obedience with which the task will be
performed. The openings for the judicious and helpful admixture of
study and entertainment are so few, that one wonders that such a
helpful form of play as stamp collecting has not become more popular
than it has in our colleges.
Take, for example, the study of geography, so important to the boys of
a great commercial nation. The boy who collects stamps will readily
separate the great colonising powers, and group and locate their
separate colonies. How many other boys, even after they have passed
through the last stage of their school life, could do this? Little-known
countries and states are too often a puzzle to the ordinary schoolboy,
which are familiar places to the stamp collecting youth. Ask the
ordinary schoolboy in which continents are such places as Angola,
Annam, Curaçao, Funchal, Holkar, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nepaul,
Reunion, St. Lucia, San Marino, Sarawak, Seychelles, Sirmoor, Somali
Coast, Surinam, Tahiti, Tobago, or Tonga, and how many of all these
places, so familiar to the young stamp collector, will he properly place?
Not many; and the same question might probably be asked of many an
adult with even less satisfaction.
The average series of used stamps are now so cheap that a lad may get
together a fairly representative collection for what he ordinarily spends
at the tuck shop. Some educationists have advocated the making and
exhibiting of school collections of stamps as aids to study. Such
collections would certainly be much more profitably studied than most
of the maps and diagrams that nowadays cover the walls.
With few exceptions, every stamp has the name of the country, or
colony, of its issue on its face; and most colonial stamps bear some
family likeness to the stamps of the mother country. Our British
colonial stamps are distinguished by their Queen's heads; the stamps of
Portugal and its colonies by the portraits of the rulers of Portugal; those
of Germany by the German currency; those of France mostly by French
heraldic designs; those of Spain by the portraits of the kings and queens
of Spain. So that the postage stamp is a key to much definite, valuable,

and practical information.
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VI.
Its Historical Finger Posts.
When considered from the historical point of view, postage stamps
attain their highest level of educational value. They are finger posts to
most of the great events that have made the history of nations during
the last fifty years. Here are a few out of many examples which might
be quoted.
The introduction of adhesive stamps for the prepayment of postage
found France a Republic. A provisional government had just been
established on the ruins of the monarchy which had been swept out of
existence in the revolution of 1848. As a consequence, the first postage
stamp issued by France, on New Year's Day of 1849, bore the head of
Ceres, emblematic of Liberty. Three years later Louis Napoleon seized
the post of power, and, as President of the Republic, his head figures on
a stamp issued in 1851, under the inscription "REPUB. FRANC." Two
years later the Empire was re-established, and the words "REPUB.
FRANC." were changed to "EMPIRE FRANC." over the same head. In
1863 the customary laurel wreath,