58 OUR ISLAND STORY if! and dispose of the same/' Under the operation of this Act school books, etc.. are obtained for use by the scholars at the lowest prices. The number of school inspectorates in the Province was, in the same year, increased to ten—thus giving to each inspector a group of not more than forty-eight schools and securing a more thorough and careful supervision of schools than in the previous years. To afford a definite aim and object for pupils who do not continue their studies beyond the common school it has been pro¬ vided that the Department of Education shall offer a Common School Leaving Diploma to those pupils who satisfactorily com¬ plete the ordinary school course and show their mastery of it by passing in English, Arithmetic, Geography, History, Hygiene, Nature Study and Elementary Agriculture. These and other amendments and regulations contributed to the maintenance of public interest in the public schools and to the development and improvement of educational facilities in town and country throughout the Province. In the year 1923— seventy years after the Free Education Act went into operation —there were four hundred and seventy-one public schools in oper¬ ation throughout the Province. A number of these schools con¬ tained two, three or more departments. Of departments there were, in 1923, six hundred and eleven. The number of pupils in the same year was 17,742, the daily attendance of pupils in the public schools amounted to 11,763, and the cost of education in the public schools was $383,888.49—a very considerable advance on the number of pupils and the school expenditure of 1853. Apart from the Public School System and Prince of Wales College, and the Model School in connection with it, a number of educational institutions were established in Prince Edward Island for the promotion, particularly, of instruction in religious beliefs and conduct. A college at St . Andrew's, near the head of the Hillsborough River , was opened on the 30th of November, 1831, by the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Charlotte town, the Right Reverend Angus MacEachern . Twenty-four years later, in the year 1855,—after a number of young men had been educated in St . Andrew's College —St. Dunstan 's College was established in the vicinity north of Charlotte town by Bishop Bernard McDonald .