estimated that at that date there were 211,164 children between twelve and fourteen years totally exempted from day-school attendance. The numbers in regular employment in the country under the age of twelve years probably do not exceed to-day 5000, so that we seem to have a fixed standing army of 200,000 child labourers of ages varying from twelve to fourteen years. These children have left school early because of their somewhat exceptional abilities. The Consultative Committee report that of these 171,000' are not 'attending any form of week-day classes.' But these figures are the mere fringe of the problem. In 1899 a House of Commons Paper (205) showed that at least 147,000 children of the age of five years and upwards in full attendance were also earning wages in regular employment, and of these 40,000 were employed for over twenty hours a week and at least 3000 for over forty hours. A large percentage of such children (all under fourteen) are too fatigued to obtain any proper benefit from school life. We have to add these to the 200,000 total-exemption children. To these again we have had to add probably not fewer than 100,000 half-time children. The number was rising in 1907-8 and was then 84,298. It is probably not far wrong to say that there are now half a million of children between the ages of twelve and fourteen years who are either receiving no education or an education that is practically worthless. Even if these children were receiving technical training of value out of school they are too young to benefit by it, but in fact almost without exception they are doing cul-de-sac work, a complete and perfect preparation for unemployableness at the age of eighteen, and in the case of the girls a complete and perfect preparation for a disastrous married life. At the very age when respectable middle-class parents are watching with special care the physical and moral development of their children, these children are cut off from the necessary minimum outfit for life.

But still we have hardly passed the fringe of the problem. The Consultative Committee in 1909 estimated that there are 'rather over 2,000,000 boys and girls in England and Wales 'between fourteen and seventeen, and that 75 per cent. of them ' are receiving, on week-days at any rate, no school educa'tion.' Moreover, those who receive continuation education

are not those who need it most. Altogether, therefore, there are some 2,000,000 children between the ages of twelve and seventeen to whom a national system of education has no meaning. It is indeed an expensive system, for under its upas shadow a generation is existing whose physical, mental, and moral inefficiency threatens not only our industrial life but the very sources of national strength.

The Consultative Committee declared that at the most 'critical period in their lives a very large majority of the boys ' and girls in England and Wales are left without any sufficient 'guidance and care. This neglect results in great waste of ' early promise, in injury to character, in the lessening of in'dustrial efficiency, and in the lowering of ideals of personal ' and civic duty.' The Poor Law reports of 1909 show how rapidly and how disastrously our imperfect system of education is affecting national life. Miss O. J. Dunlop and Mr. R. D. Denman in their very able essay on 'Juvenile Labour of 'To-day '* quote the statement in the Minority Report that the registers of Distress Committees all over the country 'not only reveal the startling fact that something like 15 per 'cent. of the men in distress are under thirty-five, and that 'nearly one-third of the whole are under thirty, but also that 'an alarmingly large proportion of these young men already "chronic cases "-in fact are unemployables.' Under the present system, if system it can be called, it is inevitable that many thousands of youths of seventeen or eighteen years are annually cast upon the market for unskilled labour, untrained in body and mind, stamped with the dull uniformity of inefficiency. It is hard after a century and a half of progress to echo Rousseau's cry: Man is born free ' and everywhere he is in chains.'

are

Cheap labour is an expensive thing. Those hungry halfmillion of children between the ages of fourteen and fifteen who are on sale for a mess of pottage, year in year out, in the labour markets of England are not only losing their souls as well as their bodies, but are instruments of national destruction. Very many of the local education authorities have no heart for better things. They too often leave the Employment of Children Act unenforced. They appear

English Apprenticeship and Child Labour (1912).

to be afraid that a longer period of education will dislocate local industry, will throw parents, who now live on their young children, upon the rates, will give advantages to less publicspirited neighbours. The reluctance of local education authorities to use permissive powers seems to show, as the abovenamed writers say,' the natural lines upon which reform should 'progress. If effective action is desired the State will in'creasingly have to lay down definite obligations and at the same time bear a larger proportion of the financial burden 'these obligations impose.' It is impossible to tolerate any longer a heterogeneity of policy when national life is at stake. But before we turn to the question of reform it is necessary to consider the second question referred to at the beginning of this paper-the maximum purpose which must be the ideal of a great system of education. In education idealism counts for much, and perhaps the greatest hope for to-morrow is the idealism that exists to-day among a multitude of educational thinkers. It will be of use to examine these ideals.

So many educational principles are such obvious truisms that it is only because they are universally disregarded by the masses of the population in the interests of cheapness and payment by results that we venture to restate them. Our present discontent can largely be traced to the vulgar error that there are two classes of children in the country predestined to receive, the one a secondary education, the other an elementary education; although in fact the type of education they receive depends less on personality than on the caprices of fortune and of the local education authority. This error has given rise to the wholly wrong notion of the educational ladder; it is responsible for the existence of higher elementary schools-the cheap substitute for secondary education which every educationalist has condemned for years, and which the Government now proposes to revive; it has created two different grades of teachers between whom a great and purely artificial gulf has been fixed; it has emphasised unreal class distinctions in the very period of history when such distinctions are giving place to a nobler conception of the relations of the various sections of society. If there are such things as educational principles, if there is a psychology of education that is of any practical value, if educational theory has any meaning at all in the upbringing

of youth, then these things are of universal application, and the withholding of them from any section of childhood is economic waste: the children are the chief potential asset of the nation and the nation dare not risk the loss involved in the degradation and de-individualisation of any one of them. Moreover, the need for what may for the moment be called intensive education-and by that is not meant intensive teaching of book-learning-becomes greater the closer we come to the poorest sections of society. To those who murmur about the expense, the reply is swift enough. It is the slum' mind that is so costly. Social reform, with all its elaborate machinery, must be both increasingly costly and largely ineffectual while it is struggling against the vis inertiae of a pariah class. The 'slum' cannot be eliminated till the 'slum' mind is eliminated, and to this end the utmost resources of educational theory and educational practice must be strained before it is too late. The problem is not merely a question of the minimum outfit for life, but of an idealism which realises that a saviour of society may be a slum-dweller and must himself be saved for the highest work.

The elementary school then at once takes on a new importance, not as the pittance of education grudgingly thrown by the ratepayer and the State to the poor child, to be withdrawn at the earliest possible moment, but as a preparatory school in which the individuality of each child is drawn out as the sun draws out the flower from the plant. It is wonderful what is done in this way already. Despite all difficulties, all disadvantages; despite very large classes, endless waste of time with the filling up and answering of unnecessary official papers; despite the disappointments involved in dealing with ill-nurtured, ill-nourished, ill-clothed, ill-booted little ones, those who have the education of the infants and quite young children achieve almost amazing results. In so far as the elementary schools are even now preparatory schools, the devoted teachers in the poorest districts produce results that are among the happiest aspects of English education. Were these teachers less tormented by officials and by the inspectors of the Board and the Councils with their conflicting standards; were their classes reduced to reasonable proportions (the small country voluntary schools are ideal

in this respect); were the children introduced to school life at seven (following the best continental precedents) instead of five, we should have an almost perfect basis for a great system of education. The teachers as time goes on, and they themselves have had the advantage of a true secondary education followed by a training in which educational theory and psychology play a leading part, will become more technically fit for their work; but the tenderness and love which are showered on the infant and lower classes will never be exceeded. These teachers indeed fulfil John Locke's first principle of education. It is tenderness that unfolds personality. The mothers, moreover, are led to take an interest in school life, and perhaps one of the most potent effects of preparatory education at present is the reactive influence that it has upon parents. More and more the parents of the industrial classes are entering into the school life, and this must tend towards some restoration of that sense of responsibility which was so sadly sapped by the introduction of free education. It may become possible as time goes on to deepen that sense of responsibility. If the beginning of compulsory school life is raised to the age of seven, parents will be willing to pay for earlier attendance, while throughout school life contributions may be, indeed are already, often asked towards supplemental but invaluable work, such as school journeys. Preparatory education is necessarily an organic link between the home and the school, and that is a matter of the greatest importance in an educational system if it is not to be merely a mechanical State device.

But the uses of the elementary school as a preparatory school practically end when the child is ten. From ten to fourteen the scholar only receives a substitute for a secondary education.

It is important to consider here the fundamental distinction between primary and secondary education. There is a popular notion that secondary education is a species of advanced book-learning, to a large extent associated with the Greek and Latin classics, reserved by the necessity of things for the children of parents possessing some certainty of income, though by means of scholarships it can be extended to the more intellectual among the children of the poor. Such a conception is responsible for a system of education that deliberately seeks