hool in which the cubical contents of the
school-room are inadequate to allow of proper respiration. I should
like to see it make another step in the same direction, and either
refuse to give a grant to a school in which physical training is not
a part of the programme, or, at any rate, offer to pay upon such
training. If something of the kind is not done, the English physique,
which has been, and is still, on the whole, a grand one, will become
as extinct as the dodo, in the great towns.

And then the moral and intellectual effect of drill, as an
introduction to, and aid of, all other sorts of training, must not be
overlooked. If you want to break in a colt, surely the first thing to
do is to catch him and get him quietly to face his trainer; to know
his voice and bear his hand; to learn that colts have something else
to do with their heels than to kick them up whenever they feel so
inclined; and to discover that the dreadful human figure has no desire
to devour, or even to beat him, but that, in case of attention and
obedience, he may hope for patting and even a sieve of oats.

But, your "street Arabs," and other neglected poor children, are
rather worse and wilder than colts; for the reason that the horse-colt
has only his animal instincts in him, and his mother, the mare, has
been always tender over him, and never came home drunk and kicked him
in her life; while the man-colt is inspired by that very real devil,
perverted manhood, and _his_ mother may have done all that and more.
So, on the whole, it may probably be even more expedient to begin your
attempt to get at the higher nature of the child, than at that of the
colt, from the physical side.

2. Next in order to physical training I put the instruction of
children, and especially of girls, in the elements of household work
and of domestic economy; in the first place for their own sakes, and
in the second for that of their future employers.

Everyone who knows anything of the life of the English poor is aware
of the misery and waste caused by their want of knowledge of domestic
economy, and by their lack of habits of frugality and method. I
suppose it is no exaggeration to say that a poor Frenchwoman would
make the money which the wife of a poor Englishman spends in food
go twice as far, and at the same time turn out twice as palatable a
dinner. Why Englishmen, who are so notoriously fond of good living,
should be so helplessly incompetent in the art of cook