ional life, has been responsible for certain tentatives which have
either failed altogether to achieve their object, or have been but
partially successful. Much has been heard of the educational
ladder--incidentally it may be noted that the educational sieve is
equally necessary, though not equally popular--and some attempts have
been made to enable a boy or girl of parts to climb from the
elementary school to the university without excessive difficulty. To
supplement the glaring deficiencies of elementary education a
few--ridiculously few--continuation schools have been established.
That these and similar measures have failed of success is largely due
to the fact that the State has been content to provide facilities, but
has refrained from exercising that degree of compulsion which alone
could ensure that they would be utilised by those for whose benefit
they were created. "Such continuation schools as England possesses,"
says a German critic, "are without the indispensable condition of
compulsion." The reforms recently outlined by the President of the
Board of Education show that he, at any rate, admits the criticism to
be well grounded. A system which compels a child to attend school
until he is fourteen and then leaves him to his own resources can do
little to create, and less to satisfy, a thirst for knowledge. During
the most critical years of his life--fourteen to eighteen--he is left
without guidance, without discipline, without ideals, often without
even the desire of remembering or using the little he knows. He is
led, as it were, to the threshold of the temple, but the fast-closed
door forbids him to enter and behold the glories of the interior. Year
by year there is an appalling waste of good human material; and
thousands of those whom nature intended to be captains of industry are
relegated, in consequence of undeveloped or imperfectly trained
capacity, to the ranks, or become hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Many drift with other groups of human wastage to the unemployed,
thence to the unemployable, and so to the gutter and the grave. The
poor we have always with us; but the wastrel--like the pauper--"is a
work of art, the creation of wasteful sympathy and legislative
inefficiency."

We must be careful, however, in speaking of "the State" to avoid the
error of supposing that it is a divinely appointed entity, endowed
with power and wisdom from on high. It is, in short, the nation in
miniature. Even if