le have been wisely
and fully educated, so that they are enabled to take an intelligent and
comprehensive interest in all that pertains to the good and future
welfare of the State. A democracy of ill or partially educated people
sooner or later becomes an ochlocracy,[2] ruled not by the best, but by
those who can work upon the self-interest of the badly or one-sidedly
educated. A true democracy is in fact ever aristocratic, in the original
sense of that term. A false democracy ever tends to become ochlocratic,
and the only safeguard against such a state of conditions arising in a
country where representative government exists is the spread of higher
education, and the inculcation of a right conception of the nature and
functions of the State and of the duties of citizenship.

But further, the demand for increased facilities for higher and
technical education is motived largely by the conviction that in the
education of our children we must in the future more than we have done
in the past take means to secure the fitness of the individual to
perform efficiently some specific function in the economic organisation
of society. And the demand proceeds, not from any desire to narrow down
the aims of education, to place it on a purely utilitarian basis, but
from the belief that the securing of the physical and economic
efficiency of the individual is of fundamental and primary importance
both for his own welfare and the well-being and progress of the State,
and that in proportion as we secure the higher economic efficiency of a
larger and larger number of the people we also secure the essential
condition for the development and extension of those other goods of life
which can be attained by the majority of a nation only after a certain
measure of economic prosperity and economic security is assured.

The social evils of our own or of any time cannot, of course, be removed
by any one remedy, but an education which endeavours to secure that each
individual shall have the opportunity to develop himself and to fit
himself for the after performance of the service for which by nature he
is suited may do much to mitigate the evils incident upon the
industrial organisation of society. If this end is to be realised, then
three things at least are necessary. We must seek by some means or other
to check the large number of our boys and girls who, after leaving the
Primary School, drift year by year, either through the ignorance or the
c