ucation of the youth of the country.

Similar reasons to those urged prior to 1870 in favour of the State
provision of elementary education may be urged in favour of the
extension of the principle to higher education. These reasons are
nowhere more clearly stated than in the writings of John Stuart Mill.

In discussing the functions of government, Mill lays down that education
is one of those things which it is admissible on principle that a
Government should provide for the people, and although in adducing the
reasons for the State undertaking this duty he is concerned mainly with
the provision of the means of elementary education, yet looking to the
altered social conditions of our own time, and taking into account the
difference in the economic relations which exist now between Great
Britain and her Continental rivals, the arguments advanced by Mill are
no less applicable now to the extension of the principle of State
provision. Let us consider these arguments.

In the first place, Mill declares that there are "certain primary
elements and means of knowledge that all human beings born into the
community must acquire during childhood." If their parents have the
power of obtaining for them this instruction and fail to do so, they
commit a double breach of duty. The child grows up an imperfect being,
socially inefficient, and members of the community are liable to suffer
seriously from the consequences of this ignorance and want of education
in their fellow-citizens.

In the second place, Mill urges that unlike that the giving of other
forms of help, the provision of education is not one of the things in
which the tender of help perpetuates the state of things which renders
help necessary. Instruction strengthens and enlarges the active
faculties; its effect is favourable to the growth of the spirit of
independence--it is help towards doing without help.

In the third place, he declares that the question of the provision of
elementary education is not one between its provision by the Government
on the one hand, and its provision through voluntary agencies on the
other. The full cost of the education of the children of the lower
working classes in Great Britain as in other countries has never been
wholly paid for out of the wages of the labourer, and hence the question
lies between the State provision of education and its provision by
certain charitable agencies. As a rule, when provided by the latter, it
is both in