r the sons and daughters of the working
classes. In our large towns the great majority of our boys and girls
leave the Elementary School at or before the age of fourteen. In many
cases the instruction given during this period soon passes away, and
leaves little permanent result behind. Evening Continuation Schools are
indeed provided, but only a small proportion of our youth takes
advantage of this means of further instruction. The larger number of the
children of the lower working classes drift, for a year or two, into
various forms of unskilled employment, chosen in most cases because the
immediate pecuniary reward is here greater than in the case of learning
a trade; and after spending two or three years in employments which do
nothing to educate them, some drift, by accident, into this or that
particular trade, while the others remain behind to swell the number of
the unskilled. During this period nothing of an organised nature is done
to secure the physical efficiency of the youth of our working classes;
nothing or almost nothing is done to secure his future industrial
efficiency; and, as a consequence, year after year, as a nation, we go
on fostering an army of loafers, increasing the ranks of the unskilled
workers, and even in our skilled trades adding to the number of those
who are mere process workers, at the expense of producing workers
acquainted both theoretically and practically with every department of
their particular calling. No wonder that the delegates of the
brass-workers[10] of Birmingham, contrasting what they have seen in
Berlin with what they daily see in their own trade at home and in their
own city, bitterly declare that the Berlin youth has from infancy been
under better care and training at home, at school, at the works, and in
the Army; and consequently, as a man, he is more fitted to be entrusted
with the liberty which the Birmingham youth has perhaps from childhood
only abused.

Space does not permit me to go at fuller length into this question, but
before leaving the particular problem let me put the issue plainly,
because it is an issue which we as a nation must soon clearly realise,
and must answer in either one or other of two ways. We may go on as at
present, insisting that a certain amount of elementary education is
compulsory for all, and leaving it a matter for the individual parent
and the individual youth to take advantage of the means of higher
education provided voluntarily, and