as a rule without any great direct
cost to them. In this way, trusting to the voluntary agencies at work in
society, we may hope that either through enlightened self-interest, or
through a higher conception of the duty of the individual to the State,
or through a loftier moral ideal becoming prevalent and actual in
society, an increasing number of parents will see that the means
provided for the higher education of their children are duly taken
advantage of, and that the majority of the youth will make it their aim
to use these means to secure their physical and industrial efficiency.
If we adopt this course, then it must be the duty of the school
authorities of the various districts to see that Evening Schools of
various types suited to the needs of the various classes of students are
duly provided, and that no insurmountable obstacles are placed in the
way of those desirous and anxious to take advantage of the means of
higher education. Further, it must become the duty of the employers of
the country to see that the youth are encouraged in every way to take
advantage of instruction designed with the above-named end in view, and
moreover the general public must do all in their power to co-operate
with and to aid the endeavours of school authorities and employers of
labour. In this way, as has been the case in Berlin, the voluntary
system of Evening Continuation and Trade Schools may gradually and in
time pave the way for the compulsory Evening School. Without doubt this
were the better way, if it could be effected and that quickly.

But if in this matter we have delayed too long--if we have allowed our
educational policy in the past to be guided by a one-sided and narrow
individualism--if for too lengthened a period we have permitted our
political action to be determined by the false ideal that, in the
matter of providing for and furthering his education as a citizen and as
an industrial worker, liberty for each individual consists in allowing
him to choose for himself, regardless of whether or not that choice is
for his own and the State's ultimate good, then it may be necessary in
the immediate future to take steps to remove or remedy this defect in
our present educational organisation. For it is necessary--essentially
necessary--on various grounds that the education of the boys and girls
of our working classes should not cease absolutely at the Elementary
School stage,[11] but that, with certain definite and well-co