cs, Young Men's Associations and
Clubs, Guilds for instruction and recreation--under whatever form they
were known, they were all schools.

Then the young working lad was invited to enter himself at one of
these places, and to spend his evenings there. 'Come,' said the
founders, 'you are at an age when everything is new and everything is
delightful. Give up all your present joys. Send the girl with whom you
keep company, night after night, home to her mother. Put down your
cherished cigarette, cease to stand about in bars, give up drinking
beer, go no more to the music-hall. Abandon all that you delight in.
And come to us. After working all day long at your trade, come to us
and work all the evening at books.'

A strange invitation! To forego delights and live laborious evenings.
Stranger still, the lads accepted the invitation. They accepted in
thousands. They consented to work every evening as well as every day.
The inducements to join were, in fact, artfully devised with a full
knowledge of boys' nature. What a boy desires, over and above
everything else, more than the company of a girl, more than idleness,
more than gambling, more than beer-drinking, more than tobacco, is
association with other lads of the same age. These Polytechnics or
Institutes or Clubs gave him, first of all, that association. They
provided him with societies of every kind. They added recreation to
study; pleasure to work. If half of the evening was spent in a
classroom, or in a workshop, the other half was passed in orderly
amusement. There was, moreover, every kind of choice; the lad felt
himself free, there were, to be sure, barriers here and there, but he
did not feel them; there was a steady pressure upon him in certain
directions, but he did not feel it; in some there were
prayer-meetings; the boys were not obliged to go, but some time or
other they found themselves present. Then there were some who wore the
blue ribbon of temperance; nobody was obliged to assume that symbol,
but somehow most of them did, without feeling that they had been
pressed to do so. For the very work and life and atmosphere of the
place into which beer was not admitted gave them a dislike for beer,
with its coarse and rough associations. Insensibly the boy who joined
was led upward to a nobler and higher level.

The motives which were strong enough to persuade a working lad to work
on, over hours, may he partly understood by considering one of these
Institutio