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THE SOCIALIST LIBRARY. IX. 
 
The Socialist Library — IX , 
 
 Edited by J. Ramsay MacDonald M.P. 
 
 The Child and 
 The State 
 
 BY 
 
 MARGARET McMILLAN. 
 
 If 
 
 MANCHESTER : 
 
 THE NATIONAL LABOUR PRESS, LTD. 
 
 30, Black friars Street, 
 

DEDICATION. 
 
 To My Sister. 
 
 240051 
 
FOREWORD. 
 
 The book that follows is addressed to all work- 
 ing people, but above all to those who are 
 working for the education of the masses. It 
 divides itself into two parts. The first is con- 
 cerned with childhood, the second with youth 
 and adult life. 
 
 It is now many years since the struggle for 
 a new life for the children of the people — a life 
 to be made possible largely through the primary 
 school — began. Long before there was any 
 Boer war or Inter-Departmental enquiry, this 
 struggle for a new regime that would ensure 
 health to children was begun. Yet even now, 
 when the echoes of the war and of the enquiry 
 are growing faint the public halts at the thres- 
 hold of the new reform movement. Even 
 educational authorities halt and go back weakly 
 on precedent. ''Learn by doing,'' said FroebeL 
 Yet the opportunities for doing the things that 
 would free a child while he is yet in the most 
 receptive stage of life are not offered. Words, 
 books, are offered — not the means of action, 
 ix. 
 
X. 
 
 It is thus we are allowing tens of thousands to 
 grow ont without the mere notion of what it is 
 to have a high standard in physical and moral 
 life. Years pass. The path of deliverance is 
 now firm and broad and bright in front of us. 
 Thousands of voices encourage us to tread it. 
 Other nations lead the way. Still, we hesitate. 
 There can be no new message, and nothing of 
 any real interest even to record^ till the people 
 and their representatives swing boldly into the 
 new path. The earlier part of this book repre- 
 sents an effort to repeat the old message once 
 more, to say it is possible a little better, or in 
 any case with new earnestness. 
 
 With regard to the second part of the book, 
 however, the matter in hand is altogether of 
 another kind. No one, however poor and 
 faltering his work, can write of the higher 
 education of the masses to-day without waking 
 some thrill of interest and hope in everyone who 
 thinks at all of his race or its future. This 
 question is a new one. To-day thousands of 
 workpeople awaken almost as if from sleep. 
 In a single year the number of Tutorial Classes 
 for working people has more than doubled. 
 
 Every tutor knows perfectly well that the 
 waking of any one of his working-class students 
 to-day is an event quite other than is the 
 
XI. 
 
 smooth progress of even tlie most brilliant under- 
 graduate. To begin with, the worker's eyes 
 are opened in an hour when Science is laying 
 bare the effects of balked youth and despoiled 
 childhood, and is proving that /long hours of 
 labour without mental progress mean nothing 
 more or less than mutilation, and that of the 
 saddest kind. The '^prizes" of life beckon the 
 selfish and even the unselfish. But life itself 
 takes on a different hue to those who know at 
 last what they and theirs have paid for our 
 modern civilisation. And meantime every 
 week and month sees the army of serious 
 students growing — sees miners, dockers, rail- 
 way men, drivers, spinners, and even the un- 
 employed forging their way across barriers that 
 were yesterday believed to be impassable by 
 them. There may be, and indeed there are, 
 two opinions as to whether they are taking the 
 right road. Still they are finding a road — 
 and the goal before them is clear enough. It 
 is Higher Education for all. 
 
 The world has never seen a large, highly 
 educated Democracy — a Democracy scorning 
 the notion of slavery. The world has never 
 seen, and I do not pretend to say whether it 
 will ever see it, for Higher Education does not 
 depend merely on leisure, and access to TJniver- 
 
xu. 
 sities and tutors, but on the will and power to 
 go through a great deal of hard and long 
 drudgery. One thing, however, is growing 
 clearer every day, viz., that a great number of 
 working people are willing to go through this 
 immense drudgery, and more, to welcome 
 trouble of every kind, in order to win the 
 knowledge that is power. One can think of 
 nothing to compare with such courage, but the 
 stubborn and bold spirit of their own wild fore- 
 bears who laughed at death and storm. Science 
 is breaking many barriers now. It is showing 
 how continuous all grow^th and development 
 is, so that we cannot disconnect the bold 
 warrior and the bold scholar and believe they 
 have no kinship. On the contrary, we know 
 that they are father and son, root and fruit. 
 
 Within the next twenty years the strug^rl^ for 
 efficiency will be carried on with anew earnestness 
 i n every civilised land. There will be a demand 
 (which we try to re-inforce) for better techni- 
 cal education. But this new efficiency, while 
 it benefits the ruling class may do very little 
 indeed for the people. Efficient workmen have 
 been slaves in the past, and may be worse than 
 slaves in the future. Something more is 
 wanted. If the working class is not to be 
 content to be educated as a subject race, then 
 
Xlll. 
 
 they must enter on a new struggle — a struggle 
 for Higher Education. And indeed this new 
 struggle is begun already, and must go on, un- 
 less indeed the whole nation is turned back by 
 being plunged into old, barbaric kinds of war- 
 fare. To state the case for Higher Education 
 to-day, however imperfectly, and in so doing 
 to be of some use to the working people in 
 facing the problems of the hour, is the aim and 
 hope of the writer. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The New Ideal 
 
 1 
 
 II. The First School Board 
 
 .. 10 
 
 III. A New Era Begins 
 
 17 
 
 IV. Education — Natural and 
 
 Artificial 48 
 
 V. The Worker's Child at 
 
 Fourteen 7S 
 
 VI. The Great Awakening ... 95 
 
 VII. Universities Old and New ... 125 
 
 VIII. Acceptance — A Summary ... ITS 
 
THE CHILD AND THE 
 STATE. 
 
 I. 
 
 The New Ideal. 
 
 On the question of education Socialists have 
 not as yet declared themselves. There is a 
 lack of unanimity, and even of clearness, in 
 the references to this subject which one finds 
 scattered through the works of Continental 
 Socialists. But in Britain — the land of free- 
 dom and laissez faire — the more prominent 
 Socialist writers flatly oppose each other. 
 Some — of whom Mr. Richardson is a type — 
 are eager to withdraw children from their home 
 surroundings and to place them in schools, 
 where they will be trained, dressed, bathed, 
 and equipped for life under competent teachers 
 and attendants; while others, such as Mr. 
 Blatchford, are opposed to schools and formal 
 teaching altogether, cv^d declare that home is 
 the only training ground, and that the only 
 head teacher should be the mother. All this 
 is a little confusing to the rank and file Social- 
 ist, and what is worse, it leaves him under a 
 vague impression that this is one of the many 
 subjects on which he need not, for the pre- 
 sent, at least, make up his mind. In the end, 
 he usually declares in favour of **a straight 
 
2 
 run from the elementary school to the univer- 
 aity," as being a very inclusive kind of pro- 
 gramme anyhow. 
 
 Meantime, the Governments of Europe are 
 not so vague. Take for example our great 
 sister-nation Germany. Germany takes 
 nothing for granted in matters that concern 
 her citizens of to-morrow. Her ruling classes 
 say: **We want good peasants," and they pro- 
 ceed to make peasants in school, or rather 
 since after all peasants cannot be made in any 
 school they adapt the teaching to the life and 
 work of the country children, and turn them 
 out at last fitted for this work and life, and 
 proud to be peasants. They say again, **We 
 want officers and leaders of men." So the 
 officers are trained from childhood. All this 
 is done so frankly, so carefully, and so 
 thoroughly, that there is little passing from 
 one kind of school to another. The child who 
 enters the common folk-school will, in all 
 probability, never go to a Realschule , and cer- 
 tainly he need not dream of entering the ''Gym- 
 nasium." In England, the division of classes is 
 not nearly so sharp, and there is a certain com- 
 ing and going between the frontiers. But even 
 in England there is not nearly so much laissez 
 faire as we are apt to believe. The great 
 schools are formed to be the nurseries, not of 
 learned men or scholars, but of leaders and 
 rulers, and the governing classes have sanc- 
 tioned a type of education for the well-to-do 
 
and upper-class child which it certainly would 
 not admit or approve in the common Council 
 School. It is never a policy of mere neglect 
 that determines the orders of education that 
 prevail in any State or Nation. England her- 
 self muddles through with a good deal more 
 method than appears on the surface. The 
 English workman, however, is less conscious 
 of any method at all than is his German cousin. 
 He knows, of course, that in England there is 
 a * 'ladder," and that a few County School 
 children climb the higher rungs, but he does 
 not know very well what they are striving for, 
 much less does he feel that he should deny 
 himself for years, in order that his son should 
 become a living mystery. 
 
 Above all, the rural labourer takes little 
 account of the ladder. He is in a sense 
 the best educated person of all — for he is 
 *' baked into the hardest of moulds." '* Some 
 score or two of years ago," to quote 
 Carlyle's famous words, **he was a red-coloured,, 
 pulpy infant — and is fixed and hardened now,„ 
 as are the artizans, clergy, gentry, who can 
 be nothing else forthwith." Not one of 
 them can compare with the peasant for firm- 
 ness of setting. That is why every reformer — 
 and particularly Karl Marx — is really afraid 
 of him. (There are, of course, rural toilers 
 who are not peasants — who do not bear the 
 mark of the industrial oven — who are even 
 scholars, and fine scholars With these 
 
4 
 we are not concerned here). They see that 
 the thing done is final. And what kind of 
 form is this into which people are baked hard ? 
 
 **In the progress of the division of labour/' 
 says Adam Smith, *Hhe employment of the 
 far greater part of those who live by labour, 
 that is, of the great body of the people, comes 
 to be confined to a few very simple operations, 
 frequently to one or two. But the under- 
 standings of the greater part of men are 
 necessarily formed by their ordinary employ- 
 ments. The man whose whole life is spent 
 in performing a few simple operations, of 
 which the effects, too, are perhaps always the 
 same, or very nearly the same, has no occa- 
 sion to exert his understanding, or to exercise 
 his invention, in finding out expedients for re- 
 moving dijBBculties which never occur. He 
 naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such 
 exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and 
 ignorant as it is possible for a human being to 
 become.' ' This was written one hundred and 
 fifty years ago, when the sub-division of labour 
 was not nearly so fine and complete as it is to- 
 day — when a shoemaker was still a shoemaker 
 (not a mere cutter, varnisher, clicker, etc.) 
 making a shoe complete. 
 
 The pit women of the earlier part of the 
 nineteenth century could not do any household 
 work. They could not prepare food. They 
 did not go to school, and they knew nothing. 
 N^ one could say they had wasted time in book- 
 
5 
 
 learning, but it certainly does not appear that 
 they were better housekeepers than are their 
 grandchildren. They were miserable house- 
 wives, wretched mothers. 
 
 **0f the 140,000 persons employed in lace 
 making in 1861 (many of these persons were 
 children), one in eight was consumptive. Of the 
 strawplaiters of Bedford, numbering over 40,000 
 persons, a Commissioner writes in 1861, **their 
 morality is at the lowest ebb. ... A great 
 number of women have illegitimate children, 
 and that at such an immature age that even 
 those most conversant with criminal statistics 
 are astounded." The parents worked their 
 little ones almost to death, and the children 
 on growing up deserted their parents at once, 
 caring nothing at all for them. For the women 
 of Lancashire and Cheshire in 1861, we are 
 assured that the great strike was really a 
 blessing in disguise. Their babies, who had 
 been dosed with Godfrey's Cordial, began to 
 be fed with milk. Yet these men and women 
 were very profitable servants. They made 
 enormous profits for their masters. And why 
 were their children sent to school in 1870? 
 Not because reading helped them in the mill. 
 It did not help them at all. In some trades 
 masters used to like to have weak-minded per- 
 sons, because they could not betray trade 
 secrets. As for book-learning, who wants that 
 to-day in the toiler in mill or mine? If the 
 first Education Act was passed in 1870 that was 
 
6 
 
 because a voice was beginning to ask in many 
 hearts: ''Why are human beings not allowed 
 to become human? They are not workers only. 
 They are men. They are women. They are 
 children.'' 
 
 This still small voice is often stifled to-day. 
 It is always being outcried. There is another 
 that says ''Workers are Workers. Hands are 
 Hands." In a paper of yesterday there was a 
 letter which is typical, and which may be 
 quoted therefore here. 
 
 "Miners are still miners, quarrymen are 
 quarrymen ; we still have the same army of 
 railway men and navvies ; stokers still stand 
 in their sweat rags before the furnaces and 
 gas retorts; Lancashire empties her schools 
 into the cotton mills, Leicestershire into the 
 shoe factories , Yorkshire into the woollen 
 mills. Our shipping ports are crowded with 
 stevedores and dockers labouring at ships, 
 and the lads of the coast towns become hardy 
 fishers. The big cities have their dustmen, 
 sweepers, and sewermen ; South and East 
 London pass their girls through the schools 
 into match, jam, and soap factories, printing 
 works, and laundries. The building trade 
 has its hundreds of thousands ; the small towns 
 supply shop assistants; the country districts 
 domestic servants ; and to name one more 
 class, there is the whole body of agricultural 
 workers. 
 
7 
 
 "The advocates of the present system (or 
 more or less '^advanced" methods) fail entirely 
 to show how the crowded curriculum will or can 
 have any bearing on the classes named, and 
 which classes constitute three-fourths or more 
 of the entire population. But there is a fear 
 that a real harm is being done by encouraging 
 a false attitude of mind in youths, and disin- 
 clining them for work rather than inclining 
 them to it ; and it is a disservice to a youth to 
 make a kind of student of him and then ex- 
 pect him to cheerfully turn to the bench, the 
 trowel, or the plough. 
 
 ** Taking the schools generally throughout 
 the country, and squarely facing the fact that 
 the vast majority of the children must pass 
 into and spend their lives in the callings men- 
 tioned above, and others of a similar nature, 
 I think — with all respect to those of a different 
 opinion — that there is much to be said for the 
 directness and simplicity of the old Three R's. 
 
 ** Let there be a thorough grounding in 
 these ; let grit, endurance, courtesy, and self- 
 reliance be encouraged and inculcated, and we 
 can well dispense with many of the frivolous 
 fancies that are passed as education." 
 
 Here we may ask, can grit, and endurance, 
 and self-reliance be developed in the ordinary 
 school of to-day where, as we know, everyone 
 has to live by rule? 
 
 Of course, a knowledge of three R.'s are 
 wanted to-day in boys and girls by a great 
 
8 
 number of employers. The businessman likes 
 to get a boy who writes a good hand and spells 
 and figures well. Quick, keen senses and 
 power of attention are priceless, too, in a great 
 many trades in which boys are taken on. But 
 the dull can be taken on for a while in large 
 numbers. Making all due allowance for the 
 growing need of higher technical education, 
 the demand for mere drudges is wide and 
 steady. 
 
 They will be ''turned off at forty." Or they 
 will lose their jobs with any change in methods 
 of production and organisation. That is not 
 the point, however. The drudge will do quite 
 well for a time — the ignorant will serve a turn. 
 Afterwards comes the dreadful moment — the 
 moment when he is adrift, a helpless, hopeless, 
 struggling creature. The fact to note here is 
 that the half-educated, unprepared youth or 
 girl can easily get a job — that even if he or she 
 could not read or write he could get one. 
 
 But everyone who thinks of education has to 
 think of the human being, not of the worker. 
 This may seem ''fantastic,'* "idealistic," far- 
 fetched. Yet it is the only thing to be tried 
 now. For the practical method — of educating 
 workers as such — has broken down. It has no 
 meaning, it has no result. It is a baulked pro- 
 ject. 
 
 Moreover, everyone who had insight saw this 
 long ago, and tried again and again to begin 
 
9 
 
 the real work. They tried, and they failed be- 
 cause in the first place everything was against 
 them. Also they were perhaps afraid of their 
 own impulse — the impulse that drove them to 
 think of the child as a child and not as a future 
 ''worker." 
 
II. 
 
 The First School Board. 
 
 There were several eminent men and women 
 on the first London School Board. Of these. 
 Professor Huxley was, perhaps, the most 
 famous. Doubtless, his presence alone proved 
 an inspiration in these very early days to many. 
 
 The earliest reports indicate that all the 
 members entered on the new task with great 
 enthusiasm. It was a thrilling moment. At 
 last, and while the whole intellectual world 
 was breathing a new life, the whole people 
 were to share this life ! Yet hope and en- 
 thusiasm were to be quickly damped. The 
 counter-enthusiasm of some of the membere 
 of the new body for **religious" questions, 
 soon led them all off the path of real progress. 
 Meantime, the result of the first efforts to give 
 primary education to the children gathered 
 into the schools were not only discouraging, 
 but very puzzling as well. 
 
 To go back however to the ^'Religious" ques- 
 tion. It became, almost from the first hour, not 
 only a bone of contention, but an ever-present 
 excuse for the postponement of every kind of 
 advance. There were seven motions on re- 
 ligious instruction at one of the earliest meet- 
 10 
 
11 
 
 ings, and the Board began to receive deputa- 
 tions of protesting Congregationalists, and 
 other Dissenters, almost from the hour of its 
 birth. There is, to be sure, evidence that the 
 more progressive members were not all at once 
 side-tracked by these discussions, and that 
 fiome of them continued for a time, at least, to 
 indulge high and noble hopes. 
 
 Take for example the motion of Mr. John 
 MacGregor, appearing on the agenda in the 
 second month of the Board's life. It is easy 
 to ridicule it, so long-winded and rhetorical 
 it appears. No doubt it was received with 
 laughter. It would certainly provoke smiles 
 if it appeared on any agenda-paper to-day. 
 And yet it contains the germs, not only of re- 
 forms since carried, but of many that are not 
 carried yet; reforms that are being delayed 
 even now, and misunderstood, and for lack of 
 which everything seems to halt. 
 
 Listen to Mr. MacGregor, contending in 
 1871. 
 
 **That it be an instruction to the Works and 
 General Purposes Committee to invite, con- 
 sider, and report upon suggestions, designs, 
 and apparatus, by which schools provided by 
 the Board, especially those for the poorest 
 children, may. be made: 
 
 1. Healthful; by playgrounds and facilities 
 for exercise and for bathing. 
 
 2. Pleasant; by children's games, and 
 music. 
 
12 
 
 3. Attractive; by comfortable school furni- 
 ture, simple tasteful decoration, wall-pictures, 
 diagrams, and flowers. 
 
 4. Stimulative; by prizes, holiday-excur- 
 sions, visits to exhibitions and museums. 
 
 5. Instructive; by illustrative lectures, and 
 by periodicals and publications suitable for 
 children. 
 
 6. Useful; to children of parents at work, 
 by arrangement for dinners brought by the 
 children, or provided by voluntary contribu- 
 tions. 
 
 7. Influential; in after life by a system of 
 communication with scholars after they leave 
 school, and of rewards to those who give satis- 
 faction to employers." 
 
 On the day when all this appeared on the 
 agenda, seven motions on the religious train- 
 ing question were brought forward. The Pro- 
 gressives adopted exactly the same methods as 
 the Moderates. 
 
 They discussed the religious motions with 
 great heat, finding in it a subject for endless 
 talk and animation. They withdrew the 
 motion of Mr. MacGregor altogether, and no 
 allusion to it appears henceforth on the min- 
 utes. Engaged in a fight which need have no 
 end, the combatants on both sides seem to have 
 forgotten Mr. MacGregor's baths, etc., en- 
 tirely. There was to be no serious talk of 
 baths for many a year. Members discussed 
 the school rate for religion in exactly the same 
 
13 
 
 temper as people had discussed the church 
 rate in former days, and the meetings, other- 
 wise dry and formal enough, were relieved by 
 the precipitous arrival of Congregationalists, 
 and others, all putting forward some of the 
 arguments (with which we are now so familiar) 
 against denominationalist teaching in rate- 
 aided schools. 
 
 With all this there was a desire to begin 
 some real work. It was there, after all, in 
 the hearts, not of one or two, but of many, 
 Carlyle's thunderings were still re-echoing 
 through the land.* The words of Mazzini, 
 warm as sunshine, keen as flash of swords, had 
 not been spoken in vain. *'It is an educational 
 problem with which we have to do — it is to 
 regenerate man in his ideas, and in his senti- 
 ments. It is to elevate and enlarge the sphere 
 of his life.'' 
 
 The new School Board took steps to discover 
 how best to set about the education of the 
 masses. Professor Huxley was appointed 
 chairman of a committee entrusted to draw up 
 schemes of education. He pointed out the 
 value of physical exercises and drill — not only 
 
 * "If the whole English people be not educated with 
 at least schoolmaster's educating, a tremendous respon- 
 sibility before God and men will rest somewhere !" 
 ''How dare any man bid the deviFs darkness continue 
 in it one hour more." Reconcile yourselves to the alpha- 
 bet, or depart elsewhither,^' with a great deal more cal- 
 culated to amaze and alarm the new School Board mem- 
 bers. 
 
14 
 
 in committee, but in popular lectures. Mr. 
 MacGregor supported him manfully. (Mr. 
 MacGregor, indeed, tried not once, but several 
 times to get bathing introduced as part 
 of physical education.) In the scheme of 
 education drawn up by the special committee, 
 the studies of infants included: — 
 
 A. — Morality and Religion. 
 
 B. — Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. 
 
 C. — Object-lessons. Hand and Eye Work 
 of Kindergarten. 
 
 D. — Singing and Physical Exercises. 
 
 Already as we shall see there was a tendency 
 to multiply subjects. What to teach? This 
 was the question that vexed and persecuted 
 everyone. The first London School Board 
 grappled with it, just as Authorities are grap- 
 pling with it now. Probably some of the 
 members saw very well that the whole life of 
 many children was crippled. Only they did not 
 see how to rescue them. They hoped that 
 they could supply what was lacking in the 
 form of lessons. (It was a very natural mis- 
 take for new educationists to make). This 
 indeed is at the bottom of all the rage for 
 new subjects — and above all it is the reason 
 why education itself is analysed and split up 
 continually into little departments of know- 
 ledge, while the real value of every kind of 
 lesson is lost. 
 
 The form of examination and inspection too, 
 in the earliest days, allowed this dissecting 
 
15 
 process to go very far. To teach many things 
 and to examine carefully, to see if they had 
 been learned or not — that was a thing that 
 could be done and was done. Even the wisest 
 were at first unconscious, it would appear, of 
 the deceptions that were being prepared for 
 them. They hastened to divide the school- 
 day, so as to get into it everything that seemed 
 to be useful or important, and a list of * 'Dis- 
 cretionary Subjects'' was drawn up for older 
 pupils, which included Shorthand, Navigation, 
 Telegraphy, and Mechanics. 
 
 As the months passed, the enormous difficul- 
 ties of the new task began to dawn on the new 
 members. One gleans a little of the real 
 facts from the old reports. Disillusionment 
 shows through them. We can see it, even 
 though the minutes give very little informa- 
 tion on educational matters. A superinten- 
 dent remarks on the ''fearfully coarse and 
 noisy singing of the children.'^ An inspector 
 complains that the result of education on 
 even the brighter pupils — that is to say, on 
 those who were going in for the teaching 
 profession — was an unexpected and disappoint- 
 ing one. ' 'The three great rivers of England are 
 the Thames, the Nile, and the Amazon," 
 writes one pupil — and others give answers to 
 questions in geography which prove that they 
 are memorizing words and jumbling them to- 
 gether, and that this is the only result of les- 
 sons in geography. 
 
16 
 After two years' service on the Board, Pro- 
 fessor Huxley resigned. A great many cir- 
 culars had been sent out before this time. 
 A great many addresses were sent to great 
 men, and some to people not so exalted. 
 But these persons, no more than the Lon- 
 doners, had the materials necessary in order 
 to answer all or even a few of the questions 
 put to them. There were, of course, great 
 teachers in the world. Few of these, if any, had 
 spent their time in studying the effect of city 
 life on the children of the masses. Froebel had 
 been dead twelve years, and his disciples were 
 keeping to the letter of his teaching ; but even 
 when two years later they began a fresh 
 propaganda in England, they addressed them- 
 selves, not to the teachers of the poor, but 
 mainly, if not altogether, to mothers in draw- 
 ing-room meetings. Meantime, even those 
 physical exercises on which Professor Huxley 
 had set his heart were in many cases far worse 
 than useless. How much mischief they did 
 we cannot know. They were ^ Vrongly derived'* 
 as Dr. Leslie Mackenzie has said, having their 
 roots in an ideal of the camp not of the school. 
 That body of knowledge which the New 
 Authority was seeking for was not in exis- 
 tence. It is only now being slowly gathered 
 by the help of many patient and obscure 
 workers. 
 
III. 
 
 A NEW ERA BEGINS. 
 
 Foe forty years educationalists talked a great 
 deal of subjects. Now they are leaving this 
 wilderness — they are beginning to think of the 
 child himself, of his aptitudes, his defects, his 
 health, his growth. 
 
 (Hitherto the complaint has never been that 
 children could learn nothing : on the contrary, 
 children learned everything — reading, draw- 
 ing, woodwork. The complaint from parents 
 and employers has been that this kind of learn- 
 ing does not appear to help them much — that 
 it develops the intelligence little, and that 
 all initiative gets lost somehow among the 
 books and figures.) 
 
 It began some time ago. The * 'study" of 
 the individual child was undertaken with fer- 
 vour by mothers with leisure. Darwin made 
 the method of observing one's own baby illus- 
 trious. Charming biographies of young chil- 
 dren are written. Great artists too, such as 
 Pierre Loti and Tolstoi, have given to the world 
 recollections of their own childhood. The 
 scientific method is seen, perhaps, best of 
 all in Paris, where Monsieur Binet and 
 his colleagues pass under review hundreds, 
 
 B 17 
 
18 
 perhaps thousands, and are able to fix some re- 
 liable kind of standard, not only of health, 
 but also of intelligence. 
 
 For the moment we will put even the notion 
 of standards aside. The facts that have met 
 us in the first attempt at a survey have been 
 overwhelming almost in their brutal nature. 
 Who could have believed that weakness, defect, 
 arrest, disease, deformity, semi-deafness and 
 blindness were general in some places. Who 
 could have guessed that these things are 
 common even among the children of the well- 
 to-do? 
 
 Yet the first reports of the School Medical 
 Officers do not leave us in any doubt on this 
 point. 
 
 In the last few years we have seen the 
 * 'figures" so often. Can we not take them for 
 granted now? Perhaps it may be well to give 
 a few details here, if only to show how im- 
 possible it is to go on while pain and weakness 
 and horrors unspeakable are right in front of 
 us. 
 
 Out of 372 scholars examined in the Boys' 
 Department in a Deptford School, 168 are 
 found to be in urgent need of Medical 
 Treatment. In the Girls' Department, 
 out of 412 examined 184 were declared 
 to be cases for a doctor's immediate 
 attention, and even in the Infants' Department 
 34 little children out of 105 are pronounced to 
 be too ill to go on longer without treatment. 
 
19 
 These figures do not, however, reveal all the 
 facts. They show, it is true, that out of nearly 
 900 children 400 stand in urgent need of treat- 
 ment. They do not show that the remaining 
 500 are in good health. Many of these are, as 
 a matter of fact, on the way to becoming ur- 
 gent cases, for the doctor turned again and 
 again to mothers in order to warn them **Not 
 to-day, perhaps, but to-morrow your child will 
 be in need of treatment.'' (The temptation of 
 a school doctor in some areas is to exempt as 
 many doubtful cases as possible in view of the 
 number of sufferers who cannot by any means 
 be regarded as ''doubtful.") 
 
 A district inspector made the following re- 
 port (which appears in the London medical 
 officers' memorandum of last year) for one 
 department : — 
 
 ''Boys. In the sixth standard no less than 
 34 boys out of 56 have suffered with some 
 more or less serious physical infirmity during 
 the year." 
 
 On further enquiry, the inspector added, that 
 he did not infer that these boys were any 
 worse than those in other parts of the school; 
 their class master is a little more observant of, 
 and interested in, their condition. 
 
 "It is worth while putting this teacher's notes 
 on record as an example of conditions which 
 will in a few years' time be almost unbeliev- 
 able, and also as an example of a teacher's 
 fine interpretation of duty, although in about 
 
20 
 one-third of the cases the parents could not be 
 stimulated to take action. 
 
 C.B. — Ringworm; absent 8th January to 
 July, 1908. 
 
 Alb. C. — Adenoids and enlarged tonsils. 
 Eight visits to hospital. 
 
 Ab. C. — Deafness; adenoids suspected. 
 No action. 
 
 S.C. — ** Scattered Homes" boy, Defective 
 Vision. Aural discharge detected in school. 
 
 Sda. C. — Tonsils operated on at London 
 hospital, 1907. 
 
 CD.— Tonsils removed 1907. Suffered 
 St. Vitus' Dance. Visual Defect. 
 
 G.P.— Epileptic Fits. 
 
 P.P. — Deafness. No action taken by 
 parents. 
 
 B.R. — Defective Vision. 
 
 G.R. — Defective Vision. 
 
 A.S. — Defective Vision. Both parents 
 seen. No action taken. 
 
 N.S. — Defective Vision. Parents written 
 to. No action taken. 
 
 H.T. — Defective Vision. Parents written 
 to and seen. No action taken. 
 
 P.W. — Tonsils removed 23rd December, 
 1907. 
 
 A.W. — Defective Vision. No action taken 
 by parents. 
 
 I.Z. — Deafness after Diphtheria. Speech 
 affected. 
 
 W.G. — Out-patient at London hospital. 
 
21 
 
 W.E. — Defective Yision. Glasses sup- 
 plied for work. 
 
 E.B. — Defective Vision. Glasses supplied 
 for work. 
 
 C.E. — Defective Vision. Glasses supplied 
 for work. 
 
 C.R. — Polypus in Nose. Recurring. Haa 
 been removed nine times. 
 
 J.M. — Deafness in left Ear. Detected 
 in February. 
 
 C.B. — Tubercular Glands in Neck. 
 
 R.W. — Severely cut about head by father. 
 Three weeks in hospital. 
 
 T.A. — Absent twelve weeks with Pneu- 
 monia. 
 
 A.B. — Absent four weeks with Pneu- 
 monia, 
 
 S.T. — Speech affected by cleft palate. 
 
 H.B. — Injury to knee in climbing wall, 
 receiving no attention. 
 
 A.G. — Defective Vision. No action 
 taken. 
 
 T.A. — Defective Vision when tested.* 
 
 Of 1,506 children selected for examina- 
 tion, 663 had adenoids with large tonsils. 
 Seven per cent. (164 out of 2,251 on 
 the roll) were in a condition suggest- 
 ing the advisability of surgical operation. 
 The figures themselves give little of the im- 
 
 * No reference is made to teeth. One may take it 
 that few or none of these children had healthy mouthi. 
 
22 
 
 pression conveyed by reading the individual 
 notes of the mass of educational inefficiency 
 which they represent. Inattentiveness, dul- 
 ness, backwardness, serious mental defect, 
 varying deafness, coughs, bronchial irrita- 
 bility, recurring colds; these are the regular 
 accompaniment of most of the cases of ob- 
 structed breathing." 
 
 As for the homes, a lurid sidelight is thrown 
 on some of them. Here is an extract, taken 
 from the same report : — 
 
 "The action of the school nurses has been 
 almost entirely directed to effective cleansing 
 of heads, but it is now necessary to extend this 
 care to the bodies and clothes of the children. 
 The numbers are much larger than was sup- 
 posed. Some 19,900 cases are known to the 
 nurses. The superintendent of nurses found 
 in one school 12 out of 55 boys in one class, 
 10 out of 60 girls, and eight out of 54 infants 
 had verminous clothes ! In another school 43 
 boys out of 135 had verminous clothes. These 
 proportions are fortunately characteristic only 
 of the dirtier schools, but of these schools 
 there are very many. Such conditions of 
 body give one an idea of the state of the 
 homes. The homes are often so dirty, so 
 dark, and wanting in the means of cleansing, 
 that it would have been pure injustice to ex- 
 clude such children and prosecute their par- 
 ents." Even the better-class home is not always 
 up to a high standard. On the same page that 
 
23 
 records the pitiable sinking of the poor into 
 every kind of horror we read that ''The Medical 
 Examination in Secondary Schools reveals an 
 unsatisfactory state of personal Bygiene among 
 the pupils," and a scheme is put forward for 
 dealing with these conditions, which impos-^s 
 penalties on sc^holars hip-holding children who 
 are attending school in a state that threatens 
 their own health, and that of their neighbours. 
 
 These two or three quotations may serve 
 as typical of a kind of report that arrives now 
 from nearly every part of the country. Forty 
 years ago there was no service that could 
 either gather such reports, or deal with the 
 evils which they bring into the light. There 
 is such a service now in the army of Medical 
 OiEcers, which has been at work since Janu- 
 ary, 1908 in our schools. At the close of 1909 
 this army numbered 1,084 doctors, and assist- 
 ing a few of them were 292 nurses. (Taking 
 an average over the whole country, there is 
 not as yet one nurse to 25,000 children.) 
 
 We are at the earliest stage of survey — the 
 **enumerative" stage — when the observers are 
 just wading in and taking hold of the nearest 
 facts. And yet we are in no doubt as to the 
 immensity of the evil. So many children are 
 ill. We are dealing with a racial problem, 
 not a social one merely. The questions we have 
 to answer are **How are these sufferers to be 
 cured?'' and secondly, ''How is this widespread 
 misery to be prevented?" But this last is, of 
 
24 
 course, too vast for us to attempt a complete 
 answer here. 
 
 It seems quite clear that Medical Inspection 
 has had some effect in rousing parents to look 
 for a remedy. It is equally clear that this 
 effect is comparatively small, and that m the 
 worst districts it does not exist at all. 
 According to the report, in one area 60 per cent, 
 of all children found ill remained after inspec- 
 tion altogether untreated, while 10 per cent, 
 had ''doubtful*' treatment or mere promises. 
 Only 28 per cent, were satisfactorily dealt 
 with. 
 
 The neglect may go on for years after warn- 
 ing is given. Not one notice, but many, not 
 one adviser (in many cases), but a number, try 
 to reach the parent in vain. 
 
 Let us here take a few illustrations from 
 life — cases that are really typical. 
 
 Ellen is a girl of thirteen, who having been 
 in attendance at an ordinary school till she was 
 ten, at last entered a special school. At the 
 first inspection the doctor noted that she suf- 
 fered from ''blepharitis," and that the eyes 
 were much inflamed. Notice is sent to the 
 parents but no attention is paid by them. One 
 year passes, the doctor writes in his notes in 
 the medical book, "no improvement." Mana- 
 gers, teachers, inspectors, doctors, and even 
 members of the Education Committee visit the 
 school. Two years pass — three — the child 
 
25 
 
 is nearly blind, and her schooldays are neap- 
 ing an end. Nothing is done. 
 
 Here is Marion, a small, but not ill- 
 nourished child of ten. The teacher reports 
 that she seems bright and intelligent, and un- 
 fit for the ordinary school only on account 
 of eye-defect. The left eye is slightly in- 
 flamed. The child suffers also from some 
 nasal obstruction. The teeth are in a bad 
 state. The visiting doctors make notes of 
 all these conditions in 1906, and again in the 
 years 1907 and 1908. In 1909 the child's 
 condition is worse, but she is being carefully 
 reported on. The doctor who visits the school 
 regularly, writes once more in the medical 
 book, **no improvement." 
 
 It is only just to say that many, even among 
 the very poorest, try to get treatment. Some 
 mothers, in spite of failures, show real 
 heroism. Such is the mother of Robert. He 
 is a boy of twelve, handicapped from birth by 
 a mouth deformity, which has made it im- 
 possible for him to learn to speak. He makes 
 sounds that are almost incomprehensible. Teeth 
 in a shocking condition. The boy is very 
 under-sized, eyelids much swollen, and ear 
 discharging. Attends a **Special Class," but 
 makes little or no progress. At the age of 
 twelve operation on mouth performed. The 
 boy is found to be intelligent ; returns to school 
 but requires special training in speech in 
 order to use the new mouth. Training in 
 
26 
 speech is given only incidentally in school 
 however, and in the course of reading lessons. 
 The child makes little progress. (In this, he 
 resembles about a dozen other children with 
 speech-defects, who are also trying to correct 
 speech-errors, while struggling at the same 
 time to master the art of reading.) The con- 
 dition of his teeth is alone a fatal bar to 
 real progress. He attends a Dental Hospital, 
 setting forth in the morning, spending three- 
 pence on the long tram rides, waits for hours, 
 and returns at last in the afternoon too late 
 for school. This goes on three, four, five 
 months. It costs over a £1 (counting fees for 
 extractions). In Miihlheusen, Dusseldorf, 
 Strassburg, or other German cities, such a 
 child would be treated in the schoolclass for a 
 trifle of one or two marks, and without any 
 interruption of his education.* 
 
 There are successful cases that show up all 
 the tragic elements in thousands of difficult 
 and seemingly hopeless cases. 
 
 A miserable little boy, deaf, almost inarticu- 
 late, undersized, unable to read even the 
 smallest words is allowed to receive treat- 
 ment. Two months later he is full of eager 
 desiire to learn. He attacks the reading book 
 and begins to master the new art, draws vigor- 
 ously, wants to model, to work, to play — asks 
 
 *ThiR case ran now be treated in^a School Clinic — 
 which the London Education Committee are going to 
 finance in Deptford. 
 
27 
 
 endless questions. In short, awakens to life 
 and all its joys. It is not possible to think 
 that the treatment which thus opens the doors 
 of life is a thing altogether apart from ** Edu- 
 cation," and that an inspector, a teacher, or 
 parent is to think of it as somethin g for which 
 the school has no responsibility at all. One 
 might as well say that a violinist should not 
 think of his violin — but only of his score. 
 
 There are many schemes already drawn up by 
 medical officers and administrators for meeting 
 the need of suffering children. Some of these 
 (like Dr. Barwise's Provident Club scheme in 
 Derbyshire) fall back on voluntary subscriptions 
 and contributions from parents. Only one 
 quarter of all those needing treatment and re- 
 ported on could be dealt with in the first year. 
 In London, the Education Authority falls back 
 on the hospitals — which, however, were never 
 intended to deal with school children at all. 
 Diseases that do not interfere with school- 
 going are not only, in some cases infectious. 
 They are nearly all very stubborn and need 
 routine treatment. Their cure is largely a 
 matter of the forming of new habits. Educa- 
 tion, as well as medical care, is needed, in order 
 to put an end to them. But, of course, no 
 hospital can take the place of school, and no 
 doctor can do the work of a teacher or highly 
 skilled mother. 
 
 The well-to-do mother perhaps need not fear 
 when the worst is over and the doctor comes no 
 
28 
 
 more. In her home she has a nursery, and many 
 '^ helps." All the routine of prevention can 
 go on merrily — bathing, dressing, exercise, 
 eating, sleeping at regular hours. And by 
 these the old evil is chased away every day and 
 every night. 
 
 Why did this private nursery come into 
 existence? Because it was needed. The 
 school nursery must come into existence for the 
 same reason. Nurseries are needed also for 
 the children of the masses. That same routine 
 of washing, dressing, play in cheerful healthy 
 space, is necessary for the prevention of illness 
 in the case of the poor as of the rich; and 
 opportunities for these must be forthcoming 
 if the new medical service is to be of any 
 practical service to rich or poor.* 
 
 The School Health-centre is an extension of 
 the Home Nursery — no more and no less. As the 
 school family is immense, however, and as its 
 needs are various, the Head of the School 
 Nursery-Clinic must be a doctor, and his as- 
 sistants must be trained hospital nurses (with- 
 out ceasing to be home nurses first and fore- 
 most). The school is not home. No, and yet 
 it must supply something that will be found 
 one day in every home. It must be built to 
 supplement the poor shelters of to-day. A witty 
 
 *It win be seen later how the services of a National 
 Medical Staff must, sooner or later, help all classes. 
 The well-to-do indeed, are already gaining something 
 through the new work undertaken for the children of 
 the people. 
 
29 
 Frenchman called the first Medical Officers of 
 Schools ''Buildings-Doctors" because they were 
 always examining walls and pipes. But now 
 they begin to approach the child himself. 
 They draw nearer at last and see him. 
 The authorities begin to act at last, 
 for it cannot be denied that a fair 
 start has been made already with School 
 nurseries or clinics. Bradford has now a 
 large and well-appointed School Clinic with a 
 staff of three doctors, two nurses, and a dentist. 
 The rooms — 13 in number — are, or were, in 
 the basement floor of the old Education 
 Committee Office. There is a large waiting- 
 room, a nursery (where children can be at- 
 tended to by the school nurse), three doctors' 
 rooms, a Rontgen Ray room (where children 
 often sleep comfortably throughout the whole 
 treatment), two dentistries, and two very 
 pleasant rooms where eyes, ears, etc., are ex- 
 amined. The whole has a very homely, cheery 
 look which is not at all like the atmosphere 
 of the hospitals. The clinic has no associations 
 of mystery, of dread, or even of pain. The 
 children come and go happily, and — most note- 
 worthy fact of all — many parents come here 
 long before their children are really ill. This 
 is held as the crowning glory of the place. It 
 is claimed that thousands of mothers begin to 
 learn the real meaning of prevention. 
 
 The doctors have drawn up their time-table, 
 exactly as the teachers draw up theirs in the 
 
30 
 schools. Instead of school-subjects, the doctors 
 have diseases, however, to deal with. Those 
 diseases have to be treated for the most part 
 regularly, and in many cases for a long time, 
 one has to learn to get well. Progress depends 
 very often on the child's diligence as well as 
 on the zeal of doctor and nurse. The first 
 aim in view is — to make the child well. The 
 second is — to keep him well. But this last is 
 not to be achieved by mere spasmodic efforts, or 
 by amateurish methods, such as many voluntary 
 associations employ. The cost of maintenance 
 is £378 per annum. 
 
 Of recognised School Dental Clinics there are 
 now several in England — one in Cambridge, 
 one in Norwich, one now also in Deptford. The 
 need .for them is so great that it is im- 
 possible to exaggerate it. To begin with, 
 at least 80 per cent, of all school- 
 children require dental treatment, but hardly 
 any receive it. Leaving out of account all the 
 misery that is hidden under these words we 
 must content ourselves here by pointing out the 
 fact that speech training (one half of all that 
 is best in elementary training) is out of the 
 question to-day on account of the bad teeth of 
 the great mass of children. The child himself 
 knows this in many cases. He is doing all 
 kinds of important things anyhow. He has 
 to breathe, to smile, to eat, and, above all, 
 to speak in a poor or ugly way. He breathes 
 
31 
 wrongly, he eats badly, he even smiles pain- 
 fully, and he leaves half his words unuitered. 
 All this is quite as serious — in many ways 
 even more serious — than is hand weakness, 
 or hand stupidity. But, whereas people are 
 waking up to see that hands should be used and 
 trained, very few have any clear notion as to 
 the real part played by language in thinking 
 and doing. 
 
 A hospital cannot undertake a new kind of 
 work such as this. It is school work, and 
 yet it is school work that is new. It is 
 home work, but few homes can offer to under- 
 take it. The after treatment of all skin 
 trouble cases, of adenoids, also the regular 
 training needed by cases of curvature, and 
 of many orders of eye trouble can be completed 
 only hy a teacher. For lack of this co-opera- 
 tion, many hospital cases fall back; and are 
 never fairly successful even after treatment. 
 
 The amount sanctioned by the department 
 for treatment was £3,400 up to July, 1909. 
 Since that time London has embarked on a 
 scheme for the treatment of children at hos- 
 pitals. It is not necessary to go into details of 
 this step, for it is safe to predict that it cannot 
 end in real success. To begin with it is costly. 
 The authority pays a subsidy of £5,000 to 
 £6,000 per annum to eight hospitals for the 
 treatment of 33,000 — that is to say it pays 4/- 
 per head, or rather more. For, at the end of 
 every month a case is treated as a new case. 
 
32 
 Add to all this the expense of tram fares — 
 where, as must happen in many cases, the 
 scholars cannot walk the whole distance — the 
 interference with school-work, and the absence 
 of records, and information, and it is difficult 
 to see how any authority can persevere long 
 with this method.* 
 
 Over and above the Bradford and Dental 
 Clinics there are others of a more recent date. 
 Bow Clinic was opened in December, 1908; 
 Deptford Clinic was opened in June, 1910. t 
 Dunfermline has now started, and it is 
 hoped that in October a School Clinic 
 and Health Centre will be opened in 
 the Potteries. Many other towns are pre- 
 paring to make arrangements for treatment on 
 the same lines. There are also small clinics 
 for the treatment of skin diseases at Reading, 
 Croydon, and other places, and a move is now 
 being made to get remedial drill for children 
 requiring it at various places. The oldest 
 clinic for spinal cases is at Dunfermline — 
 where remedial treatment has been given for 
 some years. 
 
 At the Deptford Clinic there will be a depart- 
 ment for special physical training. The 
 teacher who will be in charge sends in a list 
 
 *A certain amount of regular-school treatment has 
 been given, however, in London. It has been followed 
 by a wonderful success. The school for the treatment 
 of Faviis, a scalt) disease, is now shut up. Nearly all 
 the pupils have been cured. 
 
 t The Dental Department is financed mainly by the 
 London Education Authority. But the general Clinic 
 is voluntary. 
 
33 
 
 of illnesses that can be treated by exercises. 
 They are twenty-two in all, and most of them 
 are common among school children. All the 
 adenoid cases will be sent to learn how to 
 breathe at this clinic, and as this is the most 
 important exercise of all, they should be at 
 last the best equipped of all children. 
 
 Bathing. 
 
 As regards the conditions that breed disease, 
 England is slow in dealing with them, or re- 
 cognising the part which the elementary school 
 can play in bringing about reforms. 
 
 Only one English city — Bradford — has any- 
 thing like a complete system of shower and 
 slipper school baths. Yet in every school in 
 crowded areas there is urgent need for this new 
 order of class-room, where the whole art of per- 
 sonal hygiene can be learned in a practical 
 way. 
 
 Washing is a very modern custom in Western 
 and Northern Europe at least.* Yet it is a 
 custom which now divides classes, and also 
 arouses personal feeling of the most acute kind 
 on both sides. A new safety has been won, 
 and also new pleasure and well-being, and in 
 some quarters these new good things are held 
 firmly and without false delicacy. In the 
 great public schools it is felt that young 
 
 *It is almost unnecessary to say that three genera- 
 tions back the person who washed well was an excep- 
 tion, even among courtiers and in royal palaces. 
 
 C 
 
34 
 humans have to be trained to wash and to keep 
 the teeth clean also. In these schools unclean- 
 liness reflects only upon the individual, not at 
 all on his family and class. Training is 
 needed, and training is given — often by the 
 Head Teacher himself. If all this is necessary 
 for the safety of the rich, and everyone in the 
 public school is frank and open about such 
 things, why must the whole subject be shelved 
 when one speaks of the working-class child ? 
 
 In this country with ''soft rain water" in 
 plenty, to quote Carlyle, there is a fear of 
 speaking about and a neglect of cleanliness, 
 that threatens the child of the well-to-do and 
 careful artizan. He is yielded up a victim 
 to the ill-cared-for child of the poor. Why 
 should this clean, well-kept child of a working- 
 class home be allowed to run horrible risks? 
 In some places school-going is a daily walking 
 into a sea of infected air and disgusting con- 
 ditions. Not only in the class-room, but even 
 in the cloak-room he runs risks. The clothes, 
 as well as the bodies of some of his school-mates 
 are verminous, and though now, happily, a 
 few school nurses are at work (nearly 100 are 
 already busy in London schools) these cannot 
 be expected to look after 700,000 children. 
 Take the following as a glimpse into the 
 state of affairs in some schools. ''There should 
 be in some areas an apparatus for disinfecting 
 clothes," says a witness, giving evidence to 
 the Consultative Committee of the Board of 
 
35 
 Education. "The state of the clothes is often 
 due to the fact that they are bought at second- 
 hand clothing shops." But this is not the only 
 cause. In one area at least, South wark, when 
 a child is found to be verminous, and the due 
 warning to the parents is neglected, notice is 
 sent by the school nurse to the cleansing 
 station that the child will be taken there on 
 a given day, and the Sanitary Authority there- 
 upon sends the same day to the child's home 
 to fetch away all bedding to be disinfected. 
 
 One difficulty, however, which applies both 
 to bedding and clothes, is that they are some- 
 times in such wretched condition, that they ab- 
 solutely fall to pieces and perish when disin- 
 fected. 
 
 The arrival of the disinfecting van, and of 
 warning cards and circulars may be necessary 
 to-day, but these are not the most powerful, 
 or above all the most attractive methods. **You 
 must begin always by admiring a nation if 
 you want to understand it," said a great 
 thinker. This is true also in learning anything. 
 One begins with pleasure. To begin with 
 pain, or fear, is to stop, or want to stop, at 
 once . Nothing can be more naif than the pleasure 
 shown by all children who attend school baths in 
 Bradford, and in Germany and other countries. 
 Here is a welcome to Hygiene — little hands 
 open widely. The white-tiled walls, the tin- 
 kle of pure water, the sunlight falling on the 
 whole, and irradiating it, the laughing 
 
36 
 voices of comrades all arriving to enjoy the 
 great experience of the week — all this is a good 
 start. But if, to all this, is added the pre- 
 sence of a highly-educated man or woman who 
 knows how to make the bathing drills alive 
 with interest and meaning, then it is certain 
 that no other lesson can compare in value with 
 that which is given in the school bath-room. 
 
 Germany has built thousands of school- 
 showers within the last twenty years. England 
 has hesitated. She has even ignored that start 
 made thirteen years ago — in 1896, when Brad- 
 ford appointed the first Cleansing Committee,* 
 and built her first school bath at Wapping. 
 That is why Hygiene still remains for many a 
 book-subject — without real meaning or value. 
 
 Germany appears to have banished rags — 
 largely through her schools and teachers. 
 
 England has not got rid of foul rags, and 
 wet torn pieces of leather, which still form the 
 clothing of some of her poorest children. But 
 apart from rags, the question of raiment and 
 foot-gear will have to be gone into. 
 
 ♦This small Sub-Committee of the Bradford School 
 Board consisted of Mr. Cryer, the Eev. Mr. Addison, 
 the Rev. Mr. Leighton, and myself. We made en- 
 quiries through school officers and others, and then 
 drew up a leaflet to parents. It gave no offence, though 
 at the last moment two of the members were not willing 
 to let it go out. The first School Bath was built in a 
 kind of uproar. Not all the members of the Sub- 
 Committee voted for it. More remarkable is the fact, 
 that after thirteen years, hardly a town or village 
 followed Bradford's lead. 
 
 ^ 
 
37 
 Dr. Arkle, of Liverpool, after weighing 
 Liverpool children, writes as follows: — 
 ''Owing to the mysteries of the female dress, 
 I am afraid that, although the upper parts of 
 the clothing were turned down, they were not 
 removed, and I fear that in many instances I 
 was weighing almost as much petticoat as 
 child." Not only was it impossible to get 
 the right weight, but the chest measurement 
 could hardly be accurate owing to the number 
 of bodices. When winter comes on, many 
 parents try to guard their children from cold, 
 and they take the means they believe to be 
 the best fitted to this end. ''Large numbers 
 of the children," said Dr. Arkle, "were 
 stitched into their clothes." They wear them 
 night and day, lie down and rise up without 
 ever allowing the air to reach the skin. When 
 a child gets a new garment the old things are 
 not removed, but the new is put on the top of 
 them. This is a very strange habit, but a 
 very general one. It is common in London 
 schools attended by even fairly-to-do children. 
 The result of it is that many children are, as 
 Dr. Arkle has pointed out, always in a state of 
 unwholesome perspiration. Even in winter 
 they exist in a kind of modified Russian bath, 
 and the risk of taking cold is more or less a 
 chronic thing. In some cases the Russian 
 bath is hardly a modified one. "While ex- 
 amining one little girl in the poorest school, 
 after loosening the dress I found three bodices 
 
38 
 and a pair of corsets, then another old velvet 
 dress which fastened at the back. At that 
 point I gave up in despair and did not persist 
 in the examination of the child." 
 
 Side by side with these over-clothed victims 
 were children who looked neat, but had no 
 underclothing on, though it was Christmas 
 time and very cold. One was wrapped in an 
 old vest covered with a blue overall. A little 
 boy who looked well-to-do had no shirt, but 
 only a collar! Miss Wilke, Head Mistress of 
 the Physical Training College, Chelsea Poly- 
 technic, gives very much the same testimony. 
 ** Few people," she writes in a leaflet, '* are 
 aware of the extraordinary number of unhealthy 
 and unnecessary garments that the children 
 habitually wear. Of fifty schoolgirls, forty- 
 five were found to wear the following gar- 
 ments : a pink flannelette chemise, a pair of 
 pink flannelette drawers, a pair of stays with 
 steel busks, two pink flannelette petticoats 
 made with heavy pleats round the waist, one 
 red flannelette petticoat, and, finally, a dress 
 which was usually too tight across the chest. 
 When one considers," says Miss Wilke, ''the 
 double bands of the under-garments and their 
 numerous pleats, it is plain that each child had 
 from twelve to twenty thicknesses of material 
 round her waist ! ' ' Let the best teacher of 
 gymnastics in the world stand before a class of 
 girls dressed in this way, and what can she do? 
 Let the best scheme of exercises be drawn up 
 
39 
 by the Board of Education without regard to 
 dress, and how could it profit the busked and 
 banded little victim of the whalebone and 
 flannelette mode? Suppose the victim had on 
 heavy, misshapen boots, too, as often happens, 
 what then ? The Board of Education illustrate 
 the exercises in the Green Book by diagrams 
 of a well-dressed little gymnast. But this 
 little pictured gymnast is far to seek in many 
 schools. Many a child thinks such a dress is 
 only an ornament. I have seen children pre- 
 sented with neat gymnast costumes put them 
 on over all their tight everyday clothing — re- 
 moving not even the dress bodice, but wearing 
 the gymnast tunic like an ornament on the top. 
 
 It will now be believed — for doctors and 
 scientists are saying it aloud — that Breathing 
 is THE test of health or fitness, worth all the 
 rest in many ways. Yet how can one breathe 
 well, dressed in this way? 
 
 The clothing of the poorest class of child not 
 only dishonours but discourages her altogether.* 
 She never slips out of her life of humiliation — 
 and this chronic humiliation destroys the great 
 safeguard of the self-respect that is talked 
 about so much. Yet all this misery can be 
 done away with. It need not go on in school 
 where all work to banish it. The children 
 
 *I have not touched the subject on boys' clothing. 
 It is an even more burning one from the standpoint of 
 Hygiene than is that of girls' clothing. There should 
 be a boys' school uniform as well as girls. 
 
40 
 could go far towards getting rid of it them- 
 ■elves. Why should they not make their own 
 clothes? It is not such a great matter. 
 
 Here, for example, is a teacher who sets her 
 elder girls — that is girls from 10 to 14 — to 
 make their own clothing and that of some 
 younger children. A complete suit has only 
 four garments in all — a woollen undervest, a 
 long jersey, serge knickers, and tunic. The 
 work is a great deal more massive than any- 
 thing that can be shown in the way of * 'plain 
 sewing'* as it is called. It is all the better 
 fitted for young eyes, even if very fine darning 
 and white seam (good things as they may be) 
 were not far fetched occupations, in view of the 
 stark misery of the street. The clothes designed 
 by Miss Wilke may be made very pretty and 
 artistic. At the least they are hygienic, simple, 
 neat, and suitable. It is likely that the girls 
 trained to make, and also to wear such clothes, 
 would be glad to go on learning about dress. 
 In the new health centres the subject might be 
 taught in a new and interesting way, and this 
 also is begun already in America. It will be 
 started also this winter at the Deptford Clinic 
 or Children's Health centre. In Chicago and 
 other cities the mothers gather in school-rooms 
 in the evening and come into close touch with 
 new friends. They sew. They talk. They 
 learn from one another. The movement has 
 had a great success. There seems to be no 
 reason why it should not make quite a new era 
 
41 
 in social life possible, for every topic concern- 
 ing home and child life is discussed, and the 
 mothers come hither, not as suppliants but as 
 citizens. They are not always listeners. There 
 are often debates. Mothers are open to new 
 suggestions and eager for new light. 
 
 To turn now to the most acute sign of 
 poverty, and some of the earliest attempts at a 
 remedy inside school. 
 
 Hunger and School Feeding. 
 
 In 1907 Dr. Crowley made the now famous 
 experiment in child-feeding. He found that 
 certain orders of starvation were more common 
 than others — and also that poverty accounts for 
 this. Proteids and fats should bear a much 
 larger proportion in the child's diet than in 
 the adult, but they are dearer and therefore 
 harder to come by than are lean and starchy 
 foods. Hence rickets are common in some 
 areas, and poor teeth are common everywhere. 
 The food at the Bradford Centre is carefully 
 selected. It contains always right proportions 
 of proteid and fat. It is varied; not dull or 
 stupid feeding. The same dinner is not put 
 before a child twice in seventeen days. 
 Savouries are a staple dish, for it is found that 
 the right constituents and the right amount of 
 them can be provided very easily in this form. 
 The average cost per head of the dinners is 
 from Id. to Ifd., though one dinner of the 17 
 
42 
 falls as low as three farthings without falling 
 short in proteid or fat. 
 
 The school meal offers varied, and quite new 
 opportunities from the educationist's stand- 
 point. To begin with, however, it gives a 
 chance at last for the re-education of a basal 
 sense taste. /2e-education, because, in the case 
 of thousands, the natural and healthy taste in 
 food has been ruined, so that even children 
 relish bad food, but turn away from what is 
 wholesome. Just as some have forgotten or 
 rather given up the right way of breathing, so 
 they have also lost all power of right food 
 selection.* At the school-table real taste- 
 training can be given, and has been given. So 
 that while a great many mothers (amateurs of 
 so many orders) declare their children will not 
 touch milk, or Scots oatmeal, or barley, these 
 wholesome foods are taken eagerly by many 
 children after two or three weeks' patient 
 training. 
 
 There is another aspect of the question that 
 is more rarely touched on, however. The real 
 advent of Socialism, of even a rudimentary 
 order, must surely depend to some extent on 
 the development of social feeling. That en- 
 largement of the emotional life and imagina- 
 
 * Adulteration of food is now an art and a science. 
 Taste and smeU can be deceived, thanks to splendid 
 achievements in modern chemistry now put to a bad 
 use ! There is the more need to counteract this mit- 
 education by giving genuine food at school. 
 
43 
 tion, which alone makes possible a system of 
 practical brotherhood (the giving and taking 
 of service on equal terms, the concern and in- 
 terest, once confined to small family groups, 
 radiating in widening circles and including 
 even the alien at last which Socialism implies, 
 if it implies anything) must depend not alone 
 on a theory of life, but on constantly recurring 
 occasions for the deepening and vivifying of 
 mutual interest in larger groups and associa- 
 tions of persons, and above all on new oppor- 
 tunities offered early in life for the social 
 education of future citizens. The school meal 
 offers such opportunities. The children who 
 dine together come into new relations with one 
 another. They come also into new relations 
 with their teacher at table. 
 
 All this does not mean that the teacher is 
 to have new work thrust on her. It means 
 rather that what is vital in human education 
 should have the first claim. Our present 
 school day, with its working hours, is not part 
 of the eternal scheme of things. On the con- 
 trary it is certain that, in the future, it will 
 be changed in more than one respect. It was 
 drawn up not with the view of meeting the 
 needs of working-class children. It was drawn 
 up with a view of making things easy for 
 mothers who have no helpers. The babies have 
 the same school hours as the seventh standard 
 boys and girls ! I hope to show later a few 
 reasons why this kind of arrangement cannot 
 
44 
 hold for ever, and how, under a new order, the 
 dinner-hour, the out-of-door life and play-time, 
 might gain a new importance. 
 
 It is often feared that the home itself 
 must collapse if the dull scrambling of meal 
 preparation is given up more or less, or if 
 (as happens already) the washing is sent out to 
 a laundry. But in the homes of mothers who 
 have a little leisure, this does not happen. 
 Quite the opposite happens. A new develop- 
 ment of home appears to take place. The area 
 of the mother's work and interest is widened 
 more or less. So that, in many cases, at last 
 she observes when disease threatens. She may 
 even come to have some idea, other than a 
 stranger might have, of her children's mental 
 powers as well as of their character. This ex- 
 tension of the ofl&ce of motherhood and home- 
 making may be diffused to-morrow. Not a 
 few but a great many women may take this 
 wider survey. In any case, the advent of the 
 communal kitchen will not threaten the home — 
 though it may empty the scullery. 
 
 Before leaving this part of the subject we 
 have to bring it up-to-date. How far is 
 physical education reported on by the new 
 Medical Service. Very little as we have seen. 
 The first Reports of the School Medical Officers 
 are not only limited in scope. They are very 
 tentative in their proposals. The doctors are 
 concerned (very naturally) for the most part in 
 
45 
 stating the needs of the children, not to saying 
 how these needs should be met. There is one 
 striking exception to this rule in the Report 
 of the Bradford Medical Officer. This greater 
 boldness is made possible by the fact that the 
 new ideal is more fully admitted by the Brad- 
 ford Education Authority, and that some means 
 at least are already to hand for carrying out a 
 new system of physical care and treatment. 
 But even in this Report the writer appears to 
 look forth as on hastening waves. He looks 
 forth on a world where haste, and not growth, 
 is still the great reality ! 
 
 ' 'Speaking generally, the opportunity the 
 mid-day meal affords from the educational as- 
 pect is hardly recognised. . . . The under- 
 lying difficulty is that the meal is looked upon 
 as something to be got through as quickly as 
 possible." 
 
 The same feeling of rush, suggesting a kind 
 of shamefacedness with regard to the new ideal 
 shows itself in other ways. 
 
 **It prevents," says the Report, '* adequate 
 attention being paid to the cleanliness of the 
 children, for children still come to some of the 
 dining-rooms with dirty hands and even with 
 dirty faces, too. ..." 
 
 ''It is also," says the Report, ''the 
 reason why attention is not paid to the moni- 
 tresses, i.e., the older girls who assist in the 
 
46 
 laying of the tables, the serving of the food, 
 etc. The splendid opportunity of training 
 afforded is hardly sufficiently appreciated. 
 They should be the special concern of one 
 teacher, who would be responsible for seeing 
 that the staff of them was adequate, that they 
 were scrupulously clean and tidy, that they 
 had definite work allotted to them, and they 
 kept strictly to it. . . ." 
 
 These matters are all vital — all radical in 
 their bearing on the future of the race. Yet 
 they make their entrance on the arena at all 
 with the greatest difficulty. They are pushed 
 and hustled aside as if no one could bend his 
 head in order to look at them. It is so in 
 England ; it is so in France ; it is so as yet (in 
 spite of advance) in every country. 
 
 Meantime, the Report goes on hardily: 
 **The least satisfactory part of the arrangement 
 is the lack of attention to the individual child, 
 the complaint which dogs the path of our ele- 
 mentary school system at every turn. In the 
 original experiment it was found that some of 
 the children needed special care and atten- 
 tion." 
 
 The writer goes on to tell of those special 
 needs to show how it is impossible to fling 
 large numh^rs together pell mell, to treat all 
 alike at meal-time, at play-time, any more 
 than at lessons. 
 
47 
 Thus far we have arrived then — and now 
 must halt. The individual is, at last, in sight 
 as it were. 
 
 We have to keep him in sight — to get a 
 closer and better view of him always for the 
 future. 
 
IV. 
 
 Education — Natural and Artificial. 
 
 For more than twenty years a cry has gone up 
 against over-study. '^The school hours are 
 too long," says one great doctor, ''more es- 
 pecially for younger children." ''The amount 
 of headwork required is too much," cries 
 another, and there is a ready chorus of agree- 
 ment from thousands of weary parents. There 
 appears to be very little doubt that the hours 
 of study are too long, above all for the little 
 children. But how is one to know how much 
 a boy or girl should learn? 
 
 Not only, however, does mental power vary. 
 The circumstances vary that determine how the 
 natural powers shall develop. In the cities 
 the term over-pressure is on everyone's lips. 
 The people in the Western Isles of Scotland 
 never use that term, and what is more strange, 
 they do not seem to know the thing. The 
 school children in Barra for example or Canna 
 are not over-pressed. They speak not one 
 language but two, and they not only learn to 
 write, read, and translate freely, but they go 
 quite as far, and even further than the city 
 child in arithmetic. Their parents do not 
 48 
 
49 
 fear that they are over-driven. On the con- 
 trary, they grieve that the school tasks are so 
 easy. 
 
 It is very striking to hear in Barra, ia 
 Lunga, in Harris, in Skye, this lament from 
 sturdy mothers. These places are so far off — 
 so lost beyond the wild seas. No echo of the 
 great world comes there. They are for prac- 
 tical purposes more remote than New Zealand. 
 
 '*Why don't they go on with their Euclid 
 at the school?" asks a Skye woman, standing 
 in front of a great pool in front of the door 
 of her cottage (roofed with turf and waving 
 weeds so that it looks like a part of the hill- 
 side). '*They don't go any length in Mathe- 
 matics, and my boy's stopped always." 
 
 At Lunga, a father looks at his son's home 
 lessons. '^A baby could do it all," he says, 
 mournfully." *'The master might work them 
 like horses if he wanted to. Why doesn't 
 he?" 
 
 If the children fell behind in their studies 
 in later days one might say all this was an 
 illusion. But they do not fall back — they go 
 on. Dr. Leslie MacKenzie, in Edinburgh, has 
 remarked on the island children's easy ad- 
 vance, as had many other visitors, but these 
 after all were only impressions that might or 
 might not be taken by the public as the truth. 
 Mr. William Dey, of Aberdeen, chairman of 
 the Aberdeen Provincial Committee for 
 Students in Training, whose work consists 
 
 D 
 
50 
 partly in arranging syllabuses of study for 
 bursars and setting examination papers for 
 them has published statistics to show that in 
 proportion to population, the Highlands and 
 Islands supply from ten to twelve times as 
 many men and women of University grade as 
 does the rest of Scotland. 
 
 These mothers are not scholars in the ordinary 
 sense. Some can read — and others cannot. Do 
 they know anything of literature, or of history ? 
 They certainly know something of the origins 
 of great literature. Father MacDonald, of 
 Eriskay, himself a great scholar,* and an 
 eloquent preacher in at least three languages, 
 declared that the Eriskay men were all born 
 orators, and that they cultivated this art at 
 their gatherings. 
 
 It is worth while pausing to note here how 
 all that is known and learned is worked, as it 
 were, into the quick of the young lives spring- 
 ing up in these rude homes. Every memory 
 almost is warm and live. All the tales are 
 of those who were near and dear to the is- 
 landers. In the living room the wife and 
 mother works at her loom. It belonged, per- 
 haps, to her great great grandmother. Her 
 mother used it. Every dark string is well- 
 known, and the pedals are worn by the feet 
 
 *He was educated at Barcelona, and aconstomed to 
 preach in English, Gaelic, and Spanish. 
 
51 
 ©I loved ones, long dead. How can she help 
 loTing the worn pedals, and the dark threads? 
 She talks about the past to the children. The 
 past lives for them as they look at it through 
 their mother's eyes. All this gives depth to 
 the emotional life. It makes a hot-bed for 
 thoughts. As for the work itself, it is not a 
 stunning mystery — like that of the great 
 modern looms tended by Bradford children. 
 Flax is no longer spun, but wool is woven, 
 <lyed, and *Vaulked'' at some spinner's cottage. 
 The women meet together, and they sing loud 
 and louder to ''bring the cloth." They have 
 weaving and waulking songs, and they know 
 the story of every poet in the song book. As 
 for the work it is all begun, continued, and 
 ended at home, so that the children see the 
 whole process, from the bringing in of the 
 sheep fleece to the putting on of a petticoat. 
 
 Mr. Balfour has said that these people are 
 the finest peasants in Europe. They are not 
 peasants at all — have no trait of the real 
 peasant who is more or less the same every- 
 where. Oats are grown for fodder, and potatoes 
 planted on the slopes near the bothies. But 
 there is nothing of the torpor of village life 
 in the islands. The father builds his house 
 with his own hands. He with his barefooted 
 children roofs it with turf, rears the wide low 
 walls, paves the floor, and puts up the chimney. 
 They go out on the wild seas, crossing in the 
 dark between the islands, fearless because they 
 
52 
 learn to know the treacherous winds and cur- 
 rents. It is strange to see the lads and also 
 the children with the older men in the boats. 
 Their obedience is not only prompt. It is 
 delicate. They answer to the lifting of an eye- 
 brow as it seems. This training in attention is 
 given under the sternest circumstances — cir- 
 cumstances that cannot be reproduced in a 
 school. It is education of an intensive kind. 
 Young hunters have it. Teachers want to give 
 it now as well as they can in the altered cir- 
 cumstance. 
 
 In so far as the simple forms of work are 
 concerned the thing is easy. 
 
 In America and elsewhere there are schools 
 which are organised with the aim of 
 making vigorous recapitulation of the life and 
 labour of a younger world possible. In that 
 fast going world no child need bolt civiliza- 
 tion. "Weaving, and pottery, and rude 
 carpentry, also (in some open-air schools) 
 building of huts and primitive dwellings. The 
 teachers do not stop at any difficulty. 
 It is said that the scholars go into this 
 kind of learning as a fish goes into water. In 
 London schools as well as in the Western 
 States of America, it has a huge success. 
 Something is missed out? Tes. Danger 
 is missed out. One does not see its ''bright 
 face'* in a class-room. Can anything take 
 its place? The Greeks thought that no- 
 thing could take its place. Plato would send 
 
53 
 the boys into battle (under hidden protection), 
 compelling them to bear the tumult and to be- 
 lieve that they were facing death. We moderns, 
 however, cannot send the whole child com- 
 munity into mimic warfare. We cannot set it 
 afloat in the Minch. We cannot, even as yet, 
 send all our children into Recapitulation 
 Schools or classes in the woods. Meantime we 
 have learned that we can if we will keep close 
 to the Great Teachers, and also that intelli- 
 gence and will power can be developed in more 
 than one way. 
 
 Drill is one of these means. It seems to do 
 the work once done by the wild, heartless dis- 
 cipline of Nature — the mother who does not 
 spare, the blind mother who pays without 
 counting. 
 
 In the Paris schools Professor Binet, with 
 the help of certain devoted teachers, has carried 
 drill sheer over into the world of what is called 
 ''head-work." He drills not large muscles but 
 attention power, memory, will, initiative and 
 imagination. 
 
 Here, for example, is a class of abnormal 
 (very backward) children taught by M. 
 Roguet, at the Ecole Communale for boys, Rue 
 des Ecluses, St. Martin. The teacher comes in 
 and at once every eye is fixed on him. He 
 does not call for silence. The very word 
 discipline is never heard from him. He has 
 fixed six objects on a large piecx^ of cardboard, 
 and he turns these towards the class. They 
 
54 
 
 crowd round him, then hurry back to writ© 
 what they have seen. '^Cork, pencil, rose, etc. 
 In order to get full marks they must write 
 them down in perfect order and all must finish 
 in two or three minutes. The exercise is finished. 
 Now all are trying to carry small bowls or 
 basins filled with water to the brim from one 
 table to another. It is done quickly, and so 
 carefully that not a drop is spilt. Now, 
 while the visitor looks at the basins the whole 
 class stands as if frozen — each with his arm 
 stretched out. This is a Will exercise. These 
 once restless boys, so aimless too in their move- 
 ments, are now keeping every muscle under 
 control. Lips that were once loose and open are 
 tight now and eyes brighten. It lasts some 
 minutes. Silently all is changed. Yet tense 
 action is here still. The class is watching one 
 boy and another fill in gaps in a written sen- 
 tence on the blackboard. Then the long sentence 
 is spoken and one after another repeats it from 
 memory. Now the teacher utters a quick 
 rain of figures. The boys patter them out 
 fast like ticking machines. What is this? 
 One after another steps on the plat- 
 form, makes the movements of workmen — 
 a sweep, sawyer, blacksmith, engineman, 
 pilot. '^Write the names of all the red things 
 you can think of.'* There is a noise of pencils, 
 and many things are named : ** Cherries, straw- 
 berries, roses, uniforms, flags" — and a belated 
 voice says: 'Hhe Devil!*' ''Name things that 
 
55 
 
 turn." Fast rain the answers. ^^ Earth/' 
 ^'Compass/' ^'Top/' ^^Ball," ^'Wheel/' 
 **Bicycle." All this is mere drill, and it is 
 not claimed that it is anything more. It does 
 for wandering wits, and feeble memories what 
 remedial drill does for twisted backs and 
 rounded shoulders. 
 
 The teacher speaks little. There is a strange 
 silence in the room, broken only when the boyi 
 leave their seats to show their slates, or read, 
 that is to say compose, at the blackboard. 
 This is hard work. It goes on for a long time, 
 more than an hour and a quarter. The Fro- 
 belian ideal is learning by doing. But here is 
 not merely work. Here is intensive action. 
 Again and again, for a few moments, the 
 powers of every child are at full tension. As 
 for the teacher, his work also is hard, but it 
 is quite other than is the task of the con- 
 ventional master. He has not to speak much. 
 He has not to '^keep order." He is always look- 
 ing at keen, eager, attentive faces, though 
 they are the faces of children who were back- 
 ward yesterday. Yet, ^'At the end of the morn- 
 ing I'm tired," he admitted. '^I can't take 
 drill in the afternoon. Neither can my 
 scholars ! ' ' 
 
 M. B/Oguet has kindly given the results of 
 the training. Forty-nine children have been 
 taught in his special class. (The work is new, 
 it was begun in Paris only between two and 
 three years ago.) 
 
56 
 
 Sixteen of the 49, we learn, are still in the 
 class. Ten have gone back to the ordinary schools. 
 Four have been lost sight of. Nineteen have left 
 school. Eight of these are now apprenticed 
 and are doing well (one is apprenticed to a 
 mechanician, another to a carpenter, another 
 to a printer, etc.). Three are working in 
 shops. Two are clerks. Of the scholars now 
 in the class, one appears to be above, rather than 
 below 'the average mentally. A few months 
 ago he was two years behind the boys of his 
 age in schoolwork, though he attended regu- 
 larly. 
 
 M. E/Oguet indicates by means of a chart 
 with coloured lines the progress of children in 
 the ordinary school, and of the same children 
 after they have passed into the mental drill 
 class-room (the room which is so clearly 
 nothing more or less than an extension of the 
 room for simple physical exercise). 
 
 The lines that show the backward child's 
 progress in an ordinary school are almost level. 
 Those that indicate his advance by the new 
 method are almost upward, and between these 
 two there is a sloping line that gives the rela- 
 tive rate of advance of the normal child in the 
 class-rooms of to-day. But no diagram is 
 nearly so striking as are the faces of the chil- 
 dren who attend Mr. Eouget's '^drill.'* 
 Formerly they were dull but now they are full 
 of life and interest. These are in the School 
 Clinic of to-morrow, where disease is not the 
 
57 
 
 thing in question, where teachers and those 
 who help them are free to think of develop- 
 ment. The change in them is like that 
 wrought in poor, shuffling, feeble recruits 
 after a course of drill and hygiene in the 
 army. 
 
 Mental drill is, of course, not entirely 
 new. It is not new in France, where 
 Lecoq and other teachers of drawing gave 
 plenty of visual memory drill with good re- 
 sults. James Hinton^s game of the twenty- 
 seven cubes, described in his little pamphlet, 
 **The Education of the Imagination," is a 
 course of memory-imagination drill, pure and 
 simple. But M. Binet has carried out this kind 
 of drill as no one else has tried to carry it out. He 
 has illustrated its value in quite a new way. He 
 is the Ling of mental gymnastics. And have 
 these gymnastics any value at all for normal 
 children? M. Roquet used formerly to teach 
 in the primary schools of Paris. He is sure 
 that the drill, which does so much for the back- 
 ward, would do even more for the intelligent. 
 ''What should I not have been able to get from 
 my normal scholars in the ordinary school," 
 he said, ''if only I had treated them as I treat 
 the defective children in the 'special' class ? ' 
 
 At this point some may be inclined to ask : 
 What is a normal child? Without trying to 
 give a full definition we may say it is one who 
 marches with the great army, keeps in step 
 
68 
 with the great majority arriving at the different 
 stages of life in much the same way and at the 
 same time. To do all this is to be * 'normal." 
 It is then possible to frame a scale of normal 
 development — to trace the advancing human 
 and find what is * 'normal" for the baby, for 
 the six year old, the seven, eight, nine year old 
 child, and so on up to the adolescent and adult. 
 Yet one can find the normal by studying not one 
 child or twenty, but thousands, and not infants 
 alone, or school children, but individuals at 
 every life stage. That is what M. Binet and 
 his helpers have done, and the result cannot 
 but prove helpful, all the more because in their 
 labour they try to disentangle mere progress 
 in school subjects from growth in real intelli- 
 gence. 
 
 At the age of 3, a child should, accord- 
 ing to Binet' s metrical scale of intelligence, 
 be able to point out his eyes, his nose, his 
 mouth. To show the persons or objects in a 
 picture. To give his own name, to repeat 
 six syllables. (Of course one may think of 
 other tests. These are only guiding lines.) 
 
 At 5. — He should be able to compare the 
 weights of two boxes. To copy a square. To 
 repeat a phrase of ten syllables. To count 
 four sous or pence, etc. 
 
 At 6. — He should be able to tell which i& 
 the right hand, the left ear, and so on. To 
 repeat sixteen syllables, tell his age, do three 
 messages without forgetting one. Tell the 
 
59 
 morning from the evening. Define objects 
 by telling what they are used for (he cannot 
 define them otherwise at this age). At six 
 progress in reading begins and goes on till 
 nine. 
 
 At 7. — He should know how many fingers 
 he has. Copy a written phrase. Copy the 
 figure called a lozenge. (It is more difficult 
 than the square.) Repeat five figures. 
 
 At 9. — He should be able to give the date 
 in full. Tell the days of the week. Define 
 things otherwise than by their use. Read and 
 remember six things of what he has read. 
 Give back money change in twenty pence, and 
 place five boxes according to their weight. 
 
 At 12. — He should be able to criticise ab- 
 surd phrases. Put three words into a phrase. 
 Find at least sixty words in three minutes. 
 Give abstract definitions, etc. 
 
 At 15. — Repeat seven figures. Find three 
 rhymes to a word. Repeat a phrase with 26 
 syllables. Interpret a picture. Solve a pro- 
 blem in psychology. 
 
 Looking through this scale one is struck 
 not by the forwardness but by the slowness of 
 mental development. Only at seven does a 
 normal child know how many fingers he has, and 
 at nine, it is early enough to know the date and 
 the days of the week. Only at eight years 
 old does M. Binet give the task of counting 
 three halfpennies and three pence, and ask 
 
60 
 a child to name the figures from twenty back* 
 wards. Of the four year olds not one ex-^ 
 amined knew his left ear from the right. 
 
 Of the 5 year old one-half could do this test. 
 Only at 6 no one blundered ! 
 
 Only at 6 does an average child know his 
 right hand from his left, and at this age — 6 — 
 one-half of all the children do not know how 
 many fingers they have. Yet in France, as well 
 as in England, babies of four and five have been 
 set to do ''Number" lessons very seriously. The 
 children who had not really done learning the 
 geography of their own limbs have had to learn 
 the geography of the earth. 
 
 Is there any use in this kind of learning? 
 We have no reason to think that it has any 
 use or value. On the other hand it may do 
 some harm. The young child's wonderful 
 memory is doubtless a kind of refuge. It can 
 say a great many things in parrot fashion. 
 
 Great use is made of pictures in testing 
 growth of intelligence. The teacher takes for 
 example a picture of a man and woman asleep 
 on a bench, and shows it to a child of three. 
 The little one says '*A man" or ''a dada," 
 * 'mamma." 
 
 A 7 year old will pass from the mere naming 
 of objects to description, "They are sleeping 
 on a bench," he will say, or "It is a man and a 
 woman, and they are asleep." A normal child 
 of ten or eleven passes on to the interpretive 
 stage. "They are poor people who are home* 
 less," he will say. "They have been turned 
 
61 
 out into the cold night." This power of inter- 
 pretation, found only in older children, is in- 
 troduced as a test at the age of 12. But here a 
 word of warning must be said. The examiner 
 is not acting in these tests like one who has 
 simply to weigh a box or to take a chest- 
 measurement. He cannot fall back on mere 
 routine at any stage of his investigation. There 
 are many tests only because one, or only a few, 
 are not enough to prove anything. 
 
 Take, for example, the case of John, aged 
 nine. He is found, by one or more tests, to 
 reach the level of the eight year old, a fact 
 expressed by ''i — "or one year behind. He 
 succeeds, however, in three tests of the nine 
 year olds, and in three of the ten year old tests. 
 So he is, after all, at the level of his age, nine 
 years. 
 
 We may describe an examination of the new 
 type. It is so very different from the old, and 
 the object is quite different. ''What have you 
 done?" says the examiner we know so well, and 
 of course this question has to be asked, by 
 judge, examiner, teacher, and Society itself. 
 The new order of investigator, however, is not 
 a judge. He is trying, literally, to put himself 
 in the child's place. He wants to learn some- 
 thing about the child himself, not his work, 
 and this is the only way in which to learn it. 
 
 It might be well here to describe one or 
 two ''examinations." They are, to begin with, 
 very pleasant events. No shadow of fear 
 darkens them. The teacher is no longer a 
 
62 
 teacher when he enters the room where they are 
 carried on. He is an observer pure and 
 simple. The child, however, is on the alert. 
 It is easy to see that he is putting forth all his 
 powers. It is as though everything in him 
 knows that it is on its trial, and hastens to 
 prove itself to come into the open and be 
 appreciated. 
 
 At Eue Grange-aux-Belle, in the School of 
 which M. Vaney is headmaster, M. Binet 
 has a small psychological laboratory. It is 
 a very modest room on the ground floor. There 
 are no expensive appliances, only a table with 
 pens, ink, paper, and two or three chairs. On 
 the walls are photographs, children's drawings, 
 and paintings, and on the wide window-sill a 
 basin of water, with jars connected by a tube, 
 the whole forming a simple means of testing 
 breathing-power. M. Vaney sits at the table. 
 He is the close friend and co-worker of Pro- 
 fessor Binet. 
 
 The door opens, and Armand, an eight year 
 old boy comes in. Tall and broad-shouldered, 
 he looks at least ten. His large eyes sparkle 
 as he takes his seat at the table. He reminds 
 one not at all of the student but of a soldier 
 going into action. He reads a long sen- 
 tence, of which, after a pause, he recalls five 
 images (which is good for an eight year 
 old). He then goes through a memory test, 
 naming coins without touching them : fr. 10 
 —2 fr.— 10 fr.— fr. 50—20 fr.— 1 fr.— 5 fr.— 
 fr. 25. The whole test does not last half-a- 
 
63 
 minute. ''Write down every word yon can 
 think of." The child starts at once, but he is 
 weak in this exercise. He finds only 40 words 
 in three minntes. He has no idea of following 
 any trail* or taking up any suggestion. Next 
 conies the time test. He is in advance of his 
 age here. He knows the year, month, and day, 
 and can tell the months of the year. There 
 is a good weight test. Five small card-board 
 boxes are brought out. One holds 3 grs. 
 weight; another 6; others 9, 12 and 16 re- 
 spectively. ''Place them in the order of their 
 weight." The child does this quickly, almost 
 without hesitation. When they are shuffled 
 he finds the right order again. Hitherto the 
 tests have been concerned with memory, and 
 sensation for the most part. In these young 
 children and even "defectives" may do well. 
 But now we pass into new regions. We are 
 going to deal with intelligence apart from mere 
 sensory quickness, apart even from school 
 culture. 
 
 " What is the difference between the butter- 
 fly and a fly?" 
 
 Armand makes three comparisons — only one 
 of which I remember. " The butterfly flies 
 over flowers; the fly over things we eat." An 
 Inventive test came next. The child was given 
 three words and was asked to make sentences, 
 each of which contained them all. One minute 
 was allowed for this test. Armand got through 
 
 * It is strange how often in these tests we wre re- 
 ftiaded of hunters and their ways. 
 
64 
 this badly. His bright little intelligence 
 folded back as it were at certain well-defined 
 regions. It broke down altogether over ab- 
 stractions. ''What is charity?" ''Charity is 
 giving bread to the poor.'' "What is justice?" 
 No answer. "What is kindness?" "Kindness 
 is to be kind to people." Nevertheless, his 
 definition of a fork was very complete. "It is 
 an instrument which civilised people use in 
 eating." 
 
 " Set up a shop. You will be the mer- 
 chant," says M. Vaney. "I buy 4 sous worth, 
 and I pay you with this piece of 20 sous." The 
 little merchant comes out of this test well. 
 
 The tests of comprehension, included such 
 questions as : — 
 
 When you have lost a train, what do you 
 do? 
 
 When you are late for school, what do you 
 do? 
 
 When a comrade strikes you without mean- 
 ing to do so, how should you take it? To this 
 last A. replied, after some hesitation: "Tell 
 him not to do it again." In the tests of 
 criticism he came out well. M. Vaney made 
 absurd statements, such as "I have three 
 brothers, Paul, Ernest, and I." The child 
 discovered them at once. He is put down at 
 last as two years (according to scale) in advance 
 of his age. 
 
 After him came Jules, aged eleven, a deli- 
 cate-looking undersized boy, who has spent a 
 year in hospital. 
 
65 
 
 He is far behind Armand in many of the 
 tests. He cannot range the boxes so fast, 
 nor recall so many images and figures at a 
 moment's notice. He has not snch a quick 
 perception of things, and in the speed tests 
 for mechanical acts, he is far behind. But he 
 is older. He finds at once guiding lines in 
 the search of words, so that he manages to 
 utter seventy in three minutes (the limit for 
 children of eight to eleven is 200). Above 
 all, he is ahead of Armand in defining justice, 
 kindness, etc. He reads not merely with 
 fluency, but also with expression. No one 
 could fail to have a clear impression at the end 
 of the examination of the change that takes 
 place at certain stages — the crossing of fron- 
 tiers. The advance with a little dropping, it 
 may be, of baggage ! 
 
 Something is lost on the onward way. From 
 various ''Memory" tests carried on in the 
 schools among children of various ages it is 
 found that memory is best in the younger 
 children, and that early childhood, that is up 
 to the age of seven or thereabout, is the time 
 when the impressions gained are most vivid, 
 most fruitful and most enduring. 
 
 Yet all children have not, of course, got 
 equal power of memory, and so it is simple 
 justice to get some notice of its actual extent 
 in the individual, just as we now try, in mere 
 justice, to find what is the range of hearing or 
 vision. To be sure teachers and inspectors 
 
 £ 
 
66 
 have done this time out of mind in a certain 
 fashion. But their methods were rude, and 
 the mistakes were, it is to be feared, serious. 
 They may often have punished the unfortunate. 
 Inspectors, too, have often punished the master 
 who could not make the weak equal with the 
 strong. The Memory tests given by M. Binetin 
 Paris schools are various. In the simplest of 
 all the scholars are tested by having to repeat 
 words they have heard. There are others, 
 however, to test ''incipient" memory, that is, 
 the memory of things that cannot be uttered or 
 recalled but which have left their trace on the 
 mind, since the learner needs a much shorter 
 time to master them than he would if he had 
 never heard them at all.* There are also the 
 * 'recognition" tests, that is, the singling out of 
 words learned from many others. These tests 
 are carried out in the schools of the most 
 observant teachers. But the results show 
 that though the teachers may be keen 
 observers, and are getting hold of a great 
 range of new material to which the old-time 
 teacher was a stranger, yet they make a 
 big percentage of gross mistakes when they 
 have only general impressions to guide them. 
 
 * Examples of this are to be found in many so-called 
 failures of our present school system. Great surprise 
 is often expressed by the teacher of adult schools and 
 even tutorial classes at the rapid progress of men and 
 women who attend them. They appear to have for- 
 gotten almost how to read. Their first essays were 
 crammed with mistakes in spelling. After two months^ 
 time these very students are writing splendid essays. 
 
67 
 Thus, for example, in one very able observer's 
 list, two boys are put down in the ''Bad Mem- 
 ory" group, one of whom can repeat twenty- 
 five verses eight days after learning them, while 
 the other can recite eighteen. That is to say 
 these two belong really not only to the* 'Good 
 Memory" group, but are among the best of 
 that group. 
 
 When one begins to think how a young 
 human being grows, learns, develops, one sees 
 that the process is not only a very long one, 
 but that it is varied as well. When a certain 
 age is reached — at seven or thirteen — lessons and 
 drill are important, but even more important 
 is play, and work, also day-dreaming and 
 sleep. Every one of these helps the thing 
 done in part, through the others. One must 
 attend — but not too long. One must take 
 pains — but only at intervals. One must learn 
 how to focus one's powers, but every one, 
 young and old, must know how to give up all 
 striving, and trust to the power of the uncon- 
 scious. Then as it appears there will be no 
 overpressure anywhere. 
 
 It is just this resting and also variety in life 
 that fails in so many places. It is not granted 
 to many children. It is not found in the inland 
 village — which is gloomy and often stagnant. 
 But it fails also in the great cities . Mr . Reginald 
 Bray has painted in vivid colours, the state 
 of the town child : '*He is hurried to school — 
 
68 
 one of thousands ; in liis playground he sees 
 himself, a frail unit tossing helpless among 
 the eddies of a crowd .... Everything he 
 does is swept away and is no more seen. If 
 he brings home a few treasures they are sent 
 down the dust shoot ; if he strives to cultivate 
 a small patch of flowers in the backyard the 
 cat digs them up ; if he digs a hole in the soil 
 of one of the parks, it is levelled and smoothed 
 
 away He is dodging now this vehicle, 
 
 and now that; he is halting now to gather 
 something from the upset barrow of a coster; 
 now to watch a herd of bullocks swept into the 
 slaughterhouse. Here walking, here running, 
 here idling, now laughing, now crying, now 
 shouting, he drifts into aimlessness." 
 
 On reading this one begins to feel that it is 
 not the school, but the outside environment 
 that makes the town child changeable, and un- 
 stable. It is from his playhours, not his work- 
 hours, that something vital is missing.* It is 
 not easy to supply this vital thing, 
 very far from easy to supply the best 
 things of all — the sense of freedom, the field 
 for experiment, some peace in solitude too, 
 and the breath of adventure. 
 
 *The switchback of daily experience does not halt 
 though even in school. He changes even his teachers 
 very often; and the good teacher does not dare to cling 
 to any one in her class. They are all moving on and 
 away so fast. This is not so in every city. (In Copen- 
 hagen, for example, a teacher will have the same cnild 
 from seven to fourteen.) But it is so in London, and 
 also in other great cities. 
 
69 
 
 There is a movement now afoot to get chil- 
 dren out of the street. Back to the land 
 means for some not merely back to the fields 
 and hedgerows, but back into any open space — 
 into any space that can be cleared and made 
 free again of sun and breeze and rain. Can 
 one bring the Hebridean's great educational 
 advantages to the child in Deptford or Canning 
 Town? **Yes/' cry some bold voices. ''You 
 may even do that, or go a long way towards 
 doing it." In Canning Town, in the Spring of 
 1909, this work was begun by Miss A. C. 
 Sewell. We quote here from her first Report. 
 
 ''On March 20, 1909, the 'Garden' Club began 
 its organised work with time-tables drawn up 
 afresh each week to suit the lengthening days. 
 Gardens were allotted as follows : 12 vegetable 
 gardens to big boys; 12 flower gardens to big 
 girls; 18 small gardens to children under 10 
 years of age. The children were divided into 
 classes of six, and each class had a regular 
 lesson of one hour's length per week . . . This 
 plan was kept up until the end of the Summer 
 term. The Club was open an hour and-a-half 
 each morning before 9 o'clock, during which 
 time I was present not to teach but to be talked 
 to, and the voluntary attendance of children 
 during these hours to giye care to their gardens 
 will, I hope, be regarded as one of the most 
 valuable features of the experiment." 
 
 "The ground was part of an old churchyard, 
 and large enough to allow of 40 little gardens. 
 
70 
 All round were the crowded streets, with their 
 unwholesome little dwellings. There was no 
 money for an expensive scheme of any kind — 
 and yet a great deal was done, just as on 
 Robinson Crusoe's island a great deal got done. 
 Necessity being in Canning Town as in mid- 
 ocean islets, the Mother of Invention. 
 
 ''When play is over for the little ones, some 
 three or four of the elder children sweep up 
 the infants' play-ground. When this is done 
 a new lot of boys arrive upon the scene, and in 
 fifteen minutes turn what had been the infants' 
 play-ground into a night camp. Three different 
 types of bed are used (all on the ''Catre" plan 
 as used in hot countries) the making of which 
 has been in the hands of the children. One 
 boy in a holiday school made himself a bed in 
 class, which he proudly carried home and 
 sleeps in. Another result of interest is that 
 the night camp has on one occasion been taken 
 over by the father of one of the boys. This 
 man, delicate and out of work, has gladly 
 availed himself of the health-giving oppor- 
 tunities given by the Club, bringing four of his 
 own boys to sleep out." 
 
 As there was no money to build lavatories 
 the Club had to make its own. The children, 
 with Miss Sewell contrived a lavatory, which 
 is movable, strongly fenced in and protected, 
 and yet convenient for inspection. They also 
 made a shower-bath, screened with the cheap- 
 est sacking, over a firm wood-work frame. The 
 
71 
 
 demand for the shower-bath was great, morn- 
 ing and evening. The feeling of the children 
 about it may be guessed from the following 
 letters : — 
 
 ''Dear Miss, — I think we ought to thank 
 you and Mr. Alvis for wasting your time over 
 us by giving us shower-baths in early morn- 
 ing. 
 
 ''Dear Miss, — May a trustworthy boy have a 
 shower-bath. A. Halford would like one too." 
 
 Miss Sewell wants to make it clear that her 
 Club is not a small open-air school. It is not 
 a school at all, but a kind of garden, and ex- 
 perimenting ground, necessary as an adjunct 
 of every school. She asks why the parks should 
 be practically empty for half a day, and for a 
 quarter of a year. ''In the great park, called 
 Scansen, at Stockholm, no scorn is thought of 
 raising kitchen crops ; and gardens are specially 
 planned that schools may visit them." Miss 
 Sewell suggests that at certain hours of the 
 day the garden might be under the care of 
 public Authorities. 
 
 Below is a Time-table, the ordinary print of 
 which shows what was done in June in Can- 
 ning Town. — The italics show what might be 
 done under a larger scheme, taking advantage 
 of the permits of the code. 
 
 Only a small number can go to the more or 
 less expensive open-air schools of the Local 
 Authorities. But many can have a new kind 
 of play-time. Nature is waiting all the time 
 
72 
 under rubbish heaps and behind locked gates. 
 The new work and play may begin soon, and 
 wherever these are begun they will give a 
 new value to the school lessons. 
 
 Time Table. 
 
 Time. 
 
 How occupied. 
 
 No. 
 pres- 
 ent. 
 
 In whose 
 charge. 
 
 At whose 
 expense. 
 
 6-7 
 
 Camp rises. 
 
 8 
 
 Voluntary. 
 
 
 7—7.30 
 
 Company for shower-bath. 
 
 10 
 
 ^j 
 
 — 
 
 7.30—9 
 
 Garden talk. Plants given out, &c. 
 
 10—20 
 
 Organiser. 
 
 Parks 
 Authority. 
 Bducation 
 
 9—10.30 
 
 Manual work or Gardening, 1st to 3rd 
 
 10 
 
 School Teacher. 
 
 
 year. 
 
 
 
 Authority 
 
 10.30—12 
 
 3rd to 6th year. 
 
 20 
 
 „ 
 
 ,, 
 
 9—12 
 
 Infants, 
 
 30 
 
 „ 
 
 „ 
 
 12-1 
 
 Little Children. Sand play. Drawing 
 and Gardening. 
 
 50 
 
 Organiser. 
 
 Parks 
 Authority 
 
 2-3 
 
 Nature Study. 
 
 30 
 
 School Teacher. 
 
 Bducation 
 Authority 
 
 2-4 
 
 Infants. 
 
 J, 
 
 „ 
 
 „ 
 
 3-4 
 
 Drawing. 
 
 ,, 
 
 ,, 
 
 J, 
 
 4.30—6 
 
 Gardening. Sand play. Drawing and 
 
 60 
 
 Organiser and 
 
 Parks 
 
 
 Story-books. 
 
 
 voluntary. 
 
 Authority 
 
 6-7.30 
 
 Special Parties. Tea. Dancing. Act- 
 ing. Gardening, Ac. 
 
 30 
 
 Organiser. 
 
 ** 
 
 7.30— H.30 
 
 Big Boys. Members and visitors. Gar- 
 dening. Races, &c. 
 
 18 
 
 " 
 
 •• 
 
 8.30—9 
 
 Bed-driU with visitors. 
 
 18 
 
 ,, 
 
 ^ 
 
 9 
 
 Turn in for the night. 
 
 8 
 
 School nurse or 
 voluntary. 
 
 Bducation 
 Auihoriij 
 
 *Even in the open-air school, there is at first, a good 
 deal of formality, and even a good deal of artificiality. 
 Yet, already there is a shaking loose of cramped minds 
 and bodies. In the Birley school the children have 
 dug and planted the whole garden, and the whole place 
 is a scene, not only of industry but of experiment. 
 The boy builds mud-houses, and plays at early Britons. 
 Looking round one feels as if nature had come running 
 back — as if childhood was no longer drilled out of ex- 
 istence. In Sheffield, says a report, the baths were 
 eagerly looked forward to. The children began to play 
 without quarrelling, and to bear defeat bravely. The 
 idea of esprit de corps was conceived — the absence of 
 which in children of the Council schools was remarked 
 by a representative of the Head-Teachers' Association, 
 who held that such children would destroy the tone of 
 any public school. 
 
THE WORKER'S CHILD AT FOURTEEN. 
 
 However good elementary schools may be, 
 their function is very limited. A child quits 
 this kind of school at the age of fourteen, or 
 even earlier. If a teacher attempts too much 
 within this period the elementary education is 
 spoiled, and the work of a later period is spoiled 
 also. For elementary education should help 
 to supply the materials for a later stage of 
 life and development, but it cannot do this 
 well if it attempts to do anything else, or any- 
 thing more. 
 
 In the hurry and bustle of a work-a-day life 
 it was expected that nature could surely hurry 
 her processes a little in view of the necessities of 
 working class children. In England they 
 were, and are, sent to school at five, or even at 
 four years of age, and by dint of work, instead 
 of play, it was hoped, doubtless, that they 
 would be equipped for life at fourteen, or even 
 earlier. This hope is still indulged in by the 
 workers, and also by many of their best friends. 
 *'I left school at ten or eleven," says one pros- 
 perous man, and another, ''You see how I've 
 got on. Hard work doesn't hurt anyone.'* 
 This, of course, is not true. Hard physical 
 73 
 
74 
 work liurts children terribly, as the researches 
 of Dr. Thomas and others have proved 
 beyond any doubt. If, turning aside from 
 mere twisted bodies and injured hearts, one 
 Asks about the result of arrested education on 
 the mental side, the pride of the workers them- 
 selves is up in arms. *^I never went to school 
 at all," says a great writer, '^and yet I am 
 famous, and everyone reads my books." There 
 follows a chorus of voices. They remind us 
 of legions of gifted working-class men ; calling 
 up the shade of an immortal tinker, an illus- 
 trious tramp, and a shepherdess whose name will 
 shine like the stars for ever. All this does not 
 tring us any nearer to the facts with regard 
 to the effect of early labour on the children 
 of the masses. 
 
 We have good reason for believing that 
 most children are born healthy. We have 
 equally good reasons for believing that most 
 children are born with well-made brains and 
 capable of long continuous mental develop- 
 ment. A certain proportion are, of course, 
 above the normal, and in a very large class 
 there would of course be a good many super and 
 sub-normals. But we have not to deal with these 
 in discussing the question, but with the nor- 
 mal. Let us admit at once that the exceptions 
 are numerous. How does the normal child 
 fare when obliged to go into the rough and 
 •tumble of life at twelve or fourteen ? 
 
75 
 
 The evidence of M. Binet, who has worked 
 at the problem for 30 years, agrees with that 
 of other psychologists. ''Though our metrical 
 scale was drawn up in order to measure the 
 intelligence of children, it allows us also to 
 learn what is the limit of intelligence among 
 adults, at least, among the working class. In 
 80 far as power of abstraction is concerned, it 
 does not go beyond the limit of the twelve 
 year old. Two tests, one of questions having 
 to do with the intelligence, the other with 
 questions that put the critical faculty on its 
 trial, constitute the touchstone." 
 
 The power of abstraction then is not allowed 
 to develop. That is the dictum. We have 
 evidence to show that this loss is often more 
 apparent than real — and that when circum- 
 stances are at all favourable (as in the 
 case of many in the Tutorial classes) it is 
 suddenly, almost dramatically, made good. 
 There is no object, however, in blindly deny- 
 ing the findings of the only persons who have 
 made anything like a full investigation of the 
 whole subject. After all, this dictum is 
 . what we must expect, if education is to stop 
 between twelve and fourteen. 
 
 Fourteen is, in some ways, a worse age 
 than twelve at which to bring education proper 
 to an end. It is the age of temptation. 
 
 At the late Conference on Children's 
 Employment in Glasgow, teachers and mis- 
 fiioners rose to testify that nearly all the 
 
76 
 
 men who go wrong take their first fatal step 
 between fourteen and sixteen. They testi- 
 fied also that the great majority of these were 
 not nearly bad characters at all, but quite the 
 contrary. The truth seems to be that the 
 fourteen year old is more at the mercy of 
 suggestion and impulse than is either an older 
 or a younger child. 
 
 At the age of thirteen or fourteen the great 
 majority of the boys and girls of our country 
 are taken from school and are set to work. To 
 what kind of work? To any work, in most 
 cases, that they can do. A very large number 
 become part of our transit system like the 
 draught horses. The tragic thing about their 
 lot is not that they work hard, but that their 
 work arrests development. 
 
 Dr. Thring admits all this very naively in 
 his famous book on the Education of boys when 
 he shows, quite conclusively, how, though a 
 great genius may emerge out of almost any 
 gulf — the time available for real education 
 will always determine the relations of classes. 
 
 Let us take a case or two in illustration. 
 Here is George, a little boy of thirteen,* 
 
 * The younger the victim of over-work the more complete 
 of course his ruin. "Secondary Education/' says the recent 
 Report on Half Time exemption, ''is practically closed ta 
 the half-timer. It is hopeless for him to compete for 
 a scholarship with the full-time scholar. As for the 
 Evening Continuation Schools, it is not very wonderful 
 to hear that the child-worker has no desire to enter 
 them. In Halifax an investigation into the Evening 
 School careers of boys between 13 and 14 years of age, 
 who entered the Evening Schools in the Session 1903-4 
 
77 
 small for liis age, bright, refined looking, 
 going to school regularly, and fond of 
 drawing. One day you learn suddenly that he 
 has gone to work. And why? Is his father 
 dead; or has he lost his job suddenly? Is 
 the family starving? Not at all. Things are 
 going as well as they can ever go in a family 
 where the chief is a casual earner. What has 
 happened is that the boy is fourteen. With 
 the fourteenth birthday the family automatic- 
 ally withdraw him from school.'' I can't keep 
 him any more," says his father. In a few 
 months the little boy is no longer bright and 
 refined looking. He has lost ambition and is 
 drunk with fatigue every night — almost like 
 his father. He will certainly not go to the 
 Continuation Classes of his own free will — and 
 no one has any right to compel him. Why 
 should he go? To waste what little strength 
 remains to him and learn next to nothing? 
 In a few years he will be like his father who 
 cannot keep a son for sixteen years, and hardly 
 even for thirteen years. 
 
 Take the case of a girl, aged thirteen. Phyllis 
 is very bright, learning fast at school, 
 
 shows that 79 per cent, of those who had not been half- 
 timers received ifistruction in classes above the pre- 
 paratory course, while only 25 i)er cent, of those who 
 had been half-timers received similar instruction." But 
 ''while 33 per cent, of the full-timers received special 
 Instruction in classes beyond the preparatory classes 
 for at least two years, only 3.3 per cent, of the half- 
 timers stayed so long. The same condition is to be 
 found in other towns where half-time is prevalent. '' 
 
78 
 gentle to the younger children, and devoted 
 to her mother. One day to your horror you 
 hear that Phyllis is ^Vorking." She is the 
 drudge of a dressmaker, and when you next see 
 her the ugly change has taken place which 
 condemns her for ever to a lowly place and a 
 stunted life. What is to be done? Compul- 
 sory attendance of continuation class? This is 
 put forward very much to-day. But to-day the 
 actual problem is not fully faced. Only the 
 worst symptoms are faced. 
 
 The price paid by the child worker has never 
 yet been fairly estimated, and perhaps there is 
 no means of fairly estimating it. For, in order 
 to form a real estimate it would be necessary to 
 separate the results due to monotony and arrest 
 from those caused by exposure to downright 
 evil and degrading surroundings. The boy 
 street sellers who appear for theft and other 
 offences at the police courts represent one or ler 
 of result. But the factory child worker who 
 loses all ambition and desire for progress re- 
 presents quite another. The latter suffers 
 a very distinct order of loss, and from a 
 national standpoint this kind of loss is a hun- 
 dredfold greater than that represented by even 
 the unhappy young criminal. Yet it is easily 
 overlooked, because in the first place, the vic- 
 tim and his parents do not even suspect that 
 there has been any loss at all, and also it is 
 clear to them that he may live a very useful 
 life after all ! It is often pointed out that such 
 
79 
 useful persons are necessary as well as quite 
 happy and contented. So it is thought well 
 that the whole world should be full of ''happy/' 
 ''useful" people. Is there no field for the full 
 exercise of mental power and aptitude, save in 
 the case of the members of a small privileged 
 class ? This question will have to be asked and 
 an answer found. 
 
 If it was asked in bye-gone days an 
 answer was ready. Children were born to a 
 trade or calling. They followed it as their 
 fathers had done before them, and even to-day 
 Custom rules in some places, so that the miner, 
 the weaver, the spinner, is destined for the 
 mill or mine from his cradle. But a series of 
 revolutions of various orders have now broken 
 up the ancient closed trades for ever, and it 
 is custom and circumstance, not law that 
 dooms the children to follow one trade rather 
 than another. 
 
 To-day, however, we have new prejudices. 
 It is ofen said that the country child should be 
 a good labourer, and the city child a workman, 
 clerk, or shop assistant. But the country 
 child is not always born to be a labourer. Often 
 he makes a good salesman, or takes to the work 
 of a traveller with great joy and success. On 
 the other hand, the cockney turns out some- 
 times (when chance favours him) to have a 
 little gift for growing vegetables and roses, and 
 for bee keeping or poultry rearing. The most 
 baffling thing of all, however, is that many 
 
80 
 people who care nothing for what are called 
 '•country pursuits," or **city jobs," have a dis- 
 tinct call to kinds of work that are neither. 
 They hover (in their leisure time) on the skirts 
 of the professions and trades which they might 
 have followed and could not. A mechanic in 
 Swindon has a real gift for ambulance work. 
 He is in demand when there is any accident, 
 ^nd a favourite with the doctors whom he helps 
 sometimes. A furniture remover, too, reads 
 medical works and wishes ^'he could have had 
 ihe education." Such persons, many of whom 
 have a real ''gift" are to be found everywhere. 
 Artists, geologists, carpenters and amateur 
 nurses. It is clear that the accident of locality 
 does not furnish the best reasons why a boy or 
 girl should follow one trade or another. 
 
 The truth, indeed, seems to be that the ques- 
 tion of aptitude hardly arises at all in settling 
 the career of most people. They have to take 
 what they can find, and make the best, or, as 
 often happens the worst of it. Something may 
 be known about their powers by their teachers 
 and parents. But even in the schools where 
 the individual child is observed it is not often 
 possible to know what he is best fitted for at 
 the age of 13. 
 
 For a while all education was '* literary," 
 even for the babies. It is now becoming 
 the rage to turn away from ''letters" and 
 make handwork the centre of all primary 
 school education. But, as the education of 
 
81 
 
 the worker's child ends to-day before 14, 
 and ended yesterday at 13, and even at 
 12, how could either ''system" yield its 
 more important results? The great fact that 
 emerges to-day is, that none of the children 
 can be ready by either system to enter the 
 world at 14. The future mechanic no more 
 than the future farmer or merchant is ready 
 'Ho begin the world," or specialize at a bench. 
 This is denied by some masters in town and 
 country who want the children young. But 
 it is feared these are not preparing children 
 to be future citizens and workers, but to be 
 future drudges or ''failures." 
 
 It is now time to admit facts. The mental 
 development of the average working-class child 
 is arrested in a very significant way at the 
 school-leaving age. No "technical education" 
 for working-class boys would do away with 
 the causes of this arrest? These causes 
 lie much deeper than the giving or with- 
 holding of any special order of training 
 (however important). They depend on a 
 GENERAL falling away of every kind of human 
 impetus and help just at the time when these 
 are most needed — at the age of thirteen or 
 fourteen. 
 
 A great many boys and girls also belong 
 happily to the practical and positive type. 
 They are well-fitted for work requiring 
 manual skill. Even among backward children 
 there is a good percentage of excellent 
 
82 
 manual workers — children who, it may be, 
 can do nothing with books, and are hopeless 
 dunces, till they find themselves before 
 a bench with tools in their hands. Our mis- 
 take, however, has been to take the backward 
 child as the representative of all the practical 
 and positive type of minds. It is a fatal mis- 
 take — and absurd on the face of it. Not only 
 many of the lowliest but also some of the highest 
 minds belong to this oldest, most stable, and 
 enduring of orders. What is to be done with 
 them? Send them to work at 12 or 14? But 
 that is the greatest blunder, perhaps, which 
 a nation can commit. It was easy to fall into this 
 error. It seemed so plausible. It rested on a solid 
 basis, that is to say on the fact that some back- 
 ward children can be good manual labourers. 
 Other backward children belong more or less 
 exclusively to other orders. Some backward 
 children do badly in the workshop and hold 
 their own fairly well in reading and recitation ! 
 Defect does not lie in the fact that one belongs 
 to one type or another, but in that one cannot 
 pass to the higher orders of work in any depart- 
 Tnent. 
 
 It is fatal to plan the educational systems of 
 the bulk of the nation's children on the needs 
 of any group of defectives ! Yet that is what 
 we have been doing in the past, and that is the 
 course we are held to now by the bulk of 
 working-class parents. 
 
83 
 
 If the arrest of development in the "' prac- 
 tical" order of child is a loss to the nation, the 
 neglect of the type of mind described very often 
 as the ' 'imaginative/ ' the * 'literary' ' and ' 'intro- 
 spective" is a serious danger. Such children go 
 out into life having their own temptations, their 
 own special powers, too, of working mischief. In 
 adult life they are despised very often because 
 of their lack of that very training that would 
 have made their power real and effective. In 
 short one must not stop growing at 12 or 14 
 on pain of becoming stunted for ever. 
 
 It is necessary (for complete human life) that 
 two kinds of mind activity should go on freely : 
 that the inner and the outgoing movement should 
 be vigorous. In virtue of one of these a child 
 or adult is an observer, and in virtue of the 
 other an interpreter. Normal human beings, 
 in virtue of their humanity, have to win by 
 training, continued far into the teens, a grow- 
 ing power over the outer and the inner worlds. 
 They gain this power in various ways. We are 
 always emphasising one, perhaps because we 
 do not fully understand either. 
 
 Of the need for advanced manual training, 
 there is no need to say much to-day. It is 
 becoming the new fetish. Everywhere 
 
 people are waking to the meaning of idle 
 hands, and the effect of such idleness on 
 youthful brains. Bolder and larger schemes 
 of work are being drawn up. Forges as well 
 as benches are being put into schools. The 
 
84 
 
 Minister of Education himself, described 
 schools that are full of the hum of labour. A 
 kind of English real school is coming into ex- 
 istence — real higher grade schools, with 
 laboratories as well as workshops. It is hard 
 to see how a youth of any type almost would 
 not profit by spending some part at least of 
 his day working and experimenting, observing 
 and recording. 
 
 But it is time to go further. The training 
 that is implicit in language is also important, 
 not for one type of boy or child, but for all 
 types. This fact has been overlooked hitherto 
 because **Physical Education" is understood 
 in a limited sense. It would seem almost as 
 if people forgot altogether that words are 
 chosen and uttered, just as wood or stone is 
 selected and hewn by the action of bodily or- 
 gans, and that these organs can be trained only 
 through action. 
 
 It would seem that up to very recent 
 times the English, who went in for so 
 much large muscle exercise, lost the very 
 idea of action as a thing present also 
 in oral work. Not so the French. Take 
 for example such a classbook as the *' Livre 
 'le Style," of P. Larousse. In it there are 142 
 lessons, every one of which obliges the pupil not 
 to listen merely or to read — but to search , com- 
 pare, choose, judge, and experiment with words 
 For example in the first exercises, certain groups 
 of words are given that have the same general 
 meaning, yet each has a specific meaning 
 
85 
 of its own that marks it out from the other. 
 * ^Indolent, negligent, idle, nonchalant." The 
 pupil must define every one of these and 
 give it its own place. *^ Wages, honor- 
 arium, salary." **Animal, beast, brute." The 
 scholars have not only to define these, but to 
 put them in their right places, in sentences. 
 Later, they take piles of words and find 
 synonyms for each. Then follows drill in 
 sentence-making. Not languid composition, 
 but real gymnastic — the finding of phrases to 
 duplicate others — the reading by contrast, that 
 is reading the opposite word of any which 
 one finds in italics. (Thus for example, the 
 scholars read a description of the French 
 nation with words in italics, which, replaced by 
 their opposites give a picture of the Arabs.) 
 
 There are exercises on the ellipse in lan- 
 guage — the scholars first filling out the 
 elliptic phrase, and afterwards (always the 
 reverse movement following every new exer- 
 cise) condensing the full sentence. On 
 "sterile" phrases there is a long gymnastic 
 (which shows very clearly how wordiness is not 
 the aim of the training) . Then come exercises 
 intended to be a kind of bridle to pedantry. 
 In the latter part of the course the poets, and 
 the work of great tale tellers (such as 
 La Fontaine) are put in contrast to that of 
 the mere purist. 
 
 It may be said that the great writers do 
 all this kind of work well without lessons. 
 
86 
 Yes, but the small writer does not do it 
 well. The rank and file man or woman 
 does not even try to do it alone. We know 
 what happens to him or her now. It is only 
 by continuous training that the later con- 
 quests of mental life are made. For lack of 
 it people sink back and are lost as thinkers 
 to the world. Nothing makes good this loss. 
 Masters and mistresses complain that the vic- 
 tims are * 'stupid," "'reckless/' that they 
 cannot be trusted alone. All this is true. If 
 one is lamed, one may well limp. 
 
 Of real language training one may say that 
 it is not out of harmony with the methods of the 
 workshop. In both orders of work, one learns by 
 doing. It would be impossible for an indolent 
 teacher to use such a book as the Livre de Style. 
 The teacher who uses it cannot perorate, cannot 
 shift the stress of labour from the pupils to his 
 own shoulders. It is they who have to act all 
 the time. It is they who feel the call every 
 moment to go forward, to search, to struggle, 
 to win — to act, in short, just as they must act 
 in the gymnasium, the workshop, the playing- 
 field. 
 
 At this point everything grows dim before 
 the eyes of many a working-class parent ! It 
 may be that their children fall back just at the 
 age when they should take a long leap forward. 
 But what is to be done? There is no margin 
 at all left even at the best of times from a wage 
 
87 
 of 30/- a week and under. To save from such 
 a wage is to stint the children in food, and 
 that is a poor kind of saving. What is to be 
 done? Is the State to take action? Is the 
 parent to wait till new legislation is passed? 
 The answer is surely that the State must take 
 action, but that the parent cannot wait. 
 
 To begin with, the field of child labour should 
 be invaded by the adult. The carrying and 
 fetching, even the doorstep cleaning and baby- 
 tending could be done by men and women out 
 of work, quite as well as by children out of 
 school. If this work is unorganised to-day 
 that is because the workers are too weak and 
 isolated to organise anything. Even such 
 ''private" labour as that of the house-keeper 
 and home-worker is now being put on a coUec- 
 tivist working-basis. Why then should not 
 the child-trades be organised too? The shop- 
 keepers in any street or area could, if public 
 opinion demanded it, band together to have 
 their fetching and carrying done by grown-ups. 
 To-day, as soon as the * 'jobbing" boy or girl is 
 17 he or she is turned away because he will 
 ask more wages. It should be made impossible 
 to get a boy or girl under 16. 
 
 If we turn away from the idea of scholar- 
 ships as a possible solution that is because they 
 touch only a small number, and far from stand- 
 ing for a common right, constitute a distinction 
 and a privilege. In a large number of public 
 elementary schools 25 per cent, of the places 
 
 I 
 
88 
 are now reserved for the children from the com- 
 mon schools. Were every place reserved the 
 schools would serve for a mere fraction of the 
 youth of the nation. And will the democ- 
 racy of to-morrow even desire to accept the 
 ideal of the ruling classes of to-day in educating 
 their sons and daughters ? Truth obliges us to 
 confess that this ideal is open to every kind 
 of criticism. It was conceived when no one 
 had very clear ideas as to the meaning of 
 growth, and when certainly no one had any 
 very clear appreciation of the varieties of men- 
 tal types. 
 
 What shall be done for the youth of the 
 nation between its seventeenth and twentieth 
 years ? Should these years be spent in games 
 and study? It is certain that the new psych- 
 ology does not justify us in coming to any such 
 conclusion. On the contrary, it indicates very 
 clearly that at sixteen or seventeen a new 
 bath of experience, and a new and serious 
 discipline is necessary for real progress. The 
 field for the exercise of adolescent energies, 
 turbulent as they are in the first manifesta- 
 tions can hardly be the study or the class-room. 
 In every age the fighting, ''ragging," rioting 
 student has indicated this in spite of his tutors, 
 though in English Universities at least (though 
 not in Germany) it is believed that games, 
 boating, riding, etc., will provide at once an 
 outlet and a discipline for the Samurai of the 
 privileged classes. In this our successors may 
 
89 
 see only a timid reversion to mere play as a 
 preparation for life. At seventeen life grows 
 stern. One cannot then find a stern and varied 
 enough kind of discipline in any playing-field. 
 The new life with the love of adventure and the 
 ardent desire for experience as well as know- 
 ledge should find expression now, if ever, in 
 the work-a-day world with all its responsibili- 
 ties and trials. But in order to make this 
 possible two things are necessary. First, the 
 working, or rather the wage-earning day must 
 be limited — say 20 to 30 hours per week. 
 Secondly, the young workers should attend 
 either Higher Technical Schools, where they 
 should be trained as scientifically educated 
 skilled workers, or (in the case of lads and young 
 girls of another order of mental make-up) in 
 Higher Schools, where Modern Languages and 
 Commercial subjects in a liberal sense would 
 be taken. Higher Agricultural Schools, with 
 liberal courses in Chemistry, Physics, Mathe- 
 matics, Literature and Languages should be 
 provided for those who will engage in farming 
 or any department of rural work. 
 
 There still remains the scholar to be pro- 
 vided for, the type of young person who, if 
 fortune was at all kind to him, would not wish 
 to give up *' Greek in Eesponsions," and 
 who is, in the opinion of Thring and others, 
 the most precious material of all. It is im- 
 possible to think of these without remember- 
 ing that they were royally provided for in the 
 
90 
 past, and that all this provision has been for 
 the most part in vain.* 
 
 Far, however, from wishing to turn the 
 youth of the nation into an army of scholars, 
 varied by a squadron of athletes or dexterous 
 players, the new school of educationists will 
 accept very simply the dictum that practice 
 
 * The schools, to be sure, became very rich. Here is 
 a quotation from Mr. Mansbridge, who has done so much 
 to throw light on the Land-versus-Education question. 
 "The endowments of all Secondary Schools in Scotland 
 are not so great as Eton. Only the other day Eton 
 received .£151,000 for ground near Hampstead, much en- 
 hanced in value by recent developments. Some of the 
 land, if not all, was granted to the College for the 
 maintenance of poor scholars by Henry VI. It is a 
 matter of anxiety to us what has been done with the 
 money. Of course we know that the Eton College 
 Trustees have done something superficially justifiable 
 with it, but they have not done it for poor scholars." 
 
 Harrow School was founded for poor boys. John 
 Lyon, the founder, had this set forth even on his tomb 
 (all can still read it on the Lyon Brass in Harrow 
 CJhurch). "Heare lyeth buryed the bodye of John Lyon, 
 late of Preston, in this Parish, yeoman, deceased, the 
 11th day of October, 1592, who hath founded a free 
 Grammar School in this Parish to have continuance 
 for ever, and for maintenance thereof and for reliefe of 
 the Poore and of some poore scholars in the Univer- 
 sities.'' 
 
 He seems to have taken the greatest pains to make his 
 desires known. The favoured boys were to be chosen 
 for "towardness, povertie, and painfulness.*' A certain 
 number were to go on to the University as eight-year 
 exhibitioners. He bought land in Preston, and also 
 in Marylebone. Needless to say, the London property 
 increased in value. It now brings in an income of 
 which he could have had no idea in wildest dreams. 
 But how have the poor folks of Harrow profited by all 
 this? 
 
 In 1809, it seems, they bethought them suddenly that 
 they had a right to this school. They chose represen- 
 •tatives to go with their churchwarden to the governors 
 
91 
 comes before theory, that a new bath of ex- 
 perience precedes new life. England, in par- 
 ticular, looking back on the story of the won- 
 derful nineteenth century will find nothing 
 to justify her in turning her youth into mere 
 students, and locking them out of the world 
 of action. On the contrary, she will desire 
 above all to let her adolescents over sixteen 
 
 and enquire why the elections were carried out (as 
 was the fact) quite unlawfully. 
 
 They complained that the school was of no use to 
 them; that even if one or two fathers plucked up 
 courage to send a child to Harrow School, the life of the 
 said child was made unbearable by the behaviour of the 
 hi|:h-6pirited young gentlemen. They appear to have 
 said that the classics were of no use to them— falling 
 into thg snare of commercialism without any misgiving. 
 One of the masters of Harrow, Dr. Vaughan, felt sorry, 
 doubtless, for the simple Harrovians. He actually 
 helped them to build a school of a humbler order, by 
 giving back a sum of money from the rapidly growing 
 foundation treasury. Just so a child from whom a 
 shilling was stolen might be quieted by having a large 
 penny slipped into its hand. 
 
 Take another school — Rugby. By will, Lawrence 
 Sheriff, the founder, devised <£150 in money and property 
 for it, and also <£100 as salary for a master. After- 
 wards he revoked this, and granted instead a piece of 
 land belonging to him in Middlesex. These few acres 
 near Gray s inn Fields of course made the foundation 
 wealthy. Passing by Winchester, Westminster, St. 
 Paul's (whose lands once worth <£120 are now worth 
 ^20,000 a year, and which was founded mainly for poor 
 scholars) let us glance at Charterhouse. Sutton, the 
 founder, builded better than he knew, and yet not for 
 those whom he had the desire to help. His aim wa« 
 to open "one free school for the instruction, teaching, 
 maintenance, and education of 35 poor children and 
 flcholars. The first resolution passed by his governors 
 at their first meeting was "No children shall be placed 
 here (in Charterhouse School) whose parents have any 
 estate in land to leave unto them, but only the chil- 
 dren of poor men who want means to bring them uj).'' 
 Though the school has now over 30 masters, and its 
 wealth is increased in proportion, the class-rooms are 
 not filled with the "poor scnolars." 
 
92 
 enter the arena, not without protection but 
 without reserve. And the protection itself 
 will mean not the shutting but the opening- 
 of gates, for it will make it impossible to limit 
 a youth's experience of the working world to 
 a fragment of a trade and a corner of a work- 
 shop. 
 
 Thus, we cannot join issue here with those 
 who want a straight run from the primary 
 school to the university, if this means 
 that no one under twenty-one must work for 
 his livelihood, but engage only in study and 
 play ! Tame is the youth that submits to such 
 terms as these, that does not long in dawning 
 manhood and womanhood to be at grips with 
 the world. ''Learn by doing,'' said FroebeL 
 '*Lay hold of life," said Goethe to the young. 
 In other words, labour and struggle, conquer, 
 and bear defeat in the open on pain of having 
 nothing to theorize about or study in later life 
 if you fail to live now. 
 
 What we see to-day is that the young people 
 who are not allowed to do anything but read 
 and play get into mischief. Mischief is another 
 name for misplaced energy, and it is clear that 
 the wild youths of the Oxford of yesterday, 
 the young ''Bloods," as they are called, who 
 got up the town rows and made the dons them- 
 selves tremble in their rooms were really try- 
 ing to get some outlet for their penned-up 
 energies. It was a poor outlet they got. 
 
93 
 
 It was, if not child's play, at least boy's play 
 after all. These boys in their later teens were 
 not obliged to take on any responsibilities. 
 At the other end of the social scale there was 
 child labour, infant labour almost, but the 
 * ^ spirited ' ' young gentleman had no need to 
 think of labour at all. It is possible that the 
 spirited lad or girl of to-morrow will not toler- 
 ate this. He will feel, when sheltered at 
 college in his later teens, as a tall strong youth 
 might feel held in a nurse's arms while out- 
 side the flood was rising or the burglars were 
 breaking in, met on the threshold by some of 
 his small sisters and brothers. 
 
 And yet education is not to end at 17. 
 University or Higher Education is the right 
 not of a few, but of all. Higher Educa- 
 tion is given at Oxford and at Cambridge freely 
 to men who are not scholars in any real sense 
 as well as to those who can fully profit by it. 
 What is more, the promise of it gilds even boy- 
 hood and girlhood with a new radiance. In 
 ^* Oxford from Within," Hugh de Selincourt 
 writes of all this : ''All through his sojourn at 
 school," he says of one,'* he was looking for- 
 ward. Responsions was passed. The time 
 drew nearer. Residence in Oxford loomed 
 like the rosiest of clouds on his horizon, and 
 so brightly that he could not look for long 
 into its rosy depths. No lover awaited the 
 arrival of his mistress with greater eagerness. 
 There was no fear and no misgiving. His 
 
94 
 joy as the time drew nearer became cumula- 
 tive. His three years at Oxford was a solid, 
 shining fact, behind which the uncertainty of 
 the future was entirely hidden." 
 
 As one turns to think of working-class educa- 
 tion, one is conscious of a hardness, a dark- 
 ness even where there is much planning and 
 activity. Technical schools, evening schools, 
 industrial schools and polytechnics. Excel- 
 lent. But where is the glamour, the laughter, 
 the joy of life breaking in over the threshold 
 of youth like a wave? Where is the workers^ 
 school one dreams of, and saves up for, and 
 thinks of as a lover all through the stormy 
 years of adolescence ? 
 
 In Denmark — if anywhere, perhaps. For 
 there many a farm lad or dairy girl does 
 whisper to himself or herself as he or she goes 
 about the day's labour, ^'I, too, will go to 
 a beautiful place for six months — or three?'' 
 Grundtvig was more than a reformer when he 
 planned the High School, and determined it 
 should be a beautiful place, open to all. He 
 wanted a great TIniversity — a University of 
 all Northland people, greater than Oxford. 
 That dream was not realised. But he gave a 
 new vision to farm servants. It was he who 
 broke the heavy mould of the ^^ hard-baked 
 peasant." 
 
 He let them feel that all the striving and 
 labour of these busy years would issue in a new 
 awakening. 
 
VI. 
 
 The Great Awakening. 
 
 Up to the age of 18 schooling is more or less a 
 matter of compulsion for many. The English, 
 more than others, want to turn away from 
 books. Many declare that they cannot believe 
 in them. 
 
 But there comes a time when all this revolt 
 ends. With the dawn of manhood or woman- 
 hood every normal being wakes, even to-day, 
 as if from a sleep. He or she wakes it may be 
 only for a moment — and seeing the walls of a 
 prison house, sinks back again into mental 
 torpor. No real observer doubts, however, that 
 the waking hour comes, and that thousands 
 bestir themselves then, who have never shown 
 a desire for a larger life and will never again 
 fight to win it. It is at this age that the high- 
 born Russian flings herself into the search for 
 new knowledge, leaving her own country if 
 necessary, astounding the Swiss or French 
 teacher by her ardour. It is at this age that 
 the young Danes leave the land and flock into 
 the High Schools. Sometimes the awakening 
 shows itself in enthusiasm for a cause — in the 
 rising of young peasants. (The martyrdom of 
 Enjolras is the illustration of a fact common 
 95 
 
96 
 to normal young manhood; that of Gavroche 
 is, on the contrary an eccentricity illumined by 
 genius.) England's young manhood and 
 womanhood is certainly no exception. The 
 History of the Adult School Movement shows 
 this impulse persisting even in riper years. 
 In one country the great awakening is ex- 
 pected in all and prepared for. That country 
 is Denmark. 
 
 I write in October, the month of falling 
 leaves. Over the wide flats of Funen the 
 mellow sunshine is falling, and the last caress 
 of summer is in the quiet hours. And now in 
 the homes of many Danish land people there is 
 a kind of hush breaking in on the work and 
 minds of all. Thousands of young men and 
 also women are packing their boxes and getting 
 their clothes in order. They are going to leave 
 home, perhaps for the first time (not a few have 
 been out in service, however, to earn money 
 for this wonderful flight into the new world), 
 and everyone, from the father and mother who 
 are making a sacrifice in letting a son or 
 daughter leave the work of the holding or 
 farm, down to the little children who look on 
 with awe-struck eyes at the preparations, feel 
 that something grave and important is afoot. 
 It is not a change of place that is to be made. 
 It is a complete change of life and occupation. 
 The young man looks at his tools — and bids 
 them farewell. The young woman stands at 
 milking time near the cow-sheds, and takes 
 
97 
 
 silent leave of tlie home life and its busy round 
 of duties. 
 
 It is the hour of the great awakening. Many- 
 years have passed, and the glow of childhood 
 is far behind. Far behind are the years when 
 life was new, every day an eternity full of 
 stirring events. One has grown sadder, a little 
 chilled as well as strengthened by hard labour. 
 Now comes a new day. Childhood was only the 
 first awakening. It resembles this later and 
 greater thing only as the grey dawn resembles 
 the flooding gold of noon. 
 
 Hegel taught that the awaking of youth 
 should transcend that of childhood. The 
 eyes that have opened to behold the near 
 must in youth look beyond, and take a higher 
 survey of life. *'Let the youth plunge into 
 foreign languages and studies, mastering 
 Greek and Latin, and living over again the 
 life of distant and alien races," said Hegel. 
 And Grundtvig, the great Danish founder of 
 High Schools, took more or less the same 
 view. Only he hated ancient Rome and all its 
 works. 
 
 Along the level roads of Denmark there pass 
 in the late October days many young people. 
 Some are well off and can hire carriages, or 
 find seats in the cosy, hooded Danish wagon, 
 driven by the light, strong Danish horses. 
 But many are poor. Their luggage was 
 sent off a week ago, for the sake of cheap- 
 ness, and arrived in a leisurely way by the 
 
 G 
 
98 
 carrier's cart. Perhaps their thoughts, if not 
 anxious, are grave and touched with sadness, 
 as the thoughts of noble young people must 
 be who turn their faces to a new world. 
 They are going in for Higher Education — 
 not Technical Training or any such thing. 
 For Higher Education alone they fare forth 
 under the falling leaves. Not for them the 
 ''Continuation Class" wedged in a gap of the 
 working day. Not for them even the Agri- 
 cultural College, or Land School, where 
 ''practical" subjects are taken that have a 
 direct bearing on the future wage-earning 
 power of the countryman or woman. Accord- 
 ing to the statistics given in Dr. HoUman's 
 recently published book, only 108 out of 
 2,592 men students in Danish high-schools 
 took any instruction whatsoever in land sub- 
 jects. The teachers — even the Agricultural 
 School teachers — far from discouraging this 
 estrangement of the peasant from his tools 
 hail it as the great promise of his future 
 emancipation. "We desire," said La Cour, 
 the greatest of the Agricultural College 
 teachers, "to make human beings complete 
 jirst, to see the personality unfold itself as 
 the prelude of every other kind of event or 
 reform." From Dalum and Ladelund, 
 Ringsted and Lyngby (all famous agricul- 
 tural schools) comes the same voice — a voice 
 that is like a finger pointing the way to the 
 adolescent arriving at cross-roads in life. "In 
 
99 
 order to learn about your work you must be 
 prepared to learn. Growth itself is a kind 
 of pulse — a beat and pause, a gathering of 
 strength and a going forward. Do not hasten 
 else you will lose all. To be a good farmer 
 as to be a good scholar one needs intelli- 
 gence — and real growth. So, for the present, 
 forget all about practical aims. Forget your 
 crops. Memory, imagination, reason must 
 first awake and expand in the right atmos- 
 phere and by the right means." So the pro- 
 cession of youth moves on, heeding the finger- 
 posts of the wise. 
 
 Of all the schools Roskilde is perhaps the 
 most beautiful. The approach is by a wide 
 road with green fields on one side, and the 
 blue firth on the other. The school itself, a 
 large new building with grey terraces and 
 wide-rounded doorways, recalls, for all its 
 newness, the charm of old cloisters and ven- 
 erable halls. It seems as if the Spirit of 
 the Past breathed into the labours of the 
 men who built the walls. N'o dormitories 
 here. Every student has his own room, and 
 over the doors are names that are lights of the 
 past— ''St. Enud," ''Dalum," ''Sigurd," and 
 so on. Then the lecture halls are wide, but 
 not very lofty, and in spite of the many chairs 
 closely ranged, they have a homely look. 
 The rostrum is very low, wide, and rounded, 
 and always one remembers it as a place where 
 a man stands with folded arms, bending over 
 
100 
 a little in earnest, familiar talk, like an elder 
 brother or father speaking to his children. 
 Grundtvig's method showed him to be an 
 evolutionist by instinct. He, who had written 
 books enough to fill a library, cast aside all 
 books in facing his peasant scholars. He 
 got rid of the school-desk; his rostrum was 
 like a hearthstone. He went back to an art 
 that is still cultivated in the bare islands of 
 the Hebrides — the art of vivid, warm and 
 moving speech. In Canna and in Eriskay, 
 where fathers talk to their children of the 
 past, it often rises into eloquence, but at its 
 humblest, it is still the art of speaking in- 
 timate and unforgettable words.* The 
 High School teachers have not only revived 
 and cultivated this half -for gotten art, they 
 have expanded it into an oral method by which 
 they take hold of every subject. For not only 
 literature and history, but also physics and 
 mathematics, as we shall see later are ap- 
 proached in the same way. 
 
 The purpose, too, of the man of genius who 
 led them — for such he was, with his eyes of 
 wild-streaming light — was opposed to all that 
 was most cruel and cynical in the working- 
 class education of the past. He reversed the 
 
 * Father MacDonald, of Eriskay — the brilliant and 
 much-loved priest of Eriskay, linguist, naturalist, poet, 
 orator in many tongues, who died, alas ! in early prime — 
 told me that many of the island fishermen often uttered 
 in his hearing, discourses that equalled anything he 
 had ever heard from trained speakers. Not only were 
 the discourses good in matter, they were perfect in form. 
 
101 
 evil process by which, in every great civilisa- 
 tion of the past, the worker, however carefully 
 trained, however skilled, was allowed to remain 
 blind so that he could not even realise himself 
 as a creator at all — so that, in fact, his work 
 did not waken him. Grundtvig and his 
 followers began by waking the scholar, and 
 postponed every other end to this. *'The 
 difference between the educated and the 
 uneducated," says one of Grundtvig's 
 followers, ''is not one of skill, or even of know- 
 ledge. It is simply that the educated sees the 
 relationship or connection of things." To 
 rouse the scholar so that he should find his 
 place in time, and in the world, and, finding 
 that, should have at least some dim notion of 
 the connection of events and the meaning of 
 great lives, and of the race-soul; this was the 
 first goal. However poor the mental equip- 
 ment of his adult scholar he must reach it. 
 One must help him to unify his poor resources, 
 and in so doing lift him into the ranks of the 
 ''educated," that is to say, above the discon- 
 nected floating thoughts and visions of child- 
 hood — above the broken, mutilated life of 
 slavery.* 
 
 *It is not at all clear that even the most highly 
 skilled town workers ever reach this point at all. Not 
 in one country, but in every country educationists have 
 reason to think of the city-learner as one who learns 
 evervthing, but who does not find the thread through 
 the labrinth, and who does not expect to find it. M. 
 Herrmann Trier, who pioneeered the Evening School work 
 in Copenhagen in the eighties, testifies that excellent as 
 
102 
 
 It is well to look back at the life of the man 
 who, with another called Kristen Kold, did for 
 the education of young men and women what 
 Froebel did for the education of children. It 
 is true that Grundtvig was, in politics, a Tory. 
 If he was a lover of freedom, it was only of 
 inner freedom, the liberty of mind and soul. 
 And then it is hardly true to say that he 
 wanted to give the best to all. For he did not 
 see how all could have more than a glimpse as 
 it were of the Halls of Beauty and Wisdom. 
 But he said that everyone should have this 
 glimpse and get to know something of the 
 beauty and wonder of Life. 
 
 The fact is that having got his foot on the 
 threshold the Danish peasant stormed the Halls 
 of Light. He threw off his dull vestments. He 
 began to make his cow-house almost beauti- 
 ful, and his little holding became a new thing in 
 the story of labour. Grundtvig built better than 
 he knew. But just because of this many would 
 care perhaps to know something of this life 
 so long (he died at about ninety in 1872), so 
 full, so varied. Why did he not do as the other 
 learned men of his day did? For after all 
 he was not consciously at least what is known 
 
 were the town classes they had little or no influence in 
 80 far as any aim beyond the mere learning of "sub- 
 jects" was concerned. A man learned French, or 
 arithmetic, or drawing, and drew or counted better in 
 consequence — there the matter ended. The High School 
 transformed the peasant. The Evening School did not 
 transform the city dweller. 
 
103 
 as a ''social reformer." There are many 
 reasons why English people, and above all 
 English working folk should want to know him, 
 for it was in England, and when he was already 
 an old man, that he got his final impetus. He 
 got it from the toiling masses of England, who 
 somehow reminded him of Thor, the God of 
 Thunder and of the old Vikings. (He did not 
 go far north, and was never in the North 
 Country mills where the children were at 
 labour.) 
 
 As a child Grundtvig had learned to love 
 his own race. His mother was the daughter 
 of Danish heroes, and she sang to him the 
 songs, and told him the stories of the great 
 bye-gone days. His father too, the son of 
 a line of preachers helped to give him 
 a clear vista of the past. He learned many 
 tongues, and became a fine classical scholar, 
 but unlike many, he turned back to his own 
 race. He translated the Snorre and Saxo 
 into Danish, studied old chroniclers and 
 Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the British 
 Museum. He loved the Danish peasant even 
 more than the Greek philosopher. 
 
 At that time northern mythology was not 
 at all respected by the learned. There were 
 no Wagner festivals, no popular translations 
 from the old chronicles. To the learned at 
 Copenhagen the northern mythology was an 
 *'ugly bush," but the Greek classical litera- 
 ture ''an enchanting rose tree." Yet it was 
 
104 
 clear to Grundtvig that the enchanting rose 
 tree had not its roots in Denmark, and that 
 to graft the Greek rose on the English or Danish 
 stem did not tend to bring scholar and labourer 
 together, but had quite the contrary effect. 
 To find the real spirit of the Danish people, to 
 waken it through the living word — that was 
 his aim. 
 
 His first lessons must have been like the 
 old Skald's song, striking the rusted harp 
 of the peasant's nerves, and waking the 
 old life -melody. First, the old tales, 
 the old songs, the old spirit in the class- 
 room. Through' these the peasant mould was 
 to be broken, and the old fire and music 
 stream forth anew. The results of immense 
 learning were condensed into warm, simple 
 words. These, falling from the lips of the 
 High School teacher filled with ^'the spirit 
 that works in freedom," would speak to the 
 old brave spirit that was yet in the peasant. 
 He would stir at the call of the Past. This 
 was the prophecy of Grundtvig. 
 
 The history of the movement is told by Dr. 
 HoUman, of Berlin, in his book **Danishe 
 Volkshoch Schule," which is not yet trans- 
 lated. But it is also told in English by Mr. 
 T. S. Thornton in his five Reports and Essays 
 on Danish Education. The first High School 
 was opened at Redding, in North Schleswig, in 
 1844, that is to say, at a time when Denmark 
 
105 
 was sunk in despair. ''Tlie very thieves for- 
 got to steal in Denmark then/' we are told. 
 Surrounded by strong foes, ruined by wars and 
 losses, the little nation had lost hope. In 
 1864, after a new war, the school was moved to 
 Askov, north of the new border. There are over 
 70 High Schools now in Denmark, and about 
 200,000 men and women have passed through 
 them. They have put their seal on the life of 
 the whole land population of Denmark, and 
 the proof of this is that we can hardly speax 
 of the Danish * 'peasantry" any more. 
 
 A great deal has been said and written ot 
 the High School methods in England of latc 
 But each of these schools has not only some- 
 thing that singles it out from all others ; each 
 offers something new to almost every stranger. 
 Then they have taken root in Sweden, in 
 Norway, in Finland, and Iceland sent her 
 thanks to Askov when, some years ago, its 
 headmaster, Mr. Ludvig Schroder, died. One 
 goes, another, and all is not said. Every 
 visitor finds in them something new. 
 
 Singing is a great feature of the High 
 School. On the morning and often in th^ 
 course of the day one hears the same hard, 
 strong singing in unison. The song-book used 
 is full of beautiful ballads from the pen of 
 Bjornsen, of Grundtvig, and others. Great 
 attention is paid also to physical drill. The 
 
106 
 masters hold that those who engage in hard, 
 manual labour in youth require physical educa- 
 tion even more than do those who do very little, 
 or no manual work. So there is a fine gym- 
 nasium in every High School; it is used for 
 an hour daily by every student. In the summer 
 months — from April to August — the school is 
 filled by young women, and the gymnasium 
 offers a pretty spectacle. 
 
 The class is taken by Mrs. Ingeborg Appel. 
 The young women, all in gymnast's costume, 
 might be all scions of noble houses — so free 
 and graceful is their carriage. Tall, and very 
 fair, with flaxen locks, blue eyed, they 
 have the beauty of the daughters of Sigurd. 
 Many wear silver arrows in their heavy braids ; 
 others have their hair in shining crowns, or 
 smooth, parted in front, and bound with a 
 silver ribbon. There are Swedes here and also 
 Norwegians, and girls from the Faroes, and 
 also perhaps an Icelandic maiden, speaking the 
 old mother tongue of Norway — the Norway of a 
 1,000 years ago. The exercises are on the whole 
 a good deal more strenuous than are those taken 
 in our Polytechnics and Secondary Schools. 
 For a whole hour the girls leap, run, bend, 
 climb, and do breathing drill. At intervals 
 they march about the hall singing lustily. 
 
 At Askov the students number 400 in winter, 
 There is a staff of 13 teachers (some of whom 
 are famous in science and literature), besides 
 
107 
 many visiting masters. A former pupil 
 gives a description of a school day which 
 appears in Dr. HoUmann's book *'Danishe 
 yolkshoch Schnle," facts from which may be 
 given here. 
 
 At seven the bell rings, and the school 
 awakes. (It is a large school and includes 
 many buildings). Doors and windows open. 
 Everyone helps to put his own room in order, 
 (two students share one room as a general 
 thing). At half -past seven there is a clatter 
 of wooden shoes in the Court and hundreds 
 of young people gather in the dining hall. 
 After breakfast, prayers and singing, then 
 the lectures begin. Dr. Marius Christensen 
 takes the History of Languages, La Cour 
 Historical Physics, and the Head Master 
 Northern Myths and Hero Legends. At nine 
 the pupils go to the gymnasium, and at ten 
 the shower baths are crowded. Prom half- 
 past ten till two the work goes on without a 
 break. Lectures are given, but a striking 
 feature of the work is that later the pupils 
 form themselves into small groups. These 
 have instruction in mathematics, physics, 
 etc., until two. 
 
 The second-year students (Askov has two- 
 year courses) work in the laboratories. The 
 school dines at two, and after dinner there 
 is recreation. Games and more singing. 
 From four to six there is Language study. 
 
108 
 Danish, German, and English are taken, and 
 at six, more History. It would seem as if 
 eight to nine hours close study is too much 
 in one day, but it hardly appears so. There is 
 so much that refreshes. The poetic element is 
 not absent from any of the work. Dr. Feilberg, 
 the aged pastor of Askov, is a famous Folklorist 
 and contributes articles to English maga- 
 zines. To read one of his articles (as for 
 example: *'The Corpse door — a Danish Sur- 
 vival," which appeared in ''Folk Lore" three 
 years ago) is to understand why as he stands 
 up every eye is fixed upon him. He knows 
 so well the custom, thoughts, and life of bye- 
 gone days in Scandinavia and Iceland, he is 
 so learned, and he finds none the less such 
 simple words that everyone must listen. 
 And through all runs a strain of music, of 
 poetic thought and the idealism in which 
 Grundtvig had such faith. One can see how, 
 when on certain evenings, such a teacher meets 
 with the scholars and talks over their work, life 
 takes a new meaning. The work is very hard. 
 Yet in spite of this close, rapid work, here is 
 an atmosphere of rest. There are, as we said, 
 no examinations to pass — no prizes to win. 
 And the pupil is going back to his work after 
 he leaves school. 
 
 Into this busy yet calm place the young 
 Dane turns at 20 or 22, as a heated traveller 
 might turn down a cool lane. Here, the 
 storm of adolescence past, the first initiation 
 
109 
 into the world of toil over, he finds himself 
 in a real school, a place of leisure. All the 
 instruction has been planned to give him what 
 he needs at this hour. In the programme of 
 the Central College at Oxford I have seen 
 among the list of subjects taken by pupils 
 the word '* Evolution.'' I do not know how 
 this is taught as one subject, but the histori- 
 cal instruction of the Danish High School is 
 carefully designed for one object — to give a 
 clear notion of the meaning of evolution. 
 Herr Appel, the head master of Askov makes 
 this clear in the work. Students must acquire 
 the ability to recall and live through again the 
 life of the past. They must be absorbed in the 
 main events and movements of the world's 
 history. Otherwise, they are mere strangers 
 in the world and also mere tools. 
 
 The method is illustrated well even in the 
 class-books that have been written by the 
 High School staffs for their scholars. Take 
 for example the great work on Physics, of 
 which Mr. Appel is joint author. The book is 
 a series of miniature illustrated biographies, 
 one might say, as well as a description of 
 researches and discoveries. Many of its prob- 
 lems are, of course, faced by the scholars them- 
 selves in the laboratory or in the experiment 
 grounds near the school or in the field or class- 
 room. But here is a book which makes the 
 student walk all the time near the great shades 
 of the discoverers. From Archimedes to 
 
110 
 Robert Boyle the learner follows tliem. The 
 writer knows them all well. He has spoken of 
 them to his pupils as one speaks of those whose 
 labours one has shared. It is the same as re- 
 gards other subjects, as for example, astronomy. 
 Here again the student is always stepping in 
 the traces of the race. He puts his foot in the 
 tracts of Copernicus, of Kepler, Newton and 
 Bradley. If one turns from Professor Appel 
 to Professor La Cour, teacher of Mathematics, 
 one finds that the method is still the same. 
 '*We take the same problems as the Egyptians 
 once faced. We study their buildings. Then 
 we go to Greece, or rather we follow Thales to 
 Egypt, and return with him to Melet where 
 he founds the Ionic School and sacrifices to 
 the gods because he has found the law. (the 
 very law which we have just ourselves dis- 
 covered)." La Cour is never weary of testi- 
 fying of the great impression made by the 
 simplest propositions of Thales when they 
 come before the pupil in the right his- 
 torical connection. He shows how even the 
 simplest lad or girl meeting the problems of 
 geometry in the order in which they have 
 arisen are no longer puzzled. ''Is it not 
 absurd," he asks, "to set the hard problems 
 first?* Little by little one learns the art of 
 abstraction . . . One goes faster and surer 
 
 *Binet asks the same question — is never tired of 
 asking it. It seems hard to convince many teachers 
 that one must not go too fast— on pain of going very 
 slowly. 
 
Ill 
 
 if one keeps in the traces of the human race 
 itself, than if one adopts the method of stand- 
 ing on a high pedestal and calling down to the 
 bewildered novices that they must scramble 
 over this or that cliff or into this or that gulf.'^ 
 
 The end of all this learning and teaching is 
 the waking to a new life. After a certain time 
 the scholar gains a real vision of the past. A 
 light flits over the darkness and chaos, and he 
 begins to understand the world a little, and also 
 himself. It is not likely, it is not even possible, 
 say many of the High School teachers, that a 
 youth can win this new vision in an Evening 
 School, or in a Technical Institute, or Con- 
 tinuation class. The atmosphere in such 
 places is too noisy. And besides, the time is 
 too short. In order to get any Higher Educa- 
 tion one must go to a real school, and one must 
 also spend all one's time and strength on the 
 work of the school. One must forget worldly 
 occupations and enjoy a real Sabbath of rest 
 from these. Just as an Oxford man is heard 
 to say proudly and thankfully ^'I am glad that 
 Oxford is a backwater," so many of the High 
 School teachers say ^'We are glad that no 
 echo of the world of labour is heard in our 
 schools." Mr. Thornton reported in 1905 that 
 nearly 40 of the 66 High Schools then in 
 existence in Denmark were purely humanistic. 
 These schools contented themselves with doing 
 the work of preparation. They did not begin 
 
112 
 to teach even building construction or agricul- 
 ture. 
 
 Yet, close by many of the High Schools is the 
 world of labour. Almost at the door of Askov, for 
 example, is an agricultural experiment station 
 with fields that are like leaves with large 
 writing on them. To walk through them is to 
 see on every hand the effect of soils and 
 manures of different kinds on cereals. In the 
 same grounds as Lyneby High School is the 
 Land School of Lyneby. Many of the High 
 School teachers are on Land School staffs ; and 
 a large proportion of the High School scholars 
 — about 44 per cent. — will go later into the 
 Land School, which has given expert farmers 
 already not only to Funen and Jutland, but 
 also to Sussex and Essex ! The better-off 
 students in the High School must be conscious 
 more or less of that vivid new world of life 
 close by. But even the poorest — those who 
 cannot hope to go thither — must feel that they 
 also belong to the forward movement in in- 
 dustry as well as in life. As they rest now 
 from toil in the field and farm-yards, the ex- 
 periences of yesterday begin to have a new 
 meaning. '^How do you solve your problems?" 
 said a questioner of old to a scientist. *'By 
 thinking always of them — by patience," was 
 the answer. But the new psychologist does 
 not believe in this method. ^'Not by thinking 
 of them always," says Binet. *'By resting 
 from them altogether after working a while." 
 
113 
 No doubt the utter change of life, the rest from 
 the old labours, plays a great part in the quick 
 change worked by the High School. 
 
 Every day its aim and method are vindi- 
 cated. Its aim IS to waken the sleeper. Once 
 awakened there is no need to shake him, to 
 force things on him, to torture him with advice 
 and help. He thinks for himself. The Danish 
 land folk think about their sons and daughters 
 not only while they are babies, but when they 
 are in their teens. Thus near the College of 
 Askov there is a Sloyd School, where the 
 people's sons are sent to board in winter after 
 they are old enough to leave the day schools. 
 
 We try in England to show that child-labour 
 is wrong. There are societies to make people 
 wash, and save money, and open their windows. 
 But all this is slow work. It worries — but 
 does not awaken the sleeper. In Denmark, 
 after a time, as education spreads through the 
 Danish High Schools, the fine hygienic 
 arrangements found in the schools began to 
 appear in the homes. It is certain that very 
 soon every house will have its bath-room, just 
 as to-day almost every village has its com- 
 munal bath-room and gymnasium 
 
 Then the prospects of the land people be- 
 came much brighter, just as their ways of 
 looking at things changed. In 1870 Denmark 
 was a poor country. The people grew corn, 
 but had given no attention to stock-raising 
 or dairy- work. Nothing strikes the stranger 
 
114 
 more in Denmark now than the appearance of 
 the horses. The farm teams are light 
 strong animals; yoked in long waggons they 
 give a new appearance to the country side. 
 Farm labour is no longer associated with heavy- 
 footed beasts and humans. On every hand 
 one sees flourishing farms, experimenting 
 agricultural stations, and co-operative dairies. 
 The cow-houses are clean as parlours, and 
 lighted by electricity. Above every stall i» 
 a chart showing the yield of every animal, 
 and also the proportions of cream to milk. 
 In 1881 the net export of bacon, butter, and 
 eggs was £2,402,000. In 1904 it was 
 £13,614,000. It is now said to be over 
 £25,000,000. Canadian farmers go to study 
 the methods of the Danes, and the latter are 
 held up everywhere as the most successful 
 farm managers and dairy people. They are 
 in touch with every country. Even the small- 
 holders have their Press. They follow the 
 progress of science in all that concerns agri- 
 culture and stock-raising, dairy work, etc. 
 The Danish small-holder is, in all technical 
 matter, far beyond his brothers in France, 
 Germany, and England. But he is interested 
 also in social subjects. He has, moreover, 
 his own schools — as at Odense, for example — 
 which has a large small-holders' College. 
 Of these small-holders (many of whom have 
 spent only one winter at a High School) In- 
 spector Buns said: '*It may be that they have 
 
115 
 
 forgotten mucli that they learned. But they 
 have been taught how to see, to hear, to use 
 their powers." They are leading a movement 
 of their own in Denmark, and have to be 
 reckoned with, not only by agriculturalists, 
 but by all politicians and land-law makers as 
 well. 
 
 The Danish High School is within the 
 reach of the humblest. It is not, however, 
 a poor man's university. The rich can come 
 and the noble. A young baroness took her 
 place last winter at Askov by the side of a 
 cottar's daughter. The baroness swept and 
 dusted her room with the cottar's daughter. 
 But she had no privation. The food is ex- 
 cellent and abundant. And some of the 
 schools would compare with many a rich 
 man's house. The bedrooms of Roskilde 
 look out on a wide grassy court. On the 
 walls hang beautiful pictures. In all the 
 schools I have seen there was fine statuary, 
 flowers in bowls and vases, quiet nooks for 
 reading, and private rooms exquisitely 
 arranged. In Hillerod High School there is 
 a glorious picture of Isaac in the sunset light 
 waiting for Rebecca. It fills the whole space 
 of the southern wall of one lecture-room. 
 
 *Dr. Hollraann says that of the girls and women in 
 High Schools 50 per cent, are of the farm-servant class. 
 A smaller, but still, a large percentage are the sisters 
 and daughters of Small Holders. Twenty-seven per cent, 
 are the daughters of teachers. State oflBcials, merchants, 
 and people in society. Only six per cent, of all the 
 students, men and women, come from the towns. 
 
116 
 
 111 the dining hall teachers and scholars 
 have their meals together. There is a hum 
 of talk, and plenty of laughter at times. The 
 pupils were not abashed by the presence of 
 English and Scottish people. Many began 
 to speak in good English at once. Of the 
 bursary holders one-half would be sons and 
 daughters of cottars ! 
 
 **Ye must be born again/' said a great 
 teacher. Here people are born again — 
 launched far away from the life of hard toil 
 and bodily anguish, baptised into a new life. 
 
 The great majority of the High School 
 pupils are landfolk. It is easy to see why 
 the towns send only a very small percentage 
 of scholars. In winter the land is locked, 
 and the farmer and his helpers have little to 
 do. Then the father can let his son go ro 
 college without too great a sacrifice. The 
 winter course begins in November and ends 
 in May. 
 
 Then as to ways and means. The cost of 
 living and education is very low. A young 
 man may spend six months at the High 
 School for £9, or about 8s. to 9s. a week 
 all told. It is exactly the sum quoted in the 
 University Report of 1852 as being the minimum 
 expenditure of crofter students at Aberdeen 
 University. The cost of the three months' 
 course for women only is about £6 all told. At 
 Askov the fees for a six months' course come 
 
iir 
 
 to .£11 or £12. Small as are these sums the 
 poorest class of farm-workers could not of course 
 pay them. The State gives grants to the 
 schools. It also gives bursaries to the young 
 men and women who need help. These bur- 
 saries amount to about 22/- per month. They 
 are given to not more than half the pupils of 
 any year (for scholars in Land Schools the 
 allowance is larger, being 25 kroner or nearly 
 30/- per month). In 1906, of these bursaried 
 scholars 54 per cent, of the men were farm- 
 servants, and 76 of the women were servants. 
 Over and above these free students the High 
 School masters give a certain number of free 
 seats in their colleges. The State gives grants 
 to the High Schools alone that amount in all 
 to little less than £25,000 a year — not a bad 
 endowment of higher rural education in a 
 country of about two-and-a-half million in- 
 habitants. 
 
 The High Schools are all private ventures. 
 The size of the staffs vary from two-and-a-half 
 teachers to twenty. The number of men and 
 women engaged as High School teachers in 
 1906 was 548. (Among these, as we saw, there 
 are some famous names — La Cour, Christiansen, 
 the late N. Y. Fjord, Feilberg, and Schroder, 
 the close friend of Bjornsen. Mr. Appel, 
 head master of Askov, has just been appointed 
 Minister of Education.) The nation can 
 yield no better teachers. The schools are 
 freely helped by the State, yet they are, as we 
 
118 
 
 said, private enterprises, and Mr. Thornton is 
 never weary of showing how, under these con- 
 ditions, private initiative and collective power 
 can work hand in hand. Certainly no State 
 could do what Kold and Grundtvig, Begstrup 
 and Appel, Rosenthal and Broedstorff have 
 done. They have shown what the power 
 of the State is, and also where its power 
 ends. The State is a bulwark to the 
 schools. Its relation to them is fixed to the 
 law of 1902, under which a school seeking 
 public support must have been at work two 
 years and have had both these years 10 twelve 
 months' pupils, or 20 six months', or 40 three 
 months' as the case may be. But at the back 
 of every success there is a man or woman — or 
 a group of men and women. Even the financial 
 success of the High School is due in the first 
 place to the genius of Kristen Kold. 
 
 Those who care at all to trace the history of 
 rural education in Denmark and elsewhere will 
 love the name of this son of a Jutland shoe- 
 maker. He was known to many as '*the Danish 
 Socrates," a name given to him perhaps by 
 Dr. Feilberg, who loved to meet him and who 
 says of him : *'If he spoke to you only two or 
 three words on the street you would feel well 
 all day." He had great success as a tutor, 
 but as he would not teach in the old established 
 way everyone fought shy of him. He went to 
 Smyrna and later walked home on foot 200 
 
119 
 
 miles from Trieste to Denmark. Here he was 
 engaged as tutor in the honse of a pastor to 
 whom, in time, he made a strange proposal. 
 He asked if he might take a few young peasants 
 and teach them along with the pastor's sons, 
 and sometimes alone. This wish was granted, 
 and Kold was so pleased with the result that he 
 built a school. This school cost about £100. 
 Fifty pounds of this he paid out of his own 
 savings, and he did a good deal of the building 
 work with his own hands, the peasants helping 
 him. Grundtvig helped to raise the other fifty 
 pounds. The fees for a five months' course in 
 his school were about £3 10s. per scholar! 
 Great as were his difficulties the work grew in 
 his hands. He gave higher education to 1,300 
 young people in his school at Ryslinge, and 
 later at Odense. To-day, in Denmark, the 
 faces of hundreds of country workers light up 
 at the mere sound of his name. It was he who 
 initiated the Women's Classes, and who in- 
 spired, too, the free schools for children — 
 State supported but under private management 
 — which have sprung up in the wake of the 
 High School. 
 
 Thus the Danish High School is the product 
 of two men. One a great and famous scholar, 
 the other a son of the people. 
 
 And now to return to England. Admitting 
 as we may that our country has produced great 
 agriculturists, and that our Land Colleges are 
 not after all, so far as teaching is concerned, 
 
120 
 behind those of other countries, the question 
 remains: *'What of the English labourer?'' 
 For it is the labourer, not the history of agri- 
 culture we are discussing. 
 
 According to the testimony of many experts 
 he is hopelessly stupid. In a Report, lately 
 issued on * 'Partial Exemption" there is an 
 interesting letter from a clergyman on the 
 English country labourer's child. It states 
 that ''the boys best fitted for country work are 
 strong, dull lads, in whose homes there is no 
 tradition or environment of education." 
 These boys should, says the clergyman, go 
 on the land very young. They will be of no 
 use for farm work if they are kept at school 
 till they are fourteen. It is "a hardship for 
 parents to feed, clothe, and boot big dull 
 boys," says this witness. Another witness, 
 an M.P., regrets that the farm boy is so very 
 dull. He thinks that the ordinary farm lad 
 is not worth more than the very small wage 
 he gets. When he grows up to be a man he 
 will get only from 128. to 15s. a week and he is 
 not worth more. But the Member recommends 
 that he should leave school at twelve and go 
 to continuation classes ! 
 
 Without going any further into this ques- 
 tion, we have to point out that the time has 
 now come to prove whether this "Stupidity" 
 of the labourer is real or not. No continua- 
 tion school can settle that question. But a 
 real High School or College filled with young 
 
121 
 
 farm labourers under the right influences, 
 might settle it. 
 
 More than a year ago Mr, Cadbury opened 
 ^'Fircroft/' near Birmingham, as a College for 
 young working men. The pupils are, it appears, 
 largely from the towns, and so ^*Fircroft" can- 
 not be said to be a rural college. The students 
 who have spent a term there speak of it with 
 enthusiasm. The course of study is much less 
 ambitious than is that of Askov. The teachers 
 give very cheering reports. They are at one 
 with the University men who take the tutorial 
 classes (opened through the Workers' Educa- 
 tional Association) in saying that the working 
 man and woman advances at a good pace when 
 the way is opened. Their work goes to prove 
 also that here is a growing demand for Higher 
 Education among working class people. 
 
 Even more cheering than these reports is the 
 fact that scholars from the tutorial classes are 
 themselves beginning to make a move in rural 
 places. The villages and country places round 
 Swindon, for example, are being visited by 
 working men students with a view to rousing 
 the farm labourer. None of this work can 
 tell very effectively, perhaps, till a school is 
 actually started. There is hope that at May- 
 lands in Essex a bona-fide High School will be 
 opened in the near future. To make a start — 
 that is the point. 
 
 It does not seem as if the enterprise should 
 be too hard for English working men. There 
 
122 
 are many country places where a large building 
 can be rented at a small rate. In Bucking- 
 ham, for example, buildings were quite lately 
 offered for school purposes at a pepper corn 
 rent, which were suited at least fairly well for 
 a resident school or college. 
 
 Staffing. 
 
 The expense of a small staff of first-rate 
 teachers would be a more serious item. As 
 the older Universities, with their immense 
 funds are now, however, beginning to offer 
 help to working-class students in an organised 
 way, and as these Universities are morally re- 
 sponsible for helping poor students, it is 
 reasonable to hope they will soon acknow- 
 ledge the strong claims of the country people 
 of England. Just as the Universities help 
 to staff the tutorial classes in towns they might 
 send teachers of University standing to give 
 instruction in English Rural High Schools. 
 
 It is also reasonable to believe that just as 
 Denmark gives State grants to adult schools 
 (whether they be High Schools, Land Schools, 
 Small Holders' Schools, or others) so Parlia- 
 ment through the Board of Education would 
 give substantial help to the new movement, 
 and would do this without in any way hinder- 
 ing or making its real development from with- 
 in almost impossible. 
 
123 
 Management. 
 
 But even this help and sympathy — were it 
 forthcoming — would not alone make the new 
 venture a success. In order to win real success 
 the labourers and small-holders themselves 
 would have to inspire the whole enterprise, 
 and also direct it. They might, by-and-bye, 
 form themselves into an association, elect re- 
 presentatives (as their Danish brothers have 
 done) and appoint delegates on the Joint Com- 
 mittees of the Universities. But above all 
 they would have to supply the driving power — 
 to go into the villages, to rouse and teach and 
 inspire. Neither can they leave the practical 
 questions to others, as for example the practical 
 question of house keeping, so brilliantly solved 
 elsewhere. It is they who will have to show 
 how to reduce expenses to a minimum without 
 degrading the standard of life and fix the 
 amount to be paid by scholars (a certain 
 number of whom should be able to pay). 
 
 Curriculum. 
 
 It is not at all likely that the first school 
 would even resemble Roskilde or Askov. The 
 circumstances as well as the character of the 
 English labour will create quite a new order 
 of college. It may also be impossible to 
 have the teaching purely humanistic. At first 
 a ^'practical" side might be necessary, as it 
 was for a few months at least in the first 
 
124 
 Danish High School. A special teacher might 
 be engaged for this side of the work. This 
 point and others could only be settled whei\ 
 the work is fairly started. It is enough to 
 show that no very serious obstacles stand in 
 the way of action. 
 
 The spectacle of an economically-worked 
 college, stajQEed by brilliant scholars, would be 
 an object lesson to England, and even more 
 valuable would be the spectacle of young 
 labourers or farm servants working with a real 
 aim in view — the aim of going to college and 
 getting ready for a life that is worth living. 
 
VII. 
 
 Universities Old and New. 
 
 ^'On the arms of Oxford," says Mr. Albert 
 Mansbridge, ''above the open book with its 
 glorious challenge 'The Lord my Light' are 
 three golden crowns. These are Labour, Learn- 
 ing, and Fellowship." The bright challenge, 
 and the triple crown did not draw the eyes of 
 many labouring men and women in the last 
 two centuries. A few faced Nature's problems 
 alone and unlettered, in mine, workshop, and 
 field. The great majority lived and died facing 
 only one problem, viz., how to win food and 
 shelter. 
 
 Yet the spell of Oxford is felt even by way- 
 farers and people who know her only from afar. 
 Its cloisters, its "place of the Martyrs," the 
 noble halls of some colleges, the still quad- 
 rangles bathed in moonlight or dappled with 
 leaf shadows do not keep their spell for those 
 only who see them daily and enjoy what they 
 give at all hours. Their beauty shines safety 
 into the hearts of dusty strangers. Workless 
 men hurrying through Oxford in the sad quest 
 for a job are open to its spell. One at least of 
 the little band of working men who have done 
 so much for the children of Bradford vowed 
 125 
 
126 
 himself to his task while passing through 
 Oxford in search of work. It is not wonderful 
 that such men begin to ask how the Universi- 
 ties came into being, how they grew, and why 
 (since they have no part in their life) are two 
 of the golden crowns called '^Labour'' and 
 ^Tellowship." 
 
 Were the endowments really intended for the 
 poor — and for the poor only? I do not think 
 that the words of the founders leave us in any 
 doubt on this point. The Oxford Commission 
 of 1850 says **That the endowments of Colleges 
 were designed for the poor is sufficiently plain 
 from the language in which some of the 
 founders describe their motives." William of 
 Wykeham states that, next to his kinsmen* 
 '^poor indigent clerks are to be admitted, be- 
 cause Christ, among the works of mercy, hath 
 commanded men to receive men into their 
 houses and mercifully to comfort the in- 
 digent." In Queen's and New College the 
 Fellows are forbidden to keep dogs, on the 
 ground that ^Ho give to dogs the bread of the 
 children is not fitting for the poor, especially 
 for those who live on alms." Those to be 
 elected are defined in the several Colleges as 
 "^paupers," ' 'paupers and those living on 
 
 *The kinsmen, also, were in most cases, poor men. 
 For the great ecclesiastics who endowed Oxford were 
 sprung from the people. ''By poor men^s sons/' said 
 Bishop Latimer, already, in his day a witness of the 
 invasion by the well-to-do of Oxford, "were the people 
 instructed. 
 
127 
 
 alms," "paupers and indigent persons," *'for 
 paupers" and ''ex-paupers." One founder 
 gives as his motive for his establishing his 
 fund that ''Want playing the step-dame to 
 many, they who are best qualified for studies 
 enslave themselves to the mechanical arts, and 
 become truants to the ingenious sciences." The 
 founder of Corpus Christi College writes thus : 
 "In order that the honey-bee may work 
 within, and not be called away to mean duties, 
 we desire that there may be certain persons 
 free from honey-making. But if any of these 
 — devoted to humble service — shall please to 
 imitate the honey-bees he shall deserve a 
 double crown." Here is a founder who tried 
 to release the poor from menial work and then 
 flies to release those who serve them also from 
 mere drudgery. 
 
 The Fellows of New College were to be sup- 
 plied every year with cloth for one dress, and 
 with money to pay for the making of it. Their 
 allowance was to vary with the price of wheat. 
 The original Fellows of John Balliol College 
 were allowed one penny a day for food and 
 twopence on Sundays. The very form of such 
 payments shows that the persons who received 
 them were poor. At Brasenose, property to 
 the amount of £4 would vacate a Fellowship, 
 which, allowing for the difference in money 
 value is still a very small sum. Waynflete 
 founded Magdalen College for seventy poor and 
 indigent scholars, thirty of whom were to be 
 
128 
 called "Demyes/' and to remain for thirteen 
 years. He did indeed permit twenty sons of 
 noblemen to live at the college at their own 
 expense. Gentle birth was no obstacle to those 
 who wanted to study. But wealth, or even 
 well-to-doness, was a real obstacle. 
 
 It appears that the founders were not blind 
 to the fact that the property might increase in 
 value. They bethought them also that one 
 day individuals might take more than their 
 share. So the statutes of New College, and 
 Magdalen, of All Souls, of Worcester College 
 forbid the division of any surplus. The foun- 
 ders of Merton, Balliol, Oriel, Queen's, and 
 Pembroke lay it down that if the rev- 
 enue increased the number of Fellowships must 
 4)e made larger m proportion. In early Re- 
 formation times the founders of Protestant 
 'Colleges show the same desire to fence their 
 gifts from the rich, and to forestall '^privilege" 
 even among their own Fellows. Jesus College, 
 the first Protestant College, fixes the amount 
 which any Fellow may possess at a very low 
 figure. (The Fellows might not have more 
 than £10 a year at the time of election.) With 
 solemn words, with threats and warnings even, 
 the founders strove to make their purpose 
 clear. 
 
 The claim of the Social Democratic Party 
 that education should be secular would have 
 Tjeen met with no support from the founders. 
 When the first Colleges came into being — that 
 
 ^ 
 
129 
 is to say — in the thirteenth century, learning, 
 it would appear, was not very much esteemed, 
 except in so far as it helped to make people 
 attend to what was then believed to be their 
 great religious duties. Thus, the founder of 
 All Souls laid it down that '*the Fellows were 
 bounden not so much to ply the various sciences 
 and faculties as with all devotion to pray 
 specially for the souls of Henry V., Thomas of 
 Clarence, and the soldiers who fell in the 
 French war." The Fellows of University 
 College (founded about 1280) were even for- 
 bidden to study anything but Divinity except 
 in the holidays. Later, the great revival of 
 learning passing over Europe, reached Oxford, 
 and then a great change took place, the nature 
 of which may be gathered from the new work 
 begun in 1457 at the then new College of 
 Magdalen. Academical lecturers were engaged 
 in Moral Philosophy and Natural Philosophy, 
 a thing which amazed not only England but 
 even Europe. But only years after did Fox, 
 Bishop of Winchester, ordain that there 
 should be teachers of Greek at his College 
 (Corpus Christi) that scholars should travel in 
 Italy, that teachers should be elected from 
 Greece and Southern Italy and the old routine 
 of Divinity bo broken up. Out of the desire 
 and creative impulse of the early Founders 
 blossomed something new and strange. But 
 this desire of theirs was to serve Eeligion as 
 interpreted in the Church of their own day, 
 
 T 
 
130 
 and therefore to help the poor (more especially 
 the poor of their own kin and birthplace). 
 
 The Founders' wishes appear, on the whole, 
 to have been carried out more or less faithfully 
 for a long time. The solemn oaths and warn- 
 ings had doubtless a great effect. They became 
 longer and even more solemn as time went on. 
 The oath imposed on the Warden of New 
 College fills five octavo pages, and even when 
 the letter was forgotten the spirit that inspired 
 the framers of the Oaths died hard. So late 
 as the beginning of the seventeenth century 
 the poor were encouraged to come to Oxford. 
 The Colleges receive them as Servitors or 
 Batellers in large numbers, boarding, lodging, 
 and instructing them at very low rates. The 
 Old Halls (where the scholars were able to 
 live cheaply) had been absorbed by the Colleges 
 at this time,* and the members of the Univer- 
 sity had to belong to a College, but they 
 offered board at such a low figure that poor 
 men could live at Oxford. 
 
 *Froin the Report of 1852 we learn that the students 
 who went to Oxford in old times lived in the houses 
 of the township. In some cases a number of them lived 
 together in a hotel or hall with a Master of Arts. The 
 Master of Arts was the Principal. All that was needed 
 for the establishment of such a hall was a year's rent 
 in advance. Anthony Wood stated that he could show 
 the names and places of more than 300 halls — so great 
 was the rush of students once to Oxford. The majority 
 lived in hired rooms. Many were in their earlv teens and 
 some were even younger. They overran the taverns, 
 hotels, and even the turrets of the city walls. Later 
 all students over 12 had to go into halls. In the 
 fifteenth century, however, Oxford was rapidly emptied, 
 and then the Colleges bought up the halls and forced the 
 scholars to come into residence. 
 
131 
 
 In the year 1616, sixteen Colleges educated 
 between 400 and 500 poor students. Magdalen 
 College educated 86 of these. (In 1850 it was 
 educating only 15 undergraduates.) The great 
 Churchmen of earlier centuries saw that an 
 oath cannot always be kept in the letter. They 
 appear to ha^e been inclined to keep out Kins- 
 men (when they became very numerous) rather 
 than the poor as such, fearing perhaps as 
 someone said later that the Colleges might be 
 ''turned into clans." Thus, for example, as 
 early as 1486 the Warden of Merton held an 
 ''inquest of relations," and the last person 
 admitted as a Kinsman was entered in that 
 year. In the seventeenth century Archbishop 
 Laud, on his own responsibility, reduced the 
 number of Fellowships from 44 to 24, and as 
 many others as he pleased to elect. 
 
 Long before the date of the last Commission 
 in 1852, however, all scruples about the hold- 
 ing of statutes that interfered seriously with 
 the personal desires of the ruling class had 
 been swept away. Oxford was largely the 
 rendezvous of high spirited, wealthy youths, 
 whose habits and manners would have filled the 
 pious Founders with dismay. It had been 
 decreed that the scholars should live quietly 
 and soberly. Many of these hunted, raced, 
 gave dinner-parties that were notorious. The 
 Statutes forbade the keeping of horses. But 
 many of the students went hunting and tandem 
 driving, spending in a single day an amount 
 
132 
 that would have kept a poor scholar for 
 weeks at the University. The statutes laid 
 down that scholars must remain in Oxford, 
 keeping close to their books, speaking Latin or 
 Greek, and in one college at least French, and 
 behaving quietly, obedient to their teachers, 
 and devout. (It would appear that the neglect of 
 foreign tongues was not a characteristic of 
 English people, nor of the common people of 
 England before the Reformation). But these 
 came and went when they pleased. They 
 gambled and ran into debt. In the eighteenth 
 century all this went on merrily, but towards the 
 middle of the nineteenth century when bad 
 cases had come into the Courts, and the public 
 were indignant, gambling was checked. Ex- 
 travagance was hardly checked; and yet there 
 was a great show of obeying the letter of the 
 old laws. For example, a distinction was made 
 between real and personal property. No pro- 
 perty was counted real but the income a man 
 enjoyed in his own right! Even the fees for 
 degrees were based on this very false distinc- 
 tion. Thus a man who had £300 in his own 
 right would pay £50 for his degree, but a 
 millionaire's son with £3,000 a year from his 
 father need pay only £15 ! As for the Fellows 
 — two-thirds of whom lived away from Oxford — 
 they might keep their Fellowship or right to 
 their allowance as Fellows no matter what 
 amount of personal property they had. 
 
133 
 
 The customs and thoughts of the age were 
 reflected, quite innocently, even by the Arch- 
 bishops. Thus Archbishop Whately argues 
 that *'a man should be allowed a valet or a 
 horse who had always been used to such 
 luxuries, as they were as necessary to him as 
 were shoes and stockings to his fellow- 
 students/' 
 
 It is true that all students did not live 
 riotously. Young noblemen wore a distinctive 
 dress. They were allowed to take their degrees 
 earlier than other students. These relics of a 
 bye-gone age, when differences of rank were 
 very much more distinct than they are now 
 were allowed to remain among the students of 
 1850. But among the Fellow^s or Tutors of the 
 Colleges they had disappeared. 
 
 In 1850, moreover, a new class was knocking 
 loudly at the door. **It is desirable," said the 
 new Commissioners, *'that the manufacturing 
 and mercantile class, which has arisen by the 
 side of the landed aristocracy and which is 
 exercising a great influence on the public 
 counsels, should seek to have its sons brought 
 up where so many eminent statesmen of past 
 and present times have been trained, and that 
 the Universities should not cease to send forth 
 a succession of persons qualified to serve God 
 in the State as well as in the Church." And 
 they set themselves to remove every abuse that 
 stood in the way of the new and large number 
 of people who were determined to compete not 
 
134 
 only in tEe markets, but in every arena of life. 
 The Commission set to work in a practical 
 way. It was a Manchester School body, and 
 breathed the spirit of the old Liberalism. 
 
 It began by recommending that the 
 Founders' wishes in regard to their own kin 
 and their own localities should (with a few 
 exceptions) be swept aside. This was certainly 
 reasonable. Indeed, it was already done. 
 Time had swept them aside already. The map 
 of England in 1850 was not the map of Eng- 
 land in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 
 The land was the same but the boundaries were 
 changed, and in many cases wiped out for ever. 
 As for the next of kin they cannot always be 
 found after a hundred years ! Much less can 
 one be sure of them when four, five, six cen- 
 turies have gone by ! Certain schools and 
 localities might still have a first claim on ex- 
 hibitions, as for example, Winchester to New 
 College, BlundelFs School Tiverton, at Balliol, 
 Merchant Taylors at St. John's, and others. 
 But the sytem of close endowments must go, 
 said the Commissioners, as a thing utterly out 
 of date. 
 
 The desire for liberty moves like a wind — 
 though a rather easterly wind at times — 
 through all the recommendations of the Com- 
 missioners. They brushed aside the sugges- 
 tions of Mr. Temple, that rich Colleges should 
 build halls where poor students could be edu- 
 cated without humiliation. They showed a 
 
135 
 
 spirit of independence as regards Colleges (as 
 places of residence) altogether, and advised 
 that students should not be obliged to join 
 them at all, but find lodgings of their own in 
 the city. As regards poverty the Commissioners 
 were not in love with it. ^'We have no wish 
 to encourage ^poor scholars' to come to the 
 University, because they are poor ... If we 
 look to the wants of the country and the church 
 we must believe that what is needed is not a 
 scheme for counterbalancing the inequalities of 
 fortune, but enactments which will provide 
 that neither the rich nor the poor, if they have 
 the necessary qualifications shall be deterred 
 from following the course in which they can 
 be most useful. What is needed is justice, 
 directed by the removal of every impediment. 
 (At that time the great mass of the people had 
 no primary education worthy the name. Chil- 
 dren went to work at eight years old, and even 
 younger.) Not charity, designed to produce, 
 under artificial stimulants, a large class of 
 students without vocation." 
 
 Thus the Commissioners set forth their views 
 on the question of poverty. They stood for 
 efficiency, looking for it, however, as a timid 
 passenger might look at the sea through a port- 
 hole. 
 
 One of the great tasks of the Commission 
 was to find means to get the best staff of 
 teachers possible. They felt as everyone must 
 
136 
 feel, that here was the crux of the whole ques- 
 tion. They east about for ways and means 
 of raising money so as to get more or less sub- 
 stantial incomes for Senior Fellows — incomes 
 which could tempt men even to turn away from 
 the prospects of entering the Church, and 
 enjoying one of the many rich livings in the 
 gift of the University.* 
 
 There were 540 Fellowships in Oxford in 
 1850 w^hen the Commission was appointed, 
 though a great many had been suppressed. 
 The fond desire of the founders that their 
 numbers would grow had been altogether vain. 
 But now the number was to be cut down still 
 further. ''At the present time," says Lord 
 Curzon, in his lately published book (1907), 
 ' 'there are 315 Fellows of Oxford. Of these 
 only 220, or seventy per cent, are engaged in 
 University or College work." That is to say, 
 225 Fellowships have lapsed, or have been 
 absorbed since 1850 ! The Commission recom- 
 mended that Exeter College, which has 25 
 Fellowships (varying in 1840 from £120 to 
 £130 a year, but believed in 1850 to be falling 
 
 •Nine-tenths of the Fellowships of Oxford could be 
 held by clergymen. The limit of time during which 
 they coyld be held was ten years, after that there was 
 other provisions. Some of the Colleges were and are 
 patrons on a large scale. "Merton/' for example, had 
 17 advowsons or livings. Queen's College has 24 bene- 
 fices. All Souls has 17 and over. It was a ''rule of 
 peace" to offer vacant benefices in succession to the 
 Fellows according to their age, without any regard to 
 qualifications. For weary years the elderly men waited 
 and accepted at last a post for which very often they 
 were quite unfit. 
 
137 
 in value) should suppress ten. The proceeds 
 of five of these was to enrich the fifteen Fellow- 
 ships left. It advised that All Souls should 
 suppress a number of its junior Fellowships in 
 order to endow four Professor Fellows at £800 
 a year each. (The gross income of this Col- 
 lege was very large, and it is observed that the 
 Fellows might have a larger dividend by '*a 
 more careful attention to business.") It also 
 advised that at Queen's a Professor Fellow- 
 ship be created, two ordinary Fellowships be- 
 ing sacrificed, that Merton should give up 
 three Fellowships to create two '^Professor 
 Fellowships," also Magdalen* (whose Fellow- 
 ships were the richest in the University) should 
 suspend twelve in order to endow six Professor 
 Fellowships. In this way amounts could be 
 raised which would help to make possible the 
 existence of a staff of eminent teachers at 
 Oxford . 
 
 Over and above these two orders of Fellow- 
 ships there is another, the Prize-Fellowship, 
 which was intended to be a ''bridge" between 
 the University and the outer world. It is 
 held for seven years by the winners, and 
 amounts to £200 a year. The winner need 
 not be poor, need not live at Oxford (after the 
 
 *We have seen already how such a recommendation 
 was not a novel, and hardly, one would think, even a 
 necessary one. In the course of things all surpluses 
 would stop at home. None had increased the number 
 of Fellowships as revenue increased. In an account of 
 All Souls, for example, there is the following item. 
 Divided between Warden and Fellows, ^64,293. 
 
138 
 probation year), need not do any work for the 
 University. He is simply to represent it in 
 the outer world, and to carry its influence into 
 the professional world. His £1,400 is a prize 
 of ability — pure and simple. 
 
 A strong desire shows itself through the 
 whole report — a desire to equalise the position 
 of the Fellows (as distinct from Professor- 
 Fellows) and to separate them once for all from 
 mere scholars and Exhibitioners. Some Fellows 
 were elected before 1850 on terms that did not 
 give them a voice in the management of affairs 
 and did not make them eligible for Headships. 
 These were put on a level with the others. 
 Then the value of the Fellowships varied from 
 JB20 to £500. The Commission fixed the maxi- 
 mum at £300, and £150 as a minimum. The 
 value of Headships now varies from £600 to 
 £3,000 a year (only one Headship, that of 
 Christ Church reaches £3,000). The mere 
 tradition of the scholar as a poor and studious 
 person, absorbed, and living apart from worldly 
 ambitions and desire, had vanished completely. 
 
 What Fellowships meant in the old days was 
 a thing forgotten almost in 1852, quite for- 
 gotten perhaps in 1910. In olden days the 
 Fellows were the full-fledged scholars — the 
 students for whose direct benefit the Uni- 
 versity existed. But now Fellowships could 
 be had only when the men had ceased to be 
 students. The Fellows who remained at Oxford 
 were, henceforward, the teaching staff of 
 
139 
 Oxford. The Fellows were raised moreover 
 as we have seen from CoUegiates, and have 
 become not only the staff, but, in a large degree 
 the controlling power of the University. 
 
 ''Of whom then,'* it may be asked, **is the 
 Undergraduate to-day the successor, since the 
 original Fellows are now teachers?" Historic- 
 ally he takes the place — strange as it may ap- 
 pear — of the poor Demys, Servitor, Batteller, 
 and under-scholar ! The Fellows gave way to 
 a new profession — the Servitors to the most 
 favoured youth of Britain. To go back to the 
 Commission of 1852, it was, as we see, a re- 
 forming body. It stood for efficiency — accord- 
 ing to the light of its day. It set out to 
 create open Fellowships such as would attract 
 able men. But it also wanted good scholars. 
 So it suppressed some old Fellowships in order 
 to found new Scholarships (as for example, at 
 Brasenose where five Fellowships were sus- 
 pended to create ten Scholarships at £bO a 
 year for five years and so on). It did its work 
 so well that now there are over 500 Scholar- 
 ships, of which 126 are open every year ; also 
 66 Exhibitions (varying from £25 to over 
 £100). And it threw these open to free com- 
 petition among those who could have Second- 
 ary education. 
 
 The large majority of Scholarships have no 
 real poverty qualification. Out of the sum 
 of £50,000 given annually in Scholarships and 
 Exhibitions £34,000 is given in prizes that are 
 
140 
 held out to incite the highest and quickest 
 scholars in public schools. It is said, how- 
 ever, that a great part of this money is given 
 to persons who could not go to Oxford with- 
 out the help of the £320 awarded to them. 
 But poverty, as Lord Curzon naively observes 
 is a relative term. To a farm labourer the in- 
 come of a professional man who wants to send 
 a large family of girls and boys to expensive 
 schools, and to whom £320 is a real help, will 
 appear princely. Nevertheless, the profes- 
 sional man considers himself poor — and is sa 
 relatively; for the income of the richest 
 classes of the community, and their rate of ex- 
 penditure are such that one may feel **in- 
 digent" with £1,000 a year. Such are many 
 of those who benefit by the Scholarship fund. 
 As for the bulk of the endowments these are 
 used as part payment for tuition (over and 
 above the Fellowship money a teacher must of 
 course have fees). The greater part of the 
 resources of Oxford is paid not in gifts or 
 benefices, but as the salary of teachers, or 
 persons representing the teaching profession — 
 that is to say. Fellows, Tutors, Readers, 
 Heads. This can be seen by a glance at th^ 
 published Abstract of the year, quoted by Lord 
 Curzon in his recent book. The items are : 
 
 Heads of houses £21,500 
 
 Fellows £61,500 
 
 Contributions in respect of Pro- 
 fessor-Fellows £23,000 
 
141 
 These items do not represent all the moneys 
 spent on Fellowships, Tutorships, and Head- 
 ships. In 1871, the 19 Heads received over 
 J650,958 — this larger sum representing what 
 does not appear in the Abstracts — Trust funds 
 and funds from Ecclesiastical preferments. 
 Neither does the Abstract include payments to 
 Tutors and Lecturers (out of Tuition funds). 
 In short, the Abstract does not show the amount 
 paid after all to the teaching body. We learn, 
 however, that in 1871 it was over £100,000. 
 From a lately published balance sheet we quote 
 two items : — 
 
 Officers, Professors, Readers, Ex- 
 aminers, Heads, and Fellows. 
 College expenditure on TJni- £ 
 versity purposes 157,350 
 
 College tuition 62,653 
 
 In view of the fact that in 1871 £101,111 
 was paid in Fellowships, and that in the last 
 40 years the Professoriate has been greatly 
 developed, whilst, during the same time the 
 college system has been taking the place of the 
 Private Tuition once general, we may fairly 
 conclude that this represents mainly Endow- 
 ment funds. It is true that the receipts from 
 the members of the Colleges — that is to say the 
 revenue that comes not from the endowments 
 at all — is very large and almost equals the en- 
 dowments themselves. We can here compare 
 them. 
 
142 
 Trust Funds. £ 8. d. 
 
 Total Colleges 240,708 8 6 
 
 Total University and Colleges 265,228 6 9 
 Total expenditure of the University 
 £442,445 17s. 6d., which shows that 
 £177,217 10s. 9d. was derived from Members 
 of the University and Colleges.* 
 
 No very large portion of this sum was 
 apparently spent, however, on Teachers and 
 Tuition. We are entitled, I think, to say that 
 the Endowments are used to-day very largely 
 if not mainly for the assistance of the rich and 
 well-to-do. The great old Universities provide 
 not only historical background, they provide 
 also a financial background for the education 
 of their students. It may be that many of 
 these are not finally the debtors of the nation. 
 A very few may give back a thousand-fold what 
 they receive. The point of note here is that in 
 the Oxford of to-day the working-class man or 
 woman has directly and even indirectly very 
 little part. 
 
 Does this mean that the endowments of 
 Oxford have been taken from the poor and 
 
 •The foHowine is the tahle copied from the Report 
 of the Workers Association : — 
 
 £ 8. d. 
 
 Rates, Taxes, Insurance 15,966 18 
 
 Chapels, Libraries, Maintain Buildings 19,000 
 
 Fellows, Readers, etc 157,350 
 
 College Tuition 62,653 
 
 Scholars and Exhibitions 52,890 
 
 College Expenses, Servants 33,196 
 
 Pension Fund 5,640 
 
 Miscellaneous 35,434 
 
143 
 given to the rich? The poor have never 
 claimed them. What is more, they were not 
 even in a position to claim them. Suppose 
 that Robinson Crusoe had been left not joint 
 heir but principal heir of an estate while he 
 was still banished on an island near canni- 
 bals, and exposed every moment to the rigours 
 of the weather. Suppose that in the meantime 
 nothing at all was known of Robinson, that he 
 was silent as the grave, and his relations also 
 dumb, knowing nothing about him. If the 
 next of kin or others went and took possession 
 of the beautiful house, used it, did some good 
 work in it, and prevented it from going to 
 pieces, would that be robbery? Moreover, as 
 time went on the great house got richer, not 
 by one means, but by many. Many left new 
 gifts to the actual tenants. As for Crusoe, it 
 is clear that his first pressing desire was for 
 food and shelter. 
 
 Even if the parallel is not complete no one 
 can venture to say that it has no reality. The 
 most striking event of the past 50 years is that 
 Crusoe has been heard of. He has at least 
 learned to read, to write, and has come into 
 some new relations with the world or a part 
 of it. He has made himself known in certain 
 ways, as for example, by sending 40 men into 
 the British House of Commons in order to 
 voice his message. Surely then the situation 
 is a new one. The strange feature is 
 that, even now the workers cannot put their 
 
144 
 hands on their good scholars. Where are they 
 to look for them since the great majority are 
 prevented still by lack of early training as well 
 as by other things. And the heritage, large 
 in itself and growing, is small in proportion 
 to the swelling numbers who must soon begin 
 to look on higher education as a necessity, a 
 primary need of every normal individual. Yet 
 the people and their friends were not all asleep 
 while the doors of the beautiful houses of 
 learning were swung to. Let us glance at the 
 movements they started outside in the twilight. 
 
 The Adult School movement is the best 
 known perhaps. It began as it could, 
 using the w^orkers' scanty leisure. That 
 is to say, it was a Sunday School and Night 
 School Organisation. At first the friends of 
 children tried to include them — but this, of 
 course, was a vain attempt. The Infant 
 
 Schools, however gently managed, were 
 doomed. The children at the day's end were 
 past learning, were past playing. If they 
 cared for any meadows or for any class-rooms 
 it were merely *'to drop down in them and 
 sleep." But the Adult School movement grew 
 and prospered. In some parts of the country 
 5 to 10 per cent, of all the working people 
 attend an Adult School on Sunday mornings. 
 
 There was another movement of quite 
 another kind, a movement which gave rise in 
 a large measure to Mechanics' Institutes, to 
 
145 
 the Birkbeck, and also Working Men's Col- 
 leges. 
 
 The industrial revolution itself was the work 
 of artizans, of workmen of genius such as 
 Arkwright, Telford, Crompton, Rennie, 
 George Stephenson, James Watt, and others. 
 Their lives furnished the materials for Smiles' 
 *'Self Help.'* These, however, were more 
 than self -helpers. The storm of discovery 
 and invention which turned the world upside 
 owed little to universities, but nearly every- 
 thing to these men, and others like them, in 
 workshops, factory, and mine. Many leading 
 scientists turned away from the pioneers, and 
 declared that their work could lead to nothing, 
 so that during the time when tliere was not 
 even a system of national elementary educa- 
 tion, the new order of thinkers and doers, 
 helped only by a few eminent scholars and 
 depending not even on these in their struggle 
 with Nature and her problems, advanced with- 
 out the support of Authority or Tradition. 
 
 ''The Examination Statutes passed even in 
 1850," says the Report of the Commission of 
 Oxford, ''shows that the governing majority of 
 Graduates were not then prepared to recognise 
 even one single department of Physics or 
 Natural History as admissible in the first two 
 examinations." 
 
 This would seem to indicate that Universities 
 have something to gain by being in touch with 
 
 K 
 
146 
 Labour. Yet it is sad to note that many work- 
 ing people on finding that talent and genius 
 are not confined to college walls jumped to the 
 conclusion that schools and colleges could do 
 nothing for them. 
 
 The industrial revolution once fairly over, 
 the workers found less and less to educate them 
 in their daily task. Formerly the home was still 
 a kind of school, and the workshop a kind of 
 college. Now imbeciles were engaged for some 
 processes, and children of tender age were 
 driven into the mills. It is true that the desire 
 to learn never died out of the hearts of the 
 workers. But though Mechanics' Institutes 
 sprang up all over the country it became clear 
 that they could not do what was once hoped 
 from them. 
 
 They became middle class institutions. It 
 is true they helped workmen of very great 
 ability, but they helped only a very small num- 
 ber, and helped even these in a halting way. 
 The humanistic side was altogether lacking in 
 the education they offered, and it would seem 
 that this is fatal — that it induces, as we saw, a 
 kind of barrenness all round. The Midland 
 Institute, however, made large provision for 
 humanistic studies, and this is probably why 
 it played a great part in the movement that 
 led to the foundation of the New Universities. 
 
 The hour of Workingmen's Colleges proper 
 came when, in 1843, a People's College was 
 started in Sheffield for the teaching of Latin, 
 
147 
 
 Greek, French, German, Mathematics, Litera- 
 ture, Elocution, Logic, Drawing. The hopes 
 of many then soared high, for it was proposed 
 to appoint Committees of Public Instructors who 
 would open * 'Colleges or Finishing Schools," 
 as well as Preparatory Schools. Finally, 
 London's Working Men's College started with 
 the most brilliant staff probably that was ever 
 gathered within college walls. Ruskin took 
 the Drawing class, Woolman the Modelling, 
 Charles Kingsley, Eosetti, and Madox Brown 
 took classes, Locock lectured on Astronomy. 
 For once at least in our history a few workmen 
 culled what was best of the teaching power of 
 England. 
 
 But it was always on a small scale. The 
 movement cannot be said to have spread. 
 Though many pupils were eager to enrol them- 
 selves, though Colleges were opened in many 
 English towns, and though great kindred 
 movements were started and are now growing, 
 (such as the educational work of the Co-opera- 
 tors, the Young Men's Christian Associations, 
 and various minor efforts) yet the light never 
 fairly burned up. The principle of Co-opera- 
 tion was first applied with striking success to 
 business operation in Denmark, not in Eng- 
 land. England had the most brilliant teachers. 
 She had the best workmen. She had all, or 
 nearly all, the pioneers. And this was not 
 enough. ''In the black coal pit of the popular 
 
.148 
 heart, rain fell, liglit kindled" ; but the light 
 never flamed up brightly. 
 
 This does not mean that there were no great 
 successes. Everyone has heard how, in the 
 North Country, the miners and colliers made 
 up an audience that delighted the heart of the 
 greatest teachers, such, for example, as 
 Huxley. They — these pitmen — were them- 
 selves like a mine of buried treasure, and when 
 the right kind of teacher appeared they began 
 to show how real were the mental powers that 
 had been lying dormant in the grim places of 
 the earth. They not only learned fast, they 
 showed the true missionary spirit. The history 
 of University extension has no more thrilling 
 chapter than that which tells how, after grim 
 labour, colliers walked miles to hear the lectures, 
 and how, later, some actually became class 
 leaders themselves and began to teach what 
 they had learned to others. Permitted, as 
 one old founder would say, "to pick up the 
 crumbs that fell from the tables of the 
 learned," they at once began to feel an im- 
 mense gratitude to the TJniversitv of Cam- 
 bridge. They began to look on it with love 
 and awe. Surely there were many good 
 scholars here if any Government or Com- 
 mission was really concerned to find them out 
 and give them a real chance to win scholar- 
 ships. But the candle, lighted in the North, 
 went out suddenly. It was quenched by a 
 great miners' strike. After the struggle there 
 
149 
 was no money for the paying of fees or the 
 buying of books. 
 
 Nevertheless the clock hand moved on. 
 
 The first Education Act was already passed 
 when Mr. James Stuart, of Trinity College, 
 Cambridge, succeeded in planting outposts of 
 the University in the big industrial cities. In 
 1873 the University of Cambridge started the 
 Extension Movement, and in 1876 London 
 followed suit. Oxford, after one or two un- 
 successful efforts, got under weigh in 1885, 
 and the movement spread at last not only over 
 the United Kingdom and in the United States, 
 but on the Continent. In Continental towns, 
 above all, in the most reactionary and unex- 
 pected places, as in Russia, for example, the 
 new movement grew apace and drew into its 
 services some of the best teaching power of 
 the country. 
 
 To keep to England. It was never initia- 
 tive that was lacking — but impetus, volume of 
 public opinion. In 1890 Cambridge started 
 summer classes with practical work in Physical 
 Laboratories. Oxford had already begun 
 
 short summer courses which were visited by 
 many hundreds. Some of the people who went 
 up to these were of course very sensitive to the 
 beauty and wonder of the place, to the elo- 
 quence of its halls, and its splendid equipments 
 for learning. They went back to tell their 
 sisters and brothers, and in some quarters 
 there were stir and rumour. Moreover, 
 
150 
 
 pioneers ncA^er failed — and some were bold. It 
 was proposed that a true University career 
 should be ofered to all. This was to be done 
 by the establishment of a lecture room and a 
 laboratory in connection with every public 
 library, and by the sending out of a great staff 
 of University teachers. Any town or district 
 authority was to have power to engage one 
 or more of these teachers, who would in the 
 evenings take their scholars term by term and 
 year by year through a course of study leading 
 up to a University degree. Alas ! This float- 
 ing University is still a dream. 
 
 It would not be long a dream if the demand 
 for Higher Education was keen and also 
 general — but no one can pretend that it is 
 general or even widespread to-day. The 
 majority of those who have to toil hard for 
 food and shelter are willing (if one can say 
 there is any will where there is no choosing) 
 to sleep through life and to have children 
 who will never live. They hear their social 
 betters say that they *'are happier knowing 
 little," and they take this cowardly consola- 
 tion — a real opiate put to their lips by men 
 who perhaps believe that freed human in- 
 telligence would darken the world for them I 
 But the workpeople who have wakened, more or 
 less, cannot be quiet any more. They will not 
 turn over again and go to sleep in the dark. 
 
 In 1903, mainly through the efforts of Mr. 
 and Mrs. Albert Mansbridge, the Workers' 
 
151 
 Education Association was founded. It came 
 'Ho stimulate the demand" for higher educa- 
 tion among the workers and to satisfy it as far 
 as could be made possible. It came first of all 
 to rouse those who were half awake. It is 
 often said reproachfully that this is not a 
 great end to work for. It may, however, be a 
 very great beginning. Just so every great 
 movement has started, and it is diificult to see 
 how it could start in any other way. 
 
 It is at once a missionary and a research 
 movement, for the University men and 
 women who have begun the work profess that 
 they have come out into the open and are 
 taking working-class students not merely to 
 teach them but also to learn from them. The 
 pupils are not country folk as in the Danish 
 High Schools. They are for the most part 
 townspeople. They are not all eager to listen, 
 and only to listen as are many of the Danish 
 students. A good many are anxious to talk, 
 and there have been at least one or two mur- 
 murs from certain quarters that the English 
 workmen scholars are not allowed to talk 
 enough. Yet this natural desire is encouraged 
 in this new order of scholar. 
 
 The Tutorial class is a new thing, at 
 least in so far as the methods in English 
 schools and teaching are concerned. The tutors 
 take each a class of thirty working people. 
 They live near their pupils and are at hand 
 always, not only as teachers but as advisers. 
 
152 
 acting in fact as the guide and friend of each. 
 A tutor takes most of his pupils through two- 
 year courses. But hundreds of the Tutorial 
 class students are already taking three-year 
 courses. The regularity of attendance is 
 wonderful, taking into account all the circum- 
 stances. Indeed, under any circumstances, it 
 would be written down excellent. Thus, for 
 example, in 1909, out of 7,021 possible atten- 
 dances in 12 Oxford classes there were 6,091 
 actual attendances ! 
 
 Then, as regards the tutor, it is the simple 
 truth that he has new and quite unique oppor- 
 tunities for learning. Fresh from the mental 
 gymnastics of college life and the atmosphere 
 of the class-room (which after all turns so 
 many in a while into indifferent and blase 
 persons) he comes face to face with the keener 
 spirits among the adults toiling for a mere 
 living wage, and living in constant anxiety 
 if not fear as to how they are to feed them- 
 selves and their children. Sometimes the 
 most brilliant scholar of the class falls out of 
 his job : — and then what is to be done ? Or the 
 amount of ' 'overtime" is such that the boldest 
 has to give in and turn away from his books. 
 Tutorial class men have described their new 
 life as a plunge below the surface of things : 
 the entrance into a new world where every- 
 thing that was learned in the surface begins 
 to look different. Things that looked simple 
 and right enough in books and lecture rooms 
 
153 
 begin here to wear quite another complexion,, 
 because here in the real world one understands 
 what poverty and overtime and competition 
 really mean, and what is even more, one gets 
 to know that the real sufferers are not the 
 spiritually or mentally unfit. All here, fit and 
 unfit, are caught in one net. 
 
 The scholars, it may be, are for the most part 
 of those who have kept up in spite of all, but 
 we have no reason to think that they are better 
 in every way than tens of thousands of those 
 who have not been reached. They come to 
 their task with every kind of disadvantage, 
 and yet they get on fast. It is more a race 
 than a progress. This is not a matter of 
 opinion — a mere impression — else it would not 
 carry any weight. It is the judgment of the 
 university examiners who are certainly not 
 likely to send out rose-coloured reports. They 
 read with lifted eyebrows the essays of work- 
 ing-class students on Industrial History, on 
 Literature, on Economics, and they report 
 that one-third of these workers' papers are 
 equal to the work of Honours' men. Here surely 
 are scholars. They might never have been 
 heard of. Yet the good corn of good minds, 
 lying dark and prone in the rain, lifts in the 
 first blink of sunshine. 
 
 Not long ago one of the women students, a 
 mill-worker, addressed a representative meeting. 
 Those who came to listen to her may or 
 may not have had a preconceived view as. 
 
154 
 to what an educated working-class woman 
 should be. It was natural to believe that the 
 method and circumstances under which she had 
 learned would leave their imprint, and that 
 though she might have read and thought much 
 yet her culture would be less than that of 
 more favoured students. It was natural to 
 believe all this, and yet her speech, or rather 
 her personality, belied it all and showed quite 
 a new thing. To begin with, as she spoke 
 all learned that she had from sheer need of 
 words broken loose from her social idiom. She 
 spoke with restraint and delicate choice of 
 words, and yet very simply, and as she went 
 on everyone forgot her diction together, im- 
 pressed by something else that carried the 
 listener away. This mill-worker copied no 
 one. She spoke of what she had learned in 
 the classes she attended, and of how it had 
 lifted herself and her comrades into a new 
 world. And as she went on everyone became 
 conscious of elements of mental power and dis 
 tinction that are new to-day, quite as new in 
 colleges and drawing-rooms as in workshops 
 and kitchens. The work she had done in th^» 
 <3lasses had not helped her to earn a better 
 wage as yet, but it had raised her up into a 
 new life, and she was prepared to lay hold of 
 this new life which once seemed to lie far 
 beyond her. She became in a word her real 
 «elf. 
 
155 
 
 There could hardly be a better example of 
 the meaning of higher education — and of its 
 fruits. 
 
 It would be strange if the University men 
 and women who teach such puipls as these 
 were not driven night and day to think of 
 means by which they could go on with their 
 studies. Not the tutors only, however, but 
 all the leaders of the Workers' Education 
 Association have to think of the question of 
 finance for to-day as well as for to-morrow. 
 They have to look at all the resources avail- 
 able with an eye to the needs of the hour, 
 otherwise the promise of greater things will 
 slip away as it has slipped before from earlier 
 workers and dreamers. Mr. Mansbridge sug- 
 gests one way of raising funds which must, I 
 think, commend itself to everyone who has 
 even the smallest desire to help the poor 
 scholar. He points out that the Scholarships 
 were intended to help the poor, but that in 
 1850 the mere notion of using them for this 
 object was flung aside. From that time the 
 £80 per year four-years' Scholarships were 
 open to every young man, however rich, who 
 liked to compete for them. It is now proposed 
 not to get rid of the able but well-to-do scholar 
 who might long to enter the lists and win his 
 prize. The proposal is not to go back to the 
 ideal of the middle ages. Let the able youth 
 ^f every order go in and win if he can. Only if 
 
156 
 
 he be rich, or even well-to-do, let him he con- 
 tent with a prize of honour. Let the winning^ 
 of a Scholarship mean for him that he is 
 entitled to wear the scholar's gown, to receive 
 a prize of books, and only the formal rigrht to- 
 apply for grants in aid — the money being re- 
 turned by him, and going to swell the fund 
 that is to make it possible for poor and gifted 
 scholars to carry on their studies. It is 
 believed in some quarters, that were the real 
 truth known about the struggles of the poor, 
 and the fitness of many to profit by a Uni- 
 versity career, almost every well-to-do scholar 
 would not only be willing but eager to hand 
 back the gold he does not really need. 
 
 Lord Curzon sees an objection to this, how- 
 ever, because to quote his own words, *'If we 
 take away the tangible reward while we have 
 only the empty honour, we shall very likely find 
 that we have sacrificed a valuable incentive 
 to the industry of the well-to-do classes." This 
 raises an old, old question — that of vocation. 
 Who is the real student — the one who if 
 Universities have any function is not to be 
 set aside for the unwilling student. It would 
 appear that his character may and does vary 
 from age to age — that in one generation he may 
 be a lean clerk devoted to books, and in another 
 a bold seeker after truth, and ready to risk 
 health, life, everything in order to win new 
 light through experiments. In no age, how- 
 ever, was the real scholar painted as one opeit 
 
157 
 
 to the temptations of mere gain. The colleges 
 are not marts. Down in Whitechapel, hungry 
 school-boys wear a black badge with pride. 
 It is a real badge of honour, and does not 
 help them to-day at least to a dinner. And yet 
 they are proud of it, just as, long ago, victorious 
 youths were proud of a little wreath of laurel. 
 If the well-to-do student needs the incentive 
 of money as well as honour, and the 
 *' spoil of his brains " must alwaj^s include 
 some gold, it is hard to believe he is a student 
 at all. On the other hand it is certain that 
 possessed of means to begin with, and able to 
 enjoy not only a good Secondary education 
 but every other aid to study in college and 
 without it, he can to-day safely keep the poor 
 bona-fida student with a real vocation well out 
 of the running. 
 
 The leaders of the Workers' Education 
 Association recommend that the "tangible 
 reward" should be returned by the winning 
 scholar in every case where it can be proved 
 that it is not really a necessity. Fifty 
 thousand pounds is in itself a great endow- 
 ment. It is twice the sum which Denmark 
 pays in order to equip an educative land popu- 
 lation. If but the larger part of it were re- 
 turned every year, it would allow many of the 
 more brilliant scholars in the tutorial classes 
 to go forward to the University; or, what is 
 even more important, the extension work so 
 sadly crippled for lack of money, and which 
 
158 
 as yet hardly touches the country districts , 
 might go on more rapidly. 
 
 Not of course that this in itself would settle 
 the question of the poor man and woman 
 students' claim on the old Universities. In 
 England it is difficult to get the case stated at 
 all, because of the persistence of the caste system 
 in latter days, not at all simplified but made a 
 great deal more complicated by the success of 
 the rich middle class. Oxford, within, is a 
 very democratic place. But neither does this 
 in itself simplify the matter at all. If Oxford 
 admit only a handful of strangers it is easy 
 enough for her to treat them as members of a 
 family. It is the right or condition of entry 
 that shows the real spirit of the governing 
 classes. The caste system rules in the English 
 educational world, whether, as often happens, 
 it is not discussed, or whether it is freely talked 
 about. Lord Curzon, for his part, writes of it 
 freely. He points out that there are different 
 social strata, and that a poor man may belong 
 to one or another of them. He goes on to show 
 also that two poor men belonging to different 
 strata are not to be treated in the same way. 
 In Scotland, where the plumber's brother is a 
 light of the Established Church, and where the 
 gamekeeper's son is perhaps a distinguished 
 Greek scholar, this careful pigeon-holing of 
 human beings does not go on, because it can- 
 not. There may be as great an amount of social 
 prejudice, but it does not express itself in the 
 
159 
 same way. But in England, where, in thousands 
 of cases, poverty decides whether a boy is to be 
 a plumber or a doctor, a vanman or a school- 
 master, the ''poor" (but not the very rich) are 
 classified socially and cannot, as it appears, be 
 treated on any common basis whatsoever. 
 ''The majority of Oxford scholars," says Lord 
 Curzon, "are the sons of professional men, with 
 incomes of varying amount and description. 
 A scholarship or an exhibition is often the 
 means of enabling the father of such a man to 
 give a better education to his other children 
 which they might otherwise have been denied, 
 and the man himself to enjoy that margin of 
 amenity at the University which permits him 
 to associate with his fellows without any sense 
 of humiliation and to reap from Oxford Society 
 some of its most valuable benefits. Such a 
 man is not, of course, a pauper, but his pre- 
 sence at Oxford is probably not less beneficial 
 to the community than would have been the 
 case with the working man or the artizan whom 
 he is popularly supposed to have kept out." 
 The income of the professional man whose son 
 wins a scholarship may vary within wide 
 limits. As a rule it is not so small as to 
 prevent him from giving his son a long and 
 expensive education. In any case the poverty 
 of such a man is one thing, that of the work- 
 man is quite another. 
 
 Lord Curzon accepts this fact and gives it 
 such importance that he makes a plea for the 
 opening of a Working Man's College at Oxford 
 
160 
 
 ioT those classes ''who are too poor to enter 
 the ordinary colleges, or to spend half the year 
 in vacations." 
 
 Now there are Working Men's Colleges at Ox- 
 ford already. Riiskin College is one, and the Cen- 
 tral College is another. In these, as in the Small- 
 Holders' School at Odense, workingmen band 
 themselves together of design and of their own 
 choice to study certain things under chosen 
 teachers. This, however, is not the same as 
 going into a college provided for them as a 
 dass, and which puts a kind of seal on their 
 particular order of poverty. It is not the 
 being a shoemaker, a carpenter, a plumber, 
 or even a chimney sweep that an educated 
 human being would object to. The galling 
 thing is to be isolated or ostracised on 
 account of one's occupation, and it is not very 
 strange that up to the present working class 
 students everywhere have thrown cold water 
 on the proposal for this Workers' College at 
 Oxford. 
 
 "Still they cannot come into the colleges 
 in large numbers," says a voice from within, 
 ''because in the first place the standard or 
 cost of living cannot be brought down so that 
 they can afford to live with men of another 
 class. And besides, their education is not 
 such as makes them ready to go on with young 
 people who have been at public schools till 
 they were 18 and 19 years old." Each of 
 "these objections has to be met, though the 
 
161 
 latter is of course, out of sight, the more im- 
 portant, and deserves the long and strenuous 
 kind of treatment which, sooner or later, the 
 workers will have to give to it. 
 
 As regards the high cost of living in college, it 
 would be a vain thing to spend time in abusing 
 those who set the pace in such matters. To 
 begin with, the love of display and need for 
 rich living does not begin in the colleges. It 
 takes its rise in the homes of England. More- 
 over, to-day, luxury is not associated (as it was 
 yesterday) with utter lack of personal refine- 
 ment, and even of bodily cleanliness ! So that 
 now in condemning the one we have to be 
 careful not to lower the standard of the other. 
 Unfortunately, the question of the standard of 
 living at Oxford hardly arises at all for the 
 ordinary working-class scholar to-day. There 
 are so many obstacles which he must overcome, 
 there are so many questions which must be an- 
 swered before he can even hope to go to College 
 at all. It is probable that these earlier ques- 
 tions disposed of the '^standard of living" one 
 may begin to look paltry. Given a generation 
 of workpeople with a high standard in 
 hygiene, the question of luxury as such 
 might be summarily dealt with. The veils 
 of illusion having fallen it might appear 
 that there was nothing below but the 
 desire for display, for material pleasure, for 
 self-indulgence. Will the workers of to-mor- 
 row regard these things with reverent sub- 
 
162 
 mission and delicate tolerance? In the 
 Republic of Plato, the guardians or aristocrats 
 of the State had no land, no jewels, money, or 
 houses — neither could they expect to receive 
 but only to give happiness. They were them- 
 selves the gold of the State — its reasoning 
 and directing power, its soul. Whatever we 
 may think of the influence of Greek culture on 
 the minds of those who have forgotten that they 
 had any real culture or race heritage of their 
 own, it is quite certain that the best type of 
 Greek scholar cannot find the costly way of 
 living found at Oxford to-day very imposing 
 or worthy of respect. 
 
 And here we may say that there is no reason 
 why the workers should join in the bitter cry 
 against ^^ Greek in Responsions." It is not a 
 working-class cry. It never rose from the 
 ranks either in Scotland, where so many 
 ploughman-students flung themselves on Greek 
 like parched stags at the swollen brook, or in 
 England where in long gone by days ample 
 provision was made for classical study in the 
 endowed schools, though, in so far as the 
 workers were concerned, all in vain. To quote 
 Lord Curzon's own words, ^^ Greek will be 
 learned for its own sake as long as learning 
 exists." If, as we believe, every variety of 
 intellectual type of scholars exists among the 
 working people why should they begin by 
 slighting the best ? It is to be hoped that even 
 in the twilight of to-day the masses will take 
 
163 
 rather a wider view. The Workers' Educa- 
 tion Association has the same good reasons 
 for starting courses for the study of Greek as 
 it has for beginning classes in Craftsmanship. 
 That is to say, it has the good reason 
 that to some this branch of education 
 is helpful and congenial. No less than 
 300 out of the 504 Oxford scholarships now 
 in existence are given to classical students, 
 and as the Public Schools — not the Municipal 
 Secondary Schools — t^ke Greek, the way to 
 Oxford is paved for the Public School boy.* 
 There is a cry raised now for the development 
 of the modern side in Public and Elementary 
 Schools and the abolition of Greek as an en- 
 trance subject. And as a growing though very 
 small number of working-class children attend 
 Municipal Secondary Schools, it would seem at 
 first as if working-class parents should join 
 their protest to that of the Moderns ! The fact 
 
 * Here is the list of sub j ects for which the Scholar- 
 ships are given. It is taken from Lord Curzon^s book, 
 "Principles and Methods of University Reform.'' 
 
 
 Scholarships. 
 
 Exhibitions. 
 
 
 No. given 
 
 Total 
 
 No. given 
 
 Total 
 
 
 Yearly. 
 
 No. 
 
 Yearly. 
 
 No. 
 
 Classics 
 
 75 
 
 300 
 
 30 
 
 120 
 
 Mathematics ... 
 
 15i 
 
 62 
 
 5i 
 
 22 
 
 Science 
 
 14 
 
 56 
 
 13 
 
 52 
 
 History 
 
 Hi 
 
 58 
 
 64 
 
 26 
 
 Other Subjects... 
 
 7 
 
 28 
 
 2J 
 
 10 
 
 Total 
 
 126 
 
 504 
 
 57J 
 
 230 
 
164 
 is, however, that they have never underrated or 
 ignored the value of a classical education with- 
 out paying heavily for it. Most important of 
 all for them is it to see that different types of 
 secondary education should be provided, that 
 many orders of mind shall be understood, and 
 that the sources of the highest culture shall not 
 be fenced away from any. 
 
 Some appreciation of all this, and of a 
 great deal more than this, does lie in the 
 heart of the waking masses. Labour itself 
 is not even to-day a thing that deadens 
 utterly and sends to sleep. Even the 
 deepest sleeper of all, the rural labourer, has, 
 we are told, some mental powers that do not 
 come lightly to the surface, and yet often sur- 
 prise and perturb those who try to reach down 
 to the depth where he lives in darkness. But, 
 if the half -submerged has a point of view, it is 
 even more certain that the thousands of work- 
 ing-class people now beginning to have some 
 real interest in higher education must sooner 
 or later begin to review the history and the 
 actual constitutions and methods of the Public 
 Schools and the Universities, and to deliver 
 themselves of a message of which not even a 
 prophecy can be found in the Report of 
 Nineteenth Century Commissions. It is at 
 least reasonable to believe that such will be 
 the case. It is indeed certain that sooner or 
 
165 
 later the long dumb masses will speak, and 
 that their words will not be an echo, still less 
 a *'vain repetition," put on to their lips by 
 teachers, however noble. 
 
 It is therefore necessary that there should 
 be a new Royal Commission on University 
 Education. The demand for it should now 
 become clear and concentrated — a thing" not 
 to be turned back any more. And indeed 
 this demand is already put forward by the 
 Trade Union Congress, which has given in- 
 structions thereon to its Parliamentary Com- 
 mittee. But this demand is not enough. It 
 might very easily result in a Commission that 
 would do little justice to the cause that is at 
 stake. For it is not a mere revision of the 
 whole system of using endowments and their 
 increase that is wanted — essential as is this 
 reform. Over and above all this there is 
 the creative impulse in educational matters 
 of a newly emancipated class which, if it be 
 absent, no mere rearranging of grants in aid 
 or terms of admission will be of any use. 
 
 This creative impulse was not absent from 
 the work of the last Commission. The members 
 set out to do a certain thing, viz., to destroy 
 privilege among the well-to-do. In the course 
 of their labours they not only pooled scholarship 
 moneys, founded better-paid fellowships, and 
 rubbed out faint and old boundaries. They 
 passed in review different courses of study, set 
 forth the value of new subjects, accepted for 
 
166 
 good or ill the duty of being something more 
 than financiers. It is true that just as the 
 founders, while helping the poor, did not grant 
 the right of higher education to serfs, so 
 the 1850 Commission, while destroying privi- 
 lege among the middle and upper classes, re- 
 fused, practically at least, the right of higher 
 education to workmen. But this did not pre- 
 vent the Commissioners from having a new 
 message of their own in educational matters, 
 nor from thinking out every one of their re- 
 commendations as educational reformers of a 
 Manchester School order. 
 
 The ideal of an educated working class 
 should of course be immensely wider, fresher, 
 charged with newer and more vital elements — 
 not because the workers are better than other 
 people, but, to give but one reason, because they 
 are overwhelmingly more numerous, and must 
 include therefore, potentially at least, more 
 varied and numerous types.* Their ideal 
 too, for obvious reasons, should resemble 
 less than does that of any smaller section, 
 a merely personal or one-sided interest. 
 All this does not appear to-day. It can 
 appear only when higher education is general — 
 when every one is not merely a unit 
 but is individualised. This is why a Eoyal 
 Commission by itself is little — is nothing. If 
 
 *Of course there are many other reasons. To begin 
 with they are not limited (as were the middle class) by 
 the fierce desire for gain and the impulse to sacrifice 
 everything to this end. 
 
167 
 throiagh it flashes not the message of thousands 
 of waking workpeople (scholars already in spite 
 of all), but the pale recommendations of well- 
 wishers and advisers of another class, it can 
 have little interest. If it is a mere violent 
 demand, issued by men and women afraid to 
 do other than threaten and claim, it will have 
 no power. 
 
 Thus, it is very hard to see how any friend 
 of labour should stand aloof from the Associa- 
 tion that tries at least to bring Higher 
 Education to the door of the English mill- 
 hand, mechanic, and unskilled labourer. Back 
 into the dim ways and silent the leaders of 
 such a movement have to go, trying to make 
 a highway where there is none. Much of the 
 work is obscure enough — the helping of a 
 poor workman here, the opening of a class 
 there, the getting together a small fund to send 
 _ an able essayist to college. Some of it is 
 not obscure. There are new and great de- 
 partures. Joint Boards of University men and 
 workmen are formed. Not only the older 
 Universities, but also London, Leeds, Liver- 
 pool, and Manchester Universities have 
 through these a link with the people ; 151 Co- 
 operative Committees, 161 Adult Schools, 11 
 University bodies, 87 Working Men's Clubs, 
 48 Literary Societies, and five Trade Unions 
 stand by this missionary effort, but, through- 
 out its earlier years in any case, it goes for- 
 ward with difiiculty and under a shadow. In 
 
168 
 1910, we are told, nearly 2,000 students are 
 pledged to a three years' course in tutorial 
 classes. If it were 200,000 (which it might 
 soon be) the real meaning of the work could be 
 read easily. Its message would then be, as it 
 were, in large print. A great new army, awake 
 and alert, looking out on a new world, and 
 holding new weapons. But to-day the reality 
 is not understood except by a few. The print 
 is, as yet, so small. 
 
 But it may be said, the working people have 
 got to Oxford — or a few of them are there 
 anyhow. If they do not crowd into the old 
 colleges they enrol themselves in the new. 
 There is Euskin Hall and the Central Colleges. 
 In the summer months too there are the sum- 
 mer meetings 
 
 Of Central College there is here no question, 
 because its function, however important in it- 
 self, is not education — primarily at least — but 
 propaganda. It is said that Modern Lan- 
 guages and Natural Science can be taken, but 
 the students themselves declare that, as a 
 matter of fact, only subjects that bear directly 
 on social questions are attempted. All first 
 year students are of course expected to take 
 Sociology or Economics. Over and above thiar 
 he takes Industrial History, Political and Con- 
 stitutional History, Political and Social Pro- 
 blems, Local Government, and Essay writing. 
 
169 
 
 Ruskin College has a longer history, and its 
 attitude to the University (unlike that of the 
 Central College) has not been one of complete 
 aloofness. It provides for about sixty work- 
 ing-class men students. It has a resident 
 lecturer in Sociology, and a special master 
 for Economics, who lectures on Trade 
 Unionism, Economics, International Trade, 
 Marxian Economics. It has also a University 
 lecturer on social questions from the stand- 
 point of history, and others who take Local 
 Government and Industrial History as special 
 subjects. For a certain type of mind such 
 a course of study doubtless gives excellent 
 results. On others of equal power, and of equal 
 importance to the Labour Movement, the work 
 would have no such effect. There is little 
 doubt that the Trades and Labour Organisa- 
 tions, while supporting the new Labour Col- 
 leges, should concentrate during the next few 
 years on the research and missionary side of 
 Higher Education, carrying the work hardily 
 into the rural areas, multiplying tutorial 
 classes in cities, refusing to turn back from 
 dark places, but advancing even into the heart 
 of slum areas. 
 
 Inside the University the working-class 
 student has something to fear, but not 
 persecution; nothing (as in public schools) 
 from the barbaric impulses of adolescents. 
 No; the students are not boys, but have 
 emerged from boyhood, and are now as 
 
170 
 generous as they will ever be, and more 
 generous perhaps, for they are in the dawn of 
 young manhood and womanhood, ready to 
 accept high ideals, to form new friendships. 
 In short, they are in many respects at their 
 best. In Somerville College the young work- 
 ing women is surrounded by an atmosphere 
 of good will and tactful kindness. Jn the 
 men's College the horny-handed son of toil is 
 listened to with respect, often with humility. 
 One cannot emerge safely from a situation like 
 that by repelling kindness that is quite sincere, 
 or copying original types that are quite genu- 
 ine. Yet here is temptation, of a subtle kind. 
 One can easily become nothing in such an 
 atmosphere. There is a new path. Only the 
 strong will find it. There will be new types, 
 new manners, new destinies. Through Higher 
 Education these may be evolved at last. 
 
 But those who can face new tests to-day at 
 the old Universities are very few. So rare are 
 they that they make literally no difference. 
 The workers come to Oxford and Cambridge, 
 it is true, as wayfarers. That is, they come 
 to the summer meetings, which are the joy of 
 every year to many a poor mechanic and work- 
 ing woman. They visit the old Universities. 
 They walk through the old halls, and linger in 
 the beautiful gardens. The city is so still 
 then, in the late summer nights, and yet to 
 the new order of visitor she appears to give a 
 new kind of welcome. ''At last," she seems 
 
171 
 
 to say, *'you too have arrived." At last, in the 
 great hush, she lets us, too, hear the eternal 
 song, the song ''that runs like a river in our 
 veins and sinks and swells for ever in our 
 hearts." The moonlight streams down on the 
 fine colleges (empty for such a long time every 
 year). Behind the massed shadows loom 
 darker masses. We walk home along streets 
 made eloquent for ever. Midnight strikes. 
 All the echoes die away in the pure silence. 
 How hard is the industrial struggle that rages 
 and has raged for centuries near this beautiful 
 place. And how many of those who come 
 here for a week, a fortnight, are swallowed up 
 for fifty weeks of every year in that strife. 
 But now they too listen. The dying echoes 
 speak of Eternity, of Time, of Patience. "'At 
 last you too have come. And why?" asks the 
 beautiful city. And she seems to answer her- 
 self: ''Because of something that does not 
 die." For here in all that moulders, and in all 
 that lives for ever, the listeners are reminded 
 not of the dead hand but of the dead heart, 
 the heart of their great countrymen, who longed 
 to give them this glorious heritage . Th ey longed 
 to give it not to one class but to the nation, and 
 not to the rich alone, but above all and for 
 all time to the poor. Then, doubtless, the 
 working-class visitors must wish to voice the 
 message not of an old Commission, but of a 
 body that represents the new life and desire 
 of to-day. Their thoughts cannot, moreover. 
 
172 
 be confined to Oxford and Cambridge, save as 
 these will remain great influences in time to 
 come. They must fly beyond them, reaching 
 out to the millions that can never hope to 
 study in these colleges. For it is not the pro- 
 blem of Oxford and Cambridge that has to be 
 solved — but the problem of Higher Education 
 of all. 
 
Acceptance — A Summary. 
 
 It may be that few working-people will ever 
 read this book, and yet to working-class readers, 
 be they few or many, is this last chapter ad- 
 dressed. For them is it written, and it is 
 placed last very largely because many people 
 who are not anxious to even skim a volume are 
 willing, nevertheless, to glance at the end of it. 
 
 There is a school of writers who are known 
 as Realists, and among whom Zola is a great 
 outstanding figure. These try to rid them- 
 selves of all that made the glory of the 
 Romantic school, to cast away every trace of 
 affectation and sentimentality, and to paint 
 things as they are, or as they appear to the 
 Realist writer. A great many Realists such as 
 Flaubert — to take another giant as a type — 
 were either doctors or sons of doctors. They 
 seem to make a speciality of medical scenes. 
 But in any case their aim was clear enough and 
 was tersely stated by Zola himself, '*Let every- 
 thing be said, so that everything may be 
 remedied." The story-teller gives place at 
 last to the observer; and romance to science. 
 It is a kind of transition which the ordinary 
 person can understand. 
 
 There is one thing, however, much greater 
 than the temper of even great writers, and that 
 173 
 
174 
 
 is the Spirit of the Age, of which they are only 
 the more or less successful interpreters. In 
 the E/Omantic age of the last two centuries, the 
 spokesman of the people and the people them- 
 selves were in a sense Romanticists. They 
 passed from one paroxysm of feeling to an- 
 other. In England there was a great religious 
 movement at the end of the 18th century which 
 was the beginning of much. But even in 
 England the revolt of the masses, culminating 
 at last in the Chartist movement, was as 
 ' 'romantic" a movement as the English char- 
 acter would allow of. Feeling was expressed 
 naively in the street as in the study. * 'Feeling 
 must always precede action" it will be said. Yes, 
 but it need not always express itself in simple 
 ''romantic" ways. There are signs that it does 
 not to-day express itself always in this way even 
 in the street. The lethargy of many minds is 
 being fairly overcome at last, and how. By 
 stress of feeling. Then we have the Realist — 
 who is not only ready for explosive action but 
 above all for hard labour in a great cause. 
 
 The Realist makes his advent to-day not only 
 in literature, but in the workshop, the school, 
 the slum, the home, and in Parliament. The 
 brilliant group of French writers— Goncourt, 
 Daudet, Flaubert, etc., have their English 
 counterparts in George Moore, Gissing, and 
 others. But the public encourages the Realist 
 not only in literature but at street corners, and 
 in meeting places of every order. It asks for 
 
175 
 facts greedily. Even those who forget the 
 facts go home satisfied that a demand was 
 made that is somehow in line with the 
 forces of Evolution. Social reformers, 
 instead of describing the woes of the poor, 
 write books that give information about the 
 wage-earning powers of men and women in 
 mean streets, and also coloured maps showing 
 the degree of poverty in different quarters. 
 These books have a great vogue. They are 
 extended reports, and for that reason they are 
 popular, just as certain novels, too, are popular 
 because they are almost photographs. All this 
 indicates that the masses are sweeping beyond 
 the age of mere impulse, and that a new kind 
 of sincerity will be required in all those who 
 would successfully appeal to them. And this 
 is the hour when a real light begins to fall on 
 the past. The past begins to be unveiled. 
 Truths that could not be told before are uttered 
 now. And what is more, they are followed by 
 words that give new and dazzling hopes to the 
 race. The hour is one, in short, for acceptance. 
 '^Let all be known that all may be remedied," 
 say the awaking people. 
 
 Yet no one need be shocked here and 'Vlose 
 this book," to alter an old formula, ''lest he 
 will find something to revolt him in its con- 
 cluding pages." We shall do nothing worse 
 here than quote the words of the Chancellor of 
 Oxford University : — 
 
176 
 
 *'It is impossible/' says Lord Curzon, **that 
 the standard or cost of living at the ordinary 
 colleges at Oxford can be brought down to a 
 point which will enable working men to enter 
 them in any great numbers." 
 
 So far from quarrelling with this statement 
 we ought all to be thankful for the exclusive- 
 ness which allows people to hold up a standard 
 of living in any place at all. In many 
 respectable areas there is much vulgar pride, all 
 the social prejudices in full flower, and 
 yet no attempt to hold up any standard 
 of living at all. In the new school 
 clinics just opened there are children from 
 *' respectable " homes. Some are even ol the 
 aristocracy of labour. Is there any standard 
 of living for them at all? A point beyond 
 which they and, what is the same thing, their 
 companions must not sink. Not at all. They 
 may go into any bath of infection . Rooms where 
 €hildren gather have still to be furnished in a 
 certain way. A cushion was left in a chair 
 one day at a clinic. It had to be burned on 
 account of vermin. Books were infectious after 
 a day or two and had to be destroyed. Every- 
 thing that can be soiled is foul almost at once. 
 Nurses have to poultice some children's faces 
 before they can begin to cleanse and prepare 
 them for real treatment. Ophthalmia and other 
 infectious diseases rush through the schools. 
 It is sad to know of actual sufiEering allowed 
 to go on, of discharging ears utterly neglected. 
 
177 
 
 of rickety children becoming so deformed 
 that the heart is displaced and fatal disease 
 sets in. But even the spectacle of cruel suffer- 
 ing does not impress one so much as does the 
 fact that the causes of all this misery, so easily 
 reTnovable, are not dealt tvith at all, that there 
 is no standard, and that there never was any. 
 
 But there are worse things than even these 
 to tell. 
 
 The Realist in Education must be bolder 
 than any one else. Louise Michel was, per- 
 haps, the one woman who ever wrote the true 
 history of a certain unhappy child (type of a 
 class), but no one would publish what she 
 wrote. What is the most terrible result of 
 overcrowding? And, above all, of stunted, 
 mutilated manhood and womanhood? What 
 happens when crowded in filthy dens? The 
 physical nature develops in man and woman 
 with no corresponding mental advance. Who 
 will dare to tell ? The Eealist will tell. He and 
 she know already. Not one woman, but many, 
 now understand very well what lies behind the 
 impregnable reserve of certain little oues. 
 How much inspection we have to-day, and how 
 easy to elude it! Where are the inspectors 
 who know and will tell what is behind the 
 evasive calm face of this pale child who breaks 
 into a smile readily, a child whose real history 
 would scorch the page on which it is written. 
 
 The Doctor in the school comes here, too, 
 like a hand on a dungeon door. 
 
178 
 
 Happily the life story of the average slum 
 child does not offer anything abnormal or very 
 strange. He is behind the age as a rule, no- 
 thing worse, and not so far behind it after all. 
 For of late his betters have come on fast, and 
 have forgotten, very wisely, what it was neither 
 pleasant nor useful to remember. However, 
 the bad old customs and manners linger in 
 some places. 
 
 Here is a little boy w^ho lost his father last 
 year and went to live with his grandparents — 
 a very respectable-looking old couple. The 
 grandfather is intelligent — an old bargeman. 
 But the grandmother swears so dreadfully that 
 the child's language now is sown with curses. 
 It is only because such Realism may keep for 
 us the sense of kinship that one recalls how the 
 upper-class man of a hundred years ago swore 
 freely. Not a century has passed since squires 
 and gentlemen were carried to bed, too, after 
 dinner, helplessly drunk. As for a low stan- 
 dard of hygiene three generations back, the less 
 said of it perhaps the better. It is not neces- 
 sary to go back to Queen Elizabeth (who bathed 
 twice a year and always in fear, and \vithin 
 call of two physicians) or to Queen Anne (who 
 lost eighteen children) in order to find x^eople 
 who set a bad example. The children of the 
 worst areas to-day are after all no dirtier than 
 were the Court-ladies of yesterday. 
 
 The superiority of the upper class in such 
 matters is that they changed their habits within 
 
179 
 a generation. They were Realists. They 
 gripped the facts — which is the bravest 
 kind of revolt. Then silently, swiftly, 
 all was changed. The money question 
 did not stand in the way. But neither does it 
 stand in the way of the masses to-day. A 
 school nursery dealing with 450 ailing children 
 per week costs less than £300 a year. Such 
 children are, of course, merely treated. They 
 are not nursed or kept in health.* 
 
 Let us come to figures. ^ What is the 
 cost of an ordinary school clinic, and how 
 would a system of clinics affect the rates? 
 
 At Deptford, a doctor attends one afternoon 
 per week. There are two such part-time 
 doctors. Each sees from 30 to 40 patients per 
 week. In two months they have treated be- 
 tween four and five hundred children. The 
 nurse attends, however, every day for three 
 hours, and a teacher of physical culture gives 
 five or six hours weekly. The results are very 
 encouraging. One spinal case was cured in 
 five weeks by exercises. Adenoid cases, too, 
 have yielded to mere training without treat- 
 ment (though the number of these is small). 
 
 *But even a health nursery (such as every primary 
 school should include) need not be a place where money 
 is wildly spent on every kind of luxury. In the Rue des 
 Eclumes, Paris, there is a primary school where the 
 whole child-community is organised not in classes 
 merely, but as a family, and where the elder girls are 
 assistant nurses, and the elder boys have each a younger 
 brother to be more or less responsible for. Given a 
 staff of teachers, allowed to co-operate with nurses and 
 doctor, all could be done that is necessary for the actual 
 bringing up of healthy happy children. 
 
180 
 Grateful parents issue from side streets to ^ive 
 thanks, to declare that whereas Mary was deaf 
 now she hears, and that Johnny who was half- 
 blind sees now like his neighbours. The clinic 
 is treating well over 2,000 children per year. 
 The cost of such, excluding the teacher's 
 salary, would be roughly as follows : — 
 
 Rent . . . 
 
 Caretaker 
 
 Doctors 
 Nurse ... 
 
 Pi'tijs^ &c. 
 
 £50* 
 £50 
 £100 
 £80 
 £20 
 
 Total £300 
 
 This works out at 3/- per child per annum. 
 This estimate is rather high because the work 
 is approached timidly. The rent would not be 
 increased if the doctors were whole timers, and 
 the general expenses would be proportionately 
 less. In short, the clinic might deal with 
 12,000 annually, when the cost would fall very 
 considerably below 3/- per head. 
 
 No school clinic is doing its work 
 thoroughly if it does not take account 
 of the question of t^eth. A dentist could 
 deal with from 1,000 to 1,200 cases per 
 year. A school clinic employing a dentist four 
 half days, a doctor two half days, and nurse, 
 and dealing with 2,000 yearly, should not cost 
 more than a little over £450. Even for this 
 
 •The Greenwich Borough Council has kindly given us 
 the use of the building rent free. 
 
181 
 double treatment, then, the cases to not come 
 to nearly 5/- per head. For 5/- one rould 
 include special teaching and train ,ng to make 
 the cures perfect. 
 
 The first years will be years of mere rude 
 labour. The '' cases " are in need of simple, 
 elementary treatment. The work cannot yet 
 be other than rude, simple, and laborious. 
 The utter neglect of any treatment in the past 
 will make it hard to cover large numbers in a 
 short time. Later it will be otherwise. A child 
 with a well-kept mouth, for example, need not 
 remain long in a dentist's chair. Outbreaks 
 of infectious diseases will become rarer and 
 slighter. All the diseases that owe their 
 
 origin to dirt — and we are dealing mainly 
 with these to-day — will be stamped out. 
 The routine work of the clinic will become 
 easier, too, as the doctors, if not more skilful, 
 at any rate are more at home in the work. 
 Then the very nature of the work will change 
 the great problems that are to-day beyond our 
 range, and are hardly hinted at by even the 
 school doctor of to-day, must come clearly into 
 view. Intelligence will be measured more or 
 less accurately. Type of mind can be recog- 
 nised. Beyond lie secrets even more remote. 
 An entirely new branch of medical science will 
 be developed, and linking itself into the educa- 
 tional system will transform the latter into 
 a splendid means of racial development. All 
 this is for to-morrow. But to-morrow need 
 
182 
 
 not be far off. Meantime we can already 
 answer the burning question. Will it cost 
 much to make a start? Will it ruin the 
 nation to make the children well? ^o. 
 We can already prove that this notion 
 is mere folly. The idea that the giving 
 of medical treatment to the young must 
 be ruinous was a superstition founded on greed 
 and fear and superstition, the common origin of 
 all superstition. A collective nursery for the 
 children of an area with 20,000 inhabitants can 
 be run for a sum that would not pay the yearly 
 accounts of many a private nursery, and with a 
 staff which many a mother would think too 
 small to be in attendance on her three or four 
 children. 
 
 Take the question of feeding the children in 
 poor areas. It is still believed in many quar- 
 ters that a hungry child's dinner will ruin the 
 ratepayers. The reason people jump to this 
 conclusion is that they have never made the 
 experiment, still less have they looked into and 
 compared the prices of foodstuffs, or noted how 
 food is used. Mr. Arthur Ponsonby, in 
 *'The Camel and the Needle's Eye," gives the 
 result of some enquiries he made into the 
 accounts of the rich as well as into the bill of 
 fare of poor folk. In one house where there is 
 a family of seven, and a staff of 19 servants, 
 the food bill per week is £72. In another, a 
 small family of four and their attendants spend 
 £60 128. 7d. in one week for food alone. (The 
 
183 
 master and mistress dine out once or twice, but 
 they give parties.) These families spend over 
 £3,000 a year on their dinners, breakfasts, and 
 luncheons. In Bradford, 1,700 children are 
 fed daily in the best manner for £2,500. That 
 is to say that for the price paid for the food 
 consumed or wasted by a single family in the 
 West End you might feed over two thousand 
 children. Then the feeding of a family ex- 
 travagantly degrades everyone, but especially 
 the servants. *' Quarts of cream are emptied 
 down the sink," says Mr. Ponsonby, ''joints 
 and birds only half-eaten are thrown away, 
 and the pig tub receives a rich enough allow- 
 ance of vegetables, fruits, and cakes to satisfy 
 the appetite of a large family. In fact, in one 
 house where the household books averaged £63 
 a week, the matter was looked into and a re- 
 duction was made of £34 without any diminu- 
 tion in the number of servants." 
 
 The feeding of children in the right way 
 educates everyone concerned. In Bradford, at 
 the school feeding centres, when hundreds of 
 children, even thousands, have eaten, a very 
 small pail, half filled, contains all the waste. 
 The maid at the dish-rack shows you the little 
 pail with delight. ''Look," she says proudly, 
 ^'that is all that is scrapped." The worth of a 
 few farthings, perhaps, left over after feeding 
 nearly two thousand ! 
 
 Very educative, too, is the right way 
 of setting about clothing people. With 
 
184 
 less than £20 thirty to forty children 
 were dressed last winter in two schools. 
 The girls made their own dresses. The 
 jerseys could have been knitted by the 
 little ones, and would cost about one shilling 
 and fourpence apiece. At the time they were 
 making their new clothes all the children 
 leaped into a new desire for cleanliness, order, 
 and beauty. A stranger entering would have 
 been struck by their appearance. Had there 
 been cleansing baths in the school, plagues 
 could have been wiped out swiftly and quietly, 
 and even with the means at hand children and 
 teachers swept forward out of — what? We 
 know very well. Close by there is a room kept 
 spotlessly clean, and with windows open wide, 
 yet which can hardly be entered when a few 
 people even have been there awhile. Such is 
 the condition of the clothes and skin of some of 
 the company ! 
 
 Many years have passed since Euskin wrote 
 ' 'Sesame and Lilies." No one was such a 
 master of the picturesque style in addressing 
 women, and the beauty of appeal to the ex- 
 quisitely dressed ladies of England on behalf 
 of the naked and ragged still woos many to 
 read his pages who would shrink from rags and 
 all that goes with them. But now we have lost 
 faith in the mere making of garments by ladies* 
 hands. The task is too big for them alone. In 
 the hands of one of our great State services — 
 the teaching profession — it might become 
 
185 
 effective. In the hands of the ^'charitable'* it 
 is a mere pastime. Here, again, the 
 Realist must begin to look into accounts 
 and compare them. In this way some 
 curious facts are brought to light. Leav- 
 ing aside the exceptionally rich women who 
 spend £4,000 per year and over on their 
 toilette, let us begin with those who are not 
 ' 'extravagant," as their friends understand the 
 word, and who never wear — as some do — a boa 
 which costs thousands of pounds, and rarely 
 buy very costly lace or jewels. 
 
 Two thousand is not considered a large sum 
 in certain quarters for a woman to spend per 
 year on dress. With the allowances of half a 
 dozen of the women of this class, we could clothe 
 all the absolutely ragged children in London. 
 With the money spent by a dozen women in 
 one year all the poorer class of scholars, who 
 never put on anything new or fresh, could be 
 neatly and warmly clad. Given away care- 
 lessly, it is true, the new clothes of many chil- 
 dren would soon be filthy again. They would 
 be stowed away in dreadful places, or worn 
 night and day till they were a vile covering. 
 Given as inaterial for education, this we see 
 does not happen. The new, clean clothes are 
 the object lesson of the school — wakening new 
 hopes, ambitions, and desires. Perhaps it is 
 not possible yet to convince the Society woman 
 that the constant changing of clothes is a waste 
 of time, and also in this whirlwind of robing 
 
186 
 and disrobing slie gains nothing in beauty. 
 Not all would be patriotic enough to 
 enjoy the sight of beautiful English chil- 
 dren plucked literally out of the gutter — and 
 worse — by the cutting down of their own ward- 
 robes. Meantime, it is all-important that 
 the working-class man or woman should accept 
 the fact, now demonstrated, that rags are 
 unnecessary, that at a small expense good 
 clothing can be secured for all, that even the 
 children can make their own clothes, and indeed 
 ought to make them as part of their educa- 
 tion. ''Learn by doing, ^^ said Froebel. We 
 say we follow him. But how far? "We give 
 them mats to embroider, but not baths, or 
 handkerchiefs, or clean clothes. Have we not 
 to teach hygiene also by doing ! And how can 
 children use things rightly that they cannot 
 reach at all ? 
 
 Turning now to secondary education and the 
 fate of the working-class child in his early 
 teens, a terrible fact, long-hidden, long-ignored, 
 waits for us. It is this. The great mass of 
 human beings have to stop growing mentally 
 while the impulse of growth is yet strong. 
 They are fourteen-year children for ever (ac- 
 cording to Binet the average working-class man 
 is a twelve-year old) in so far as the higher 
 powers of the mind are concerned. We, in 
 England, have evidence that this arrest is not 
 final. That given even very meagre opportuni- 
 ties, many of these stunted intellects will 
 
187 
 spring up like plants taken into a warm liouse. 
 But that this arrest is common, almost general, 
 in some classes, we have no room to doubt. It 
 is a fact now brought to light and offered 
 for our acceptance. The last person to 
 refuse it should be the working-class man 
 or woman. He or she has won the right to 
 about 25 per cent, of all the places in a certain 
 number of secondary schools. And what does 
 this amount to? Not 4 per cent, of their 
 children get any secondary education at all. 
 And meantime the elementary school teacher 
 is at least tempted to discourage his pupils 
 from leaving him to enter secondary schools, 
 for in going they leave his school shorn of all 
 its glory. If one takes fourteen years old as a 
 halting point there is nothing to be said — 
 except that elementary education comes to an 
 inglorious end. That is what the Realist in 
 education is saying to-day. Nothing else 
 can be said until the school age is raised — 
 raised so that all our '* elementary" schools, or 
 whatever we may call them, are built, and 
 staffed, and organized to carry every scholar on 
 till he has at least passed his sixteenth birth- 
 day. 
 
 There can be no serious opposition to this 
 reform except the opposition of the working- 
 class parent himself. He is opposing it to- 
 day, and we are arguing with him. He fights 
 against the raising of the school age, in some 
 cases because he is poor, but not always. Often 
 
188 
 he does it because he cannot imagine a good 
 which he has never experienced.* The real 
 cause of his strange indifference shows behind 
 all his *' independence," his ''shrewdness/' 
 etc. He is stunted, and cannot know it. 
 
 Yet nothing encourages us to follow the ex- 
 ample of the ''leisured" classes — to wish that, 
 one day, all young people shall pass from one 
 school to another till at the age of 20 or 22 all 
 meet in the University. Britain at least can 
 hardly settle down at last to give all her chi^ 
 dren a dull and balked youth. "Dull," it may 
 be said. "Is it dull to ride, boat, play games, 
 hunt, etc. ?" Tes, it is dull to do these things 
 only in safe and pleasant ways. Our fore- 
 fathers were raiders and plunderers, but at 
 least they had a notion that valour should have 
 a field of some kind. Real Samurai would not 
 want to spend their time in games, however 
 "manly," nor to live a screened life in youth 
 as in childhood. They would want — and do 
 want — to face life at last, to look into "the 
 bright face of Danger," or in any case to take 
 the brunt of things, to bear hardships and face 
 responsibilities. 
 
 No mere "school" will save the young people 
 who do not feel like this — who knowing that 
 other people are going down mines, stamping 
 
 * In Bradford 5 per cent., in most other cities 3 per 
 cent, or less of the elementary school children go on to 
 secondary schools. Five per cent, as a maximum. And 
 this city has been congratulated by inspectors ! Inspec- 
 tors may be content, but working-class parents have" 
 no right to be. 
 
189 
 
 glowing metal, facing storms, toiling around 
 furnaces, do not wish to share the hardships 
 and risks of the world. Swein of Aslifson, 
 walking the oars of his dragon ship as they 
 swept, fan-like, through the waters, was a fierce 
 wild figure, and yet he compares favourably 
 enough in some respects with the modern young 
 gentleman in flannels. The latter is perhaps 
 quite as brave. But he has no field for his 
 valour, and that in the long run cannot be a 
 good thing for valour, if environment counts 
 for anything ! 
 
 More cruel, even, is the fate of those who 
 are brave in vain. On the north-eastern 
 coast of Scotland there are fisher communities 
 who are descendants of these same Norsemen 
 who once raided the coasts and rode their 
 galleys into the Moray Firth. Some of these 
 fisher people are said to be direct descend- 
 ants of the Vikings. In one county many of 
 them bear the name of **Main" (a corruption 
 of the Norse Magnus), and they add on what 
 they call a ^*tee-name" to distinguish indi- 
 viduals, as for example ''John Main, Bochel,'' 
 etc. It is a wonderful sight, when the spring 
 tides are on to see a boat come in manned by 
 one or two fishermen and as many youths. The 
 harbours are dangerous. At one point, where 
 the boats have to pass in, there is a broken wall, 
 making a narrow passage through which the 
 rowers can just manage to sweep. Vikings the 
 little crews look, with their helmet-like caps, 
 
190 
 How well they use the oars, one steering as 
 might Swein himself ! The youth are grave 
 men at twenty. They go to the Shetlands, and 
 are at home on wild seas in small craft. They 
 whisper among themselves, sometimes a little 
 wonderingly, of the naval men in the great 
 men-of-war who ought to see ''a lot more of 
 rough weather." They tell grave brief stories 
 of the sea. They have the advantage constantly 
 of the naval men in things that depend on ex- 
 perience. The fisher for example, can gauge 
 the depth of water to a fathom where the 
 other goes wrong by twelve or twenty fathoms. 
 And yet the fisher holding so much from the 
 past is winning nothing at all from the pre- 
 sent. What do the learned know of him or 
 his life? Do they help him in any way to 
 share what has been won by the modern world, 
 or give him any hint as to how he can hold his 
 own with the rich men who buy steam drifters ? 
 Where is his share of the world of to-day ? 
 
 It is a thing to face at last — this error 
 of making some live in vain and others 
 read and play to small purpose. Nature urges 
 youth to face hardships in the later teens. 
 Even if one cannot join lumber camps and 
 engineering parties in the Wild West, storm 
 into new lands, go out in yawls and other 
 craft, one can earn one's bread in wharfs, 
 in the shops and warehouses. This going into 
 the world, far from destroying power, must, if 
 done at the right moment, enrich and fortify 
 
191 
 
 the whole mental and moral life. One day 
 we may be sure the rich and well-to-do will re- 
 quire * this kind of experience for their sons as 
 they crave other good things. (Already every 
 lad — and even every girl in her sphere t — of any 
 spirit, however, craves it for himself.) The 
 point we have now to urge, however, is not one 
 that concerns the rich, but only the poor. It is 
 the fact that even this strenuous life in the 
 open does not take the place of secondary edu- 
 cation, but only gives new meaning to it. To 
 have this, and to have nothing more, is to live 
 like a savage. To escape from it is to remain 
 always more or less a child. Yet, how to get 
 that kind of teaching that saves — that is the 
 question. 
 
 The problem is one that varies so widely in 
 different areas and is affected so largely by 
 local conditions that no central organisation 
 
 * Some well-to-do mothers have achieved it — urged it 
 by their healthy-minded children. A lady writes in 
 the ''Survey^' (an American magazine) that for a year 
 her 17 year old boy, tired of books, learned nothing at 
 school. After a year or two in the West with an en- 
 gineering party, however, he found a new interest in 
 studies of all kinds. He loved them because they threw 
 new light on a world he had really lived in and would 
 live in again — the world of Eealities. 
 
 t It is only fair to say that girls have taken the 
 initiative here already — and that they were no sooner 
 allowed to have any kind of systematic education in 
 secondary schools than they insisted on going into the 
 work-a-day world. Into our great hospitals well-to- 
 do girls have crowded. Many are now lady helps, 
 gardeners, and even farmers. The educated girls who 
 go on the land do not shirk any drudgery, and this 
 eagerness to go into the rough, and the staying powers 
 to keep there really mark them out very often from 
 the uneducated. 
 
192 
 can deal witli it. It is a man or woman that 
 has to be found always, not a system. In 
 every community we must find one who knows 
 — an intimate of the others, or, if that is 
 impossible, one who has found a way to their 
 hearts, and who understands their life in 
 youth and manhood. If he is a University 
 man or w^oman so much the better. Through 
 him or her the rude labour of the outer life 
 can be focussed, as it were, in the brightness 
 and stillness of a sanctuary of learning open to 
 all in their time of leisure. Here the young 
 labourers on land and sea, and in the city 
 might be allowed to connect his work with 
 the art and literature and science that have 
 grown out of it. He would be encouraged 
 also to believe that every locality, and its 
 people, have something that is precious, and 
 also peculiar to them. By the sea, but also in 
 the city, youth is the time for action. The 
 young worker longs for self-expression as a 
 means as well as an end in itself. Why, then, 
 should not young architects and designers, and 
 workers of every kind, be invited to do some of 
 the fine work of their own city? 
 
 In planning the education of girls over 17 
 we have to take into account a new body of 
 facts, hitherto ignored. In the later teens 
 Nature has changed, as it were, the physio- 
 logical key, and is setting all human life to a 
 new music. Now everything centres round 
 the individual, and class teaching of certain 
 
193 
 
 things is impossible. To this we will return 
 presently — in a footnote. 
 
 Various efforts are put forward in different 
 countries with a view to helping the girls and 
 boys in their teens who are out in the world. 
 The work of Dr. Kerschenheimer, in Munich, 
 is well known. That of Dr. Dyer, the Direc- 
 tor of Education in Cincinnati, is not so 
 familiar to British people. Under his regime 
 a Continuation Day School for working lads 
 has been opened, the employers paying the lads 
 for attendance at one morning session per 
 week. 
 
 The teacher is not merely a practical work- 
 man. He has a knowledge of engineering and 
 mechanics which allows him to take an even- 
 ing class of foremen, some of whom are re- 
 sponsible for immense workshops, where the 
 latest kinds of tools and machines are turned 
 out. 
 
 Mr. Eenshaw has made a study of the human 
 problem offered by his young workers. He 
 has heard the complaint of so many masters. 
 **The hands can't think," and has set himself 
 to find out the causes of it. Why cannot the 
 boys think? It is well to listen to the 
 answer of one who is teaching mechanics 
 in a city which is, perhaps, the greatest 
 centre for Machine Construction in the world. 
 To begin with, he finds that geometry, 
 which is the subject which lies at the core as 
 
 N 
 
194 
 it were of the whole work, is not taught early 
 enough in the school course, so the early- 
 leaving child is behind in it. Above all, it is 
 taught merely as a book subject. As a mere 
 book subject it cannot be learned, and yet if 
 a mechanic expects to do any new or original 
 work he must become familiar with its princi- 
 ples. 
 
 Mr. Renshaw casts aside school text books. 
 He cannot ask his apprentices to wade through 
 books for a petty fact. They must be treated 
 as men, for after all they have to do men's 
 work, or, at least attempt it. The age of 
 mimicry and memorising is past for them. 
 
 When an apprentice comes to him (amidst a 
 crowd of others) puzzled with questions that 
 involve much knowledge for the answering, 
 while the youth's education is very elementary, 
 he has to educate him as he can. And how is 
 it to be done ? 
 
 In the first place he never asks the puzzled 
 youth if he has studied algebra or geometry. 
 Neither does he turn to teach anything that 
 has no bearing on a piece of work that is in 
 hand. So — 
 
 *'The subject matter of my lessons," he 
 writes of his classes, *^is a mixture of shop 
 practice and calculation, engineering subjects, 
 and commercial practices, interspersed with as 
 much effort for personality as the conditions 
 will permit. When the material or tactics 
 employed fail to hold attention they are im- 
 
195 
 
 mediately changed; and it often happens that 
 a boy, who, if he were in another school, would 
 be studying decimals, is here doing problems 
 in machine design that involve algebra, geome- 
 try, trigonometry, mechanics, strength of 
 materials, and drawing. His rules for deci- 
 mals, etc., are stored away in his mind under 
 such titles as ^designing gears,' * testing levels,* 
 'calculating speeds,' *feeds and motions in 
 machines,' etc." 
 
 It would pay any teacher to study Mr. 
 Eenshaw's ** Jig-pro tractors," which are 
 notched paper circles with rubber bands. No 
 matter where these are placed the angles 
 formed can be readily measured. Thus, for 
 example, when the point of an angle is in the 
 centre of the protractor the number of degrees 
 between the bands which form the sides of 
 the angle show the size of the angle or number 
 of degrees. The principles that show one how 
 to calculate all the angles, no matter where 
 they are placed, are thus illustrated in a simple,, 
 concrete way. The device is, of course, not 
 intended for use as a tool. It is a means of 
 helping one to discover for himself the facts 
 of geometry without going to school. If one 
 had not a paper circle and rubber band, a gear 
 wheel from a clock and a piece of string would 
 do, or the change gears of a lathe or a circular 
 saw. The device illustrates the class-room 
 method of the school. A glance round the 
 
196 
 room,* filled, as it is, with specimens of spoiled 
 work and also of good work, done by the boys 
 themselves in the shop or factory, also gives one 
 an idea of how the material supplied by their 
 own lives and environment is used by the 
 teacher. 
 
 But this education through work is not 
 all. Over and above the educational problem 
 there is the human problem. 
 
 The secret misery of the unready youth flung 
 into the industrial world reveals itself at odd 
 moments. It comes to the surface in the pre- 
 sence of a teacher who is a new order of com- 
 rade and friend. *'You don't mean," said one 
 boy, **that there is any joy in labour, f Garn !" 
 ''Yes, sir," said the teacher. Great surprise 
 in the class. It is a startling theory. ''The 
 workshop," cries another in a low voice, ''it's 
 hell — that's what it is." And indeed, some 
 places where boys work are terrible. There 
 they have been sent off to work by fathers who 
 throw them out as it were as kittens might be 
 thrown into the water. They are tumbled into 
 
 * Though we have dwelt on the work of this class a 
 little it represents of course only a part of the work in- 
 augurated by the leading educationists of Cincinnati for 
 young pjeople over 14. They have followed the example 
 of Munich in planning out and organising full courses 
 of instruction representing the great divisions of human 
 labour. The Building Trades, Engineering, Physical 
 Sciences, Teaching, Arts and Crafts, Home Making, etc. 
 
 fSuch words might be heard in almost any city. Not 
 in Munich perhaps. But the small town of Munich 
 spends over ^£80,000 a year on the education of pupils 
 oyer the elementai'y school age. 
 
197 
 
 the industrial world suddenly. It is pretty sure 
 that all, being poor, have come out of child- 
 hood and home with a jerk. They were un- 
 prepared for what awaited them. ''You've got 
 'em bad," says the teacher one day to a de- 
 jected youth who had been working for some 
 weeks. His father had declared that he 
 couldn't send him to school any more, and he 
 sent him to a shop where, to quote the fore- 
 man, ''Sympathy ain't kept on tap." "Yes, 
 I have," muttered the boy, after weeks of 
 dogged silence, and the tears fell like rain. But 
 that is very rare. It is a point of honour with 
 most of the young people to stifle their misery, 
 and to adopt a coarse manner, which corres- 
 ponds to a real coarsening and hardening pro- 
 cess taking place within.* 
 
 * This coarsening can be prevented so far as we know 
 only in two ways, viz., by culture and by sympathy. In 
 the later teens Nature has changed, as it were, the 
 physiological key, and is setting all human life to a new 
 music. Now everything centres round the individual, 
 and class teaching of certain subjects becomes almost 
 useless. The new life seeks new modes of expression and 
 finding now shuts itself up in timid reserve. But shows 
 itself into a new kind of self-consciousness and vanity. This 
 is the age when a girl wants "to be a great singer," or 
 still more delightful and common, "to go on the stage.*' She 
 wants to go on the stage (not always as many think, in 
 order to seek adventures, but obeying a natural impulse 
 towards self-expression). She will stand up and "recite" 
 at "entertainments." She does not know how to stand 
 even, or to let her arm fall after lifting it. No matter. 
 She must try as she can to give expression to the wonder- 
 ful young life surging within her. This is the moment 
 for fine physical culture, for the training of the Sense 
 Organs in a new way. Any girl can now learn to move, 
 to speak well — which will allow her to think well. Her 
 parents think that only a great actress can aspire to 
 these things. On the contrary, these are things that any 
 girl should aspire to. A great specialist looking rau&d 
 
198 
 
 *'The Continiiation School is no substitute of 
 course for a real system of Secondary Educa- 
 tion/' it may be said. No. The United 
 States has such a system in her High Schools 
 free to all. The Continuation Day School is 
 not, however, a mere missionary effort. It is a 
 research school of a high order, and is doing 
 work that is bound to re-act favourably on the 
 High School itself.* It is just this kind of Scout- 
 School that we want so badly in England. As 
 for the High Schools, they give a four-year course 
 to pupils over fourteen, the industrial training 
 of the last years being a kind expansion of the 
 old apprenticeship system. There is nothing 
 bookish or unpractical in it, nor is entrance 
 into the world really delayed unduly. For in 
 the last years the boys attend school and shop 
 in alternate weeks. 
 
 The teachers are of a new order. They go 
 about with tools, just as formerly students 
 
 at the young teachers in Bradford Pupil Teachers' Centre 
 ©aid regretfully, **Here are dozens of splendid voices that 
 could go in for the highest order of singing/* "It would 
 be impossible, however, to train them all for grand 
 opera, ' the practical reader will cry. Not for grand 
 opera, but for sweet and clear speech, and singing that 
 would delight many; for grace and beauty of movement 
 they might be trained. 
 
 * In 1850 there were only 50 Public High Schools in the 
 States. Now there are 8,000. In 1890 only 200,000 were 
 enrolled. To-day there are 800,000. It is interesting to 
 note how these are recruited. It is not the well-to-do 
 alcme who send their children. In a working-class dis- 
 trict in Boston 90 per cent, of all the children go on to 
 Hi^h School. It is the late arrivals — the recently-come 
 emigrants who pull down the per centage to 10 per cent, 
 all over the country. 
 
199 
 went about with books. Yet, they are never, so 
 far as one can judge, appointed merely on 
 account of their technical skill. It would 
 appear that the United States, in common with 
 other countries, but more vividly than smaller 
 countries, has realised the need for a new order 
 of teachers — and therefore for a new order of 
 Higher Education. They want teachers who 
 have been workers, and yet who have all the 
 versatility of the trained thinker, who have 
 mastered the learning of the schools and can 
 apply it under perfectly new conditions. No 
 mere "technical education" will enable any- 
 one to do this. 
 
 Such teachers are coming to the front, but 
 not in large numbers. 
 
 One and another stands at very far in- 
 tervals in the breach, doing a new work un- 
 dreamed of by many even of our "modern" 
 pedagogues. But the coming of the many 
 that are needed, and that have to save tens of 
 thousands of young people alive, must depend 
 on the existence of some agency that will reach 
 the toiler in workshop, yawl, or mine, and will 
 help him to qualify for this new task. But 
 where are the teachers who will make all this 
 practical knowledge live anew, and give it a 
 new meaning. In the Universities. But in 
 England, at least, the outlook is not very 
 bright in that quarter. It may be, and is, 
 brighter than ever before. Yet, during the 
 past year the Hebdomadel Council of Oxford, 
 
200 
 
 having held a great many meetings with a view 
 to considering new proposals for the admis- 
 sion of poor men, changed nothing almost in 
 so far as the working man is concerned. It 
 was decided that even scholarship money 
 should continue to be at the disposal of the 
 rich who can win it. Prizes of £1,400 and 
 £1,G00 are still to be won by the wealthy. The 
 Exhibitions (reserved for the poor) vary from 
 £20 to £30. These are facts to note and 
 realise.* 
 
 It is not easy to see how, as things stand, 
 the best teaching can soon be within the reach 
 of all. One thing, however, can ruffle even 
 the most placid waters, and that thing is a 
 new demand. If a new, and growing, and en- 
 lightened demand for a share in the best kind 
 of teaching that England can offer should arise 
 
 * In some countries ail the Universities are practically 
 open to all. One-fourth of all the students at Harvard 
 University, for example, are working their way through 
 by means of Scholarships, and by dint of labour. Even 
 from the far West States young people flock up to the 
 country's oldest Universities, taking their chances of 
 finding work, and facing the struggle hopefully. The 
 list of occupations they follow is a long one — from 30 to 
 40 callings are represented. Many of these are very hum- 
 ble. Waiters, snow shovellers, guides, shopmen of every 
 order are working out of class-hours for a living. In 
 summer many go on the farms where labour is well paid. 
 Some wait at table on their comrades, and neither rich 
 nor poor feel that this is at all embarassing ! There is a 
 kind of self-consciousness in every class in the Mother 
 land which stands in the way of swift advance. Take 
 the matter of School Bathing for example. Even in slum 
 areas there is a doubt about putting Baths in School. 
 In Chicago the millionaire's child bathes at school after 
 games. The finest School Baths are to be seen at Park 
 School, Chicago, to which pupils come in automobiles 
 every morning. 
 
201 
 in every part of the country, nothing could 
 withstand it long. But such a demand grows 
 and strengthens only by supply. There 
 appears to be no way then of making the 
 demand for Higher Education effective, save 
 by helping the working people and scholars 
 who are already struggling to secure Higher 
 Education for all to-day. 
 
 *'But why should not the worker strive 
 alone?'' many will ask. Many workmen are 
 striving alone. These are, for the most part, 
 trying to do something as individuals. But 
 in the older countries, in latter days, a new 
 thing has come to pass. The worker and the 
 scholar have met for a new purpose. And say 
 what one may, this union has been fruitful. 
 To go back once more to Denmark. Kristen 
 Kold's success was just this, that he brought 
 the University men into the farms and 
 homes and schools of the common people 
 in Denmark. At their meeting of scholar 
 and worker the * * Spirit that works in Free- 
 dom" revealed itself, and broke the spell 
 that made the worker a slave, and kept the 
 life of the Universities barren. Then all the 
 words that used to fall from the lips of the 
 pseudo-thinkers grew pale and withered. The 
 peasants were not merely ''raised.'' They were 
 transformed. Said the old world, *'He, the 
 peasant, must be a drudge." ''Then the peas- 
 ant shall die," said a new voice. "Instead of 
 him shall come the new farmer, the educated 
 
202 
 fanner, with interests in every quarter of the 
 globe. He, with the last word of science in 
 his ears, as he turns over his grain samples, or 
 goes to his cattleshed." The new workmen- 
 teachers of America are saying and trying to 
 do practically the same thing. They are try- 
 ing to transform workers — to make a new race 
 of workpeople.* They fan the light that was 
 dying at dawn in factory and mine. 
 
 Dimly, perhaps, but truly, they glimpse at 
 times the dawn of a new life, a world where 
 all is made new, where every trade is trans- 
 formed as the oldest of all- -agriculture — is 
 transformed in at least one little country. Cer- 
 tainly they speak and work, not as hirelings, 
 but as seeing a kingdom that is invisible. 
 Meantime, with what light they had, the 
 working-class reformers have attacked a few 
 social problems, and have begun even to 
 solve them. Within the past twenty years 
 they have settled the gas and water questions 
 in some towns, and also the matter of tramway 
 service. These later reforms deal, however, 
 with day-old blossoms, not with the under- 
 ground roots that drain the soil. The deeper 
 problems, those age-long wrongs, the depth of 
 
 *One cannot say "It is a lower class after all. The 
 rich do not belong to it.'' The rich do belong to it. They 
 are fitting themselves to enter this new order. The 
 scholars of Parker School, for example, go out skilled 
 workers — trained from early children to understand in- 
 dustry and knowing the principles of many trades through 
 having worked as smiths, carpenters, engineers, printers, 
 etc., at school. 
 
203 
 whose root in the social under-world is the 
 measure, not only of the despair of the 
 workers, but of the security of those who 
 oppress them (wittingly and unwittingly) have 
 hardly been faced, have hardly come even with- 
 in the range of our boldest workers and 
 thinkers. 
 
 This is not the hour for despising the fine 
 and old order of trained thinker, the scholar, 
 who chooses the gold and azure of *'the humani- 
 ties." But there are thousands who do turn 
 away from him hopelessly. They turn from 
 him, perhaps, without losing the desire for a 
 new light. Does he possess it, living so far 
 from them? Does he not learn in vain even 
 as they toil in vain? Some hint of the truth 
 may reach one and the other even in the Uni- 
 versities. ''What are the humanities even 
 to me," one scholar here and there begins 
 to ask, ''since they divide me from my fellow- 
 o.reature?" Meantime, there are many who, 
 never rising out of a world of dull, hard labour, 
 never cease utterly to long for something 
 higher and lovelier than the mere struggle for 
 the bread that perishes. Indeed, the whole 
 desire of the workers to-day is touched with 
 Idealism, however material their demand for 
 more wages, better houses, etc., may appear 
 to be. The poor woman in the slums, as well 
 as the factory hand and the skilled mechanic, 
 are conscious, more or less, of a beauty and 
 light that eludes them always, but which they 
 
204 
 were formed to love, and to appreciate in a 
 growing measure all their lives long. The 
 materialism itself is largely a result of this 
 baulked desire for something else. Even the 
 vice that degrades our cities is a kind of revolt 
 against this monstrous denial. 
 
 Nevertheless, the new hope is alight. Once 
 fired, it cannot very well go out again. To 
 fan it, and feed it, is one of the highest duties 
 of a Labour or Socialist Party. 
 
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 CONTENTS: 
 
 Introduction. 
 
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 A Note on Chartism. 
 
 The Type of the Old Unionism. 
 
 The '* Marking Time" Era. 
 
 The Unlearned Lessons of the 
 
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 The Coming of Liberal-Labourism 
 The Labour Electoral Association 
 The Striking of the Roots. 
 The New Unionists. 
 
 The Last of the Electorsd 
 
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 The Rising of the Independent 
 
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 The Birth of the Labour Party. 
 Initial Struggles. 
 First Fruits. 
 
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 Legislative Rudiments. 
 Labour in Parliament. 
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 Statement of the Provisional Committee of the Grand 
 
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