pupils is exceedingly civilizing for them, and does quite unobtrusively produce an enormous effect on their manners and on their lives. It is therefore, as a rule, not very hard to get helpers when a class is once seen at work. But some one, of course, must take the plunge and set the matter going. It is very easy to set going; the arrangements could not be more simple than they are. But if the first step is not taken by some one, of course there can be no result.
And the last thing I have to say is this. Do not let us imagine our efforts superfluous, from the idea that the State or the locality may shortly take up this task with larger means than ours. Whatever form the new system may assume, its actual working must depend on the material with which it has to work. Education does not consist in buildings, not even m workshops, nor in grants of money from Parliament, or out of the rates; it consists in the desire and the capacity of human minds to teach and to be taught. To awaken this desire, and to create this capacity, in a new direction, is the achievement not of years but of generations. Methods have to be evolved, and to become easy and familiar to teachers; an order of teachers has to be created, uniting experience with enthusiasm; the mind of the upper classes, as of the lower, has to be penetrated with a new sense of what makes life worth living. This, and nothing less, is the work in which we have the chance of helping, and any future organization must entirely depend for its efficiency on the progress which this work shall have made.
