humanism and industry still jar. The Poor Law Commissioners of 1909 found among almost all their witnesses a strong feeling that the system is still unsuited to practical needs. Or again, that the distaste of the parents for education is still decided may be judged from the fact that, though they can claim gratuitous elementary education for their children up to the age of fifteen, the vast proportion withdraw their children from school on the earliest possible opportunity, at the age of fourteen, thus rupturing their scale of instruction at the most critical point. Or again, many listen to the advice of Tolstoi, the Rousseau of our time, like him a revolutionary and like him an educationalist, urging that children should not be burdened with books at all, that all boys and girls should be trained mainly to work with their hands at domestic duties, that all the school systems of modern states instil false statecraft and inspire wrong jingo ideals, and that disorder, or free order as he called it, should be encouraged to evoke individuality at all costs. Nevertheless, in spite of such moot issues or deficiencies, our elementary system may be pronounced to be taking shape on set lines, so that it can no longer be said to the English educationalist, in the matter of elementary instruction: "Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep."
The main educational issue of the coming time centres, then, not so much in elementary, as in that vague and vast field known as secondary, education.
