Government is enormously increasing the quantity and improving the quality of this machinery.

Let us first consider the classes now formed all over the country under the auspices of the Science and Art Department. Their development in the last thirty years has been something truly marvellous.

When the Queen, in 1852, opened Parliament, there were already 35,000 students of art, but practically no students of science, in this country, amongst the industrial classes. That 35,000 will, if the present progress goes on, give us nearly 1,000,000 students of art at the end of this year; while the science schools have increased from 82 in 1860 to 1,400 in 1880, with 69,000 students. The system which has thus developed so enormously has dealt chiefly with pure science, but for the future we shall have side by side with it, and built upon the same lines, a system of teaching the applications of this pure science to each of our national industries. He who wishes in the future to have to do in any way with the manufacture of alkali, gas, iron, paper or glass, to take some instances, or in the dyeing of a piece of silk or the making of a watch, to take others, will find the teaching brought to his door and obtainable almost for the asking.

Here, again, we may congratulate ourselves, for while those who know most about the subject tell us that the more ambitious attempts at technical instruction in Germany and elsewhere have failed, because the teaching is not in sufficiently close contact with the works in which the processes are actually carried on, the system to which I have drawn your attention will enable the instruction to be given at night to those who have already begun practical work during the day.

We have, then, come to this: that putting together what is most desirable in the abstract, and what has been practically proved to be the best, the education of our industrial classes should be, and can easily be, something like this. The boy will go to an elementary school till he is thirteen. He will then pass with an exhibition, if necessary, to a secondary school till he is sixteen. He will there go on with his science-now a class subject in the elementary school-and begin the study of languages. At sixteen he will leave school and begin the battle of life, and can still in the evening proceed further with his studies in pure science, if the secondary education has left him too ill-equipped in that direction. Having thus got the principles of pure science into his mind he will be able to take up the technical instruction in the particular industrial art to which he is devoting himself.

But be the number of our future foremen and managers who have had this extra three years of secondary instruction, large or small, if there be in Coventry let us say out of your population of 45,000, 1,000 boys, or girls, or men, who are anxious not only to learn science, but its application to their particular industries, then the Government is ready to endow Coventry with a sum varying from 2,000l. to 6,000l. a year, according to the results of the examinations, if two subjects of pure science are taken up, and the students pass. The City Guilds are prepared to endow the town with from 1,000l. to 2,000l. a year additional, provided some application of the principles of science to the industrial arts is taken up, and evidence forthcoming that the principles themselves have been studied. Now if among your 45,000 there is not 1,000 who care for these things which are vital to your trades,

seeing that abroad these things are cared for, how can your trades stand against foreign competition? Let such a system as this go on for twenty years, and we shall hear nothing more of the decay of our national industries.

Now here I am bound to point out a distinct gap in the present system. We have classes for art, classes for pure science, classes for applied science, but where are the classes for languages?

The modern languages are taught so badly in our secondary schools, that it is hopeless to expect that sufficient knowledge, either of French or German, can be acquired in the three years' course to enable the student to find out what his French and German rivals are doing in the branch of industry which he takes up; and we must, moreover, consider those who may wake up to the importance of studying science and its technical applications after the chance of a secondary education is lost. Such classes then are a real want.

But I will not end my address by a reference to what I regard as an unfortunate gap, but would rather conclude what I have to say by pointing out that the scheme I have sketched out need be no Utopia, so far, at all events, as a supply of well-trained teachers is concerned. This, up to the present time, has been the real difficulty. But now that the authorities at South Kensington have started summer courses of lectures to teachers, and that they actually pay the teachers for going to learn, the method of teaching, both in the elementary and secondary schools, and evening classes, cannot fail to improve.

Quite recently, too, we have seen the inauguration of a Normal School, where Royal Exhibitioners and other free students are admitted without payment; where the

teacher has the first claim, and where he can attend any single course for a nominal fee.

Now every town of importance in the country should associate itself with the Government in this attempt, and should have one, at least, of its citizens always in training there, so that the scientific instruction in that town, whether primary, secondary or tertiary, should always be at its highest level. On the other side of the road, too, at South Kensington, is rapidly rising another institution where we may hope the teachers of our technical instruction will receive an equally careful training.

So that you see, to bring what I have to say to a conclusion, though we are late in the day, though many people have not yet made up their minds as to what is best to be done and I acknowledge that the question is hedged in with difficulties on all sides-there is an easy solution of the difficulty based on the experience of other countries, which is at the same time an act of simple justice; that this solution requires, if we adopt it, no dislocation, but simply a natural growth of our existing means, and finally that all the newest developments of our educational machinery will fall naturally into place.

THE EDUCATION QUESTION IN 1883.

(1883.)

We are a long-suffering patient people. The call of Luther to those around him to educate their children and make men of them, as well as provide them with arms— a call at once answered in Germany-is only just now being answered among ourselves.

One of the most interesting and one of the most touching sights in London now, and one which in our view is a standing disgrace to the politicians who have held sway during the last hundred years, is the gradual rising above dingy roofs and millions of chimneys of the red brick board schools. The children in London at all events are now being educated, and our future masters are receiving the first rudiments of their instruction, and this much more on account of the intention of their fathers to have it for them than on account of any far-seeing policy of those who are popularly supposed to look in any and every direction for anything that may conduce to the well-being of our country.

We have at last got a public instruction, and it is already in the air that that instruction will in time be as free as it is now compulsory. It is a heartbreaking thing to look back and think what might have been had these all too recently built schools overtopped the squalid