be a Nonconformist, if you want to get anything; but disadvantage is one thing, disability another.

Were any such compromise as this possible, the result would be, that religion could be taught in all the public elementary schools of the country.

The property question arises. It always does. The denominational schools are private property. If they are taken over by the country, they must be paid for. If the local authority can come to terms, either to rent or buy, well and good! If it cannot, it must either buy the old schools from their proprietors at a fair valuation to be fixed by some third party, or build new schools of its own. This will cost money-there is no way out of it.

There still remains the question as to the nature of the religion to be taught in all the schools. Here the parents really must, whether they like it or not, conquer their shyness, and, making their first appearance in this ancient and horrid controversy, tell us, when they send Tom and Jane to school, whether they wish them to receive any, and if any, what, religious instruction. There is no chance of the multiplication of strange parental religions. We are not an imaginative people. Jews, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Dissenters (in a lump), will usually exhaust the list. The great body of Dissenters will be found ready to accept the same broad, simple Bibleteaching which, for the most part, characterized Board School Christian

ity.

Unorthodox Dissenters and Agnostics seldom object to their children receiving ordinary religious school teaching, since they know they can always make their own opinions known to their children in private intercourse; but any parent who feels alarm can set his fears at rest, by letting his child run home at the end of the secular work.

In schools where the great majority of the children are all of the same way of parental thinking, things will go on just as they do now in denominational schools. At the close of the secular work, a small minority may either clatter off home, or into another place to receive their religious instruction. In a very short time, we should have heard the last of the religious difficulty in schools. The extra expense occasioned by religious teaching must be paid for by voluntary effort. Would it be absurd to expect the parents to subscribe? At all events, if they did not, other people would.

Compromises are never popular. We love to get the better of our opponent. The Churchman likes to think he has got "his" school upon the rates, and the Dissenter clings to his "CowperTemple" clause. It will be hard to persuade either to compromise. The ardent Dissenter "passively resists" in his hour of affliction. If the pendulum swings, the ardent Churchman will do his bit. The honors are easy.

The friends of compromise must appeal to the commonsense and sobriety of the English people. Why should we not provide a good sound secular education for the children of everybody who cares or is obliged to send his children to a public elementary school, and at the close of each day's secular work, for which alone the tax and rate payer will be responsible, allow the children to receive in the schoolhouse the religious instruction their parents desire them to have? Who then can complain? There will be no room for passive resistance on either side. Whoever is opposed to such a state of things must, as it seems to me, be prepared to admit, that he looks upon our national system of secular education as a means of propagating his own religious faith among a class of children he could not otherwise hope to reach.

If no such compromise is possible, the fight must continue, with consequences to the cause of religion which The Independent Review.

some day will startle both Churchman and Dissenter.

Augustine Birrell.

He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenished.

Sometimes, when one reads of technical education, or sees what is being done in provincial night schools by County Council Technical Education Committees, one begins to wonder whether our technical educators have ever given a thought to technique; or whether at least they can be aware how much technique the English have long practiced without their aid.

Over all the countryside, wherever one goes, indications of technique are visible to the seeing eye. By technique is meant an exercise of skill acquired by practice and directed to a well foreseen end. It is the name for the action of any of our powers after they have been so improved by training as to perform that action with certainty and success. This is the nature of technique; and, go where one will about the country, one can hardly escape the evidences of its abundant practice.

The metalled roads tell of it well. The deep-rutted by-roads, too, and the winding lanes, preserve through years of neglect the traces of technique in their hedgerows, however tangled; in their ditches, however choked. On the old ruinous field gate, with its lightly arched, tapering top-bar rudely carved on the under side against the tenon, the grey lichen cannot hide the signs

of a vitality more marvellous than its own-the intensified vitality of those skilled hands that shaped the timbers. The fields, newly ploughed in straight furrows, or with stubble in long rows, or green lines of wheat just appearing after snow; and the meadows, well rolled and level, or perhaps still wavy from long-forgotten ploughings; and the river banks; and the copses growing up on old "stamms"; and the woods, thinned out, and full of decayed stumps of felled trees, are all witnesses to the exercise of technical powers, just as are the tools, the farm implements, the wagons and carts, the very horses, and cattle, and sheep. Each detail of country life offers its convincing proof of skill to anyone who cares to look.

But it is in the nature of a technique (as every artist well knows) to be indescribable. No one who practices it can ever explain its essential mystery to one who is not acquainted with it by similar practice. An attentive student from the outside may track it very far, but not home. If he sees the fine results, and discriminates between them and the next finest, he is still unaware, except by inference, of the subtle vitality in the workman's hands which produced the especial fineness. The expert cricketer alone can truly appreciate the inner delicacies of cricket: the admiring onlooker who is not an expert misses what is most to be admired. And since there is this cryptic element in technique, imperceptible

to the uninitiated, the work of a true craftsman often looks so easy as to persuade an outsider that there is nothing in it. How should I know whether I can play the flute or not? I have never tried. How should we guess that a peasant's work is less simple than it appears? We have not given it a thought: we have been talking about technical education.

Yet the matter is one that would reward attention, and from several points of view. Besides the immediate interest that attaches to any form of dexterity, there are bound up with the skill of country laborers secondary interests enough to make it worth investigation. To begin with, an insight into it may enrich our own pleasure. The world has had a good deal of fun out of "Hodge," and a good deal of sweet food for spiritual pride in the comparison of its own learning with his “ignorance"; but a better pleasure than the old fun may be had from recognizing the peasant's accomplished efficiency, and a sweeter gratification than that of spiritual pride from the discovery of more merit in our race than our book-learning had led us to suspect. For our own immediate profit, therefore, it is well to know a little of what it is that peasants can do. Then, too, in the fact that commerce threatens to dispense with the skill of the English peasantry (so that it may actually be not worth the notice of technical educators) there is ground for taking another kind of interest-the antiquarian kind-in that skill. The traditional, and now vanishing, techniques of the country must some of them be inconceivably old. They must have been known to the Saxon pirates (not to mention the builders of Stonehenge and the men of the long-barrows-good at spade-work), and have been practiced diligently by those gentlemen when they settled down seriously to begin making the country what it is

now.

The woodman's axe is implied

in the Yule log, and the reaper's hook has its place in some of those harvest customs that fascinate the folk-lore student. And as the first English (from whom so much has come) must have been skilled country folk, so one cannot but feel at least an antiquary's regret at seeing their old and wellproved techniques at last going out of use. The vigor of the men who practiced them has been a stand-by, a kind of last national resource, for a very long time.

And this suggests a more vital interest attaching to the skill of country people. What influence the practice of technical gifts may have upon character is perhaps an open question, but farmers are everywhere asserting that the younger generation of laborers are as untrustworthy as they are unskilful. It is true that the farmer is a prejudiced witness, who finds fault as it were by tradition, and was lamenting even in Shakespeare's day "the ancient time, when service sweat for duty, not for meed," yet now it does really seem as though his accusations may have some ground in fact. Allied with this, there is that much regretted discontent with rural life which is emptying our villages and filling our towns. And though, of course, the causes of this discontent are originally and chiefly economic, yet a factor in the problem may very possibly be discovered in this: that to the villager the advantages of elementary education are not even a tolerable substitute for the old lost skill that made the days pleasant and won the approbation of all the neighbors.

That the old-fashioned men found an interest in one another's ability is beyond a doubt. One or two short fragments of conversation with laboring men, to be presently quoted, should be enough to establish that fact. As to the nicety of skill involved in the work

of laboring folk, that too might be inferred from their occasional talk; but after all, opportunities of hearing such things are not many, for the men are commonly too modest about their work, and too unconscious that it can interest an outsider, to dream of discussing it. What they have to say would not therefore by itself go far in demonstration of their acquirements in technique. Fortunately, for proof of that we are not dependent on talk. Besides talk there exists another kind of evidence open to every one's examination, and the technical skill exercised in country labors may be surely deduced from the aptness and singular beauty of sundry country tools.

The beauty of tools is not accidental but inherent and essential. The contours of a ship's sail bellying in the wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the curves of an adzehead or of a plough-share. Cast in iron or steel, the gracefulness of a plough-share is more indestructible than the metal, yet pliant (within the limits of its type) as a line of English blank verse. It changes for different soils; it is widened out or narrowed; it is deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the technical demands of the expert ploughman. The most familiar example for beauty indicating subtle technique is supplied by the admired shape of boats, which however is so variable (the statement is made on the authority of an old coast-guardsman) that the boat best adapted for one stretch of shore may be dangerous if not entirely useless at another stretch ten miles away. And as technique determines the design of a boat, or of a wagon, or of a plough-share, so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all tools, none of course is more exquisite than a fid

dle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler tools. Quarryman's peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat, fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to the skill of those who use them; and like animals and plants adapting themselves each to its own place in the universal order, they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law of adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees, is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and convexity in the beerbarrel; and that, exerting itself with matchless precision through the trained senses of haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the handles of their scythes and the shafts of their axes. Hence the beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in the proper handling of it technique is present.

Coming, then, from the tools in general to those more strictly associated with rural work, we find as it were midway between general and special use one which, connected as it with a perfectly well recognized form of skill, affords a convenient standard for estimating the degree of skill incidental to the use of other tools. The axe, as Walt Whitman says, has been the servant "of all great works on land and all great works on the sea"; and in our country-places it still serves, amongst others, woodmen in the forest, sawyers in the timber-yard, wheelwrights in their village workshops. For though

elsewhere axe-work may be giving place to machine-sawing and apprentices grow up unskilful in it, in villages far from machinery your wheelwright is helpless without his axe, and preserves faithfully the traditional technique of its use. Perhaps also he cherishes the traditional belief (which may be recommended to the attention of technical educators) that a wheelwright must first chop his knee at least five or six times before he can hope to become a master of his craft.

Be that as it may, in the manipulation of an axe-whether it is the mighty two-handed weapon of woodmen and sawyers or the lighter one of wheelwrights-there is one circumstance which makes the tool a pre-eminent example of the law by which beauty waits on technique. In the case of most other tools, from fiddlebow to dung-prong, the part to be handled is adapted for a stationary grip, but the handle of an axe is required for a grip that may loosen for the swinging gesture, and sliding back swiftly down the shaft, tighten suddenly at the moment of impact into a clutch that is at once firm to check rebound and yet elastic to disperse the jar of the concussion. Consequently there is no part of an axe-shaft, from the wide end where it is wedged into the head to the other end which swells to prevent slipping, but has its necessary contour; and the whole handle, thus fitted so to speak to the clever motion of a man's trained hands, has taken the mould of that motion and exhibits it to our sight. In earlier days, not so long ago but that they can be remembered, but before commerce had dispensed so much as now with the technique of chopping, every worker in hard wood was wont to fit his own shaft into his own axe. wheelwright still does So, because there is no other than himself who knows so accurately what his individ

The village

ual needs are. And seeing that his needs are roughly those of all other men, the established type of the tool is never departed from. It is as indispensable as the sole to a shoe, or as the teeth to a comb. It began to acquire organic shape in the hands of the first primeval savage who lashed a stick to his chipped flint; and through all the thousands of years since then the skill of all woodmen has been moulding the form of the tool until it is impossible to conceive any real alteration in it. But the type is as plastic as it is immutable. The present writer once knew an old wheelwright who, being left-handed, gave such a "set" to his axe-shafts that no other skilled workman could work with them; yet their refinement on the type was so nice that apprentice boys never perceived anything unusual in the tools, until the peculiarity of them was pointed out.

In singular contrast with the axe, which ever suggests the cunning of the individual workman, as the scythe, in whose comely lines the cleverness of the whole race of mowers, rather than supreme individual skill, is recorded. The reader is not to imagine here that there is no technique in mowing, or that a scythe would be a safe plaything for students in night-schools; but only that the scythe, before it began to be discarded, had reached such perfection as to minimize the extent of skill demanded for its proper use. It had almost ceased to be a tool pure and simple; it had all but become an "implement," fit to produce its results even in the hands of men who scarce understood it. True it is that farmers nowadays, when occasionally they want mowers to make up for the deficiencies of machines, have some difficulty in finding men who can handle a scythe. Yet, while this proves that there is a technique to be acquired, on the other hand it must be remembered that no individ