or their special work, nor to attain a higher general
education with a view to their obtaining employment of a different class
and ceasing to be manual workers. It is to enable them, while continuing
to earn their living by manual work, to participate in the fuller life
given by intellectual activity. There are some subjects which can be
pursued and studied _thoroughly_ with pleasure and profit without any
long or exact preliminary training. With some wise guidance in reading
and some stimulating criticism to help him, the workman can really
obtain all that is important from the study of the literature of his own
language--to learn to know and to enjoy the best that has been written.
It is of no importance that he will probably not become a "literary
expert," able to trace the influence of this or that obscure writer of
one age or country on the literature of another. It is to be hoped that
he will not learn the kind of literary jargon affected by so many modern
critics, or attempt in his essays to imitate those who think that
obscurity indicates profundity. There are some sciences, too, especially
certain branches of natural science, which can be pursued by men whose
time is mainly taken up by manual work.

The idea of erecting an educational ladder by which all will proceed
from the elementary to the secondary school and thence to the
University, is a false one. Any such ladder must continue to be narrow
at the top. It is impossible in any economic conditions that we are
likely to see in our time that the majority of our people will be able
to devote their whole lives to study until the age at which a University
course can be finished. Indeed, for all classes there is a modern
tendency to prolong the school period unduly, to keep boys under the
discipline and following the methods of the secondary school until
nineteen years of age, so that they finish a University course, which is
also becoming more prolonged, after twenty-three, and then at last take
up their vocational training. Neither parents nor the nation can afford
to make such a course the normal one. It is no doubt of the greatest
importance to secure a career for special talent so that poverty shall
not prevent a really able boy or girl following such a course of study
as would enable his or her talents to have their full scope. The old
Grammar Schools, especially in the North of England, afford many
examples of poor boys who by means of their school and Uni