traveler through European lecture
rooms. The young engineer, the young architect, the young specialist
of every sort, finds his period of preparation steadily extending
before him.

A complicated and distant world instead of a simple and near one, a
large mass of human experience to assimilate instead of a small one, a
long technique to master instead of a short one,--for all this part of
the extension of immaturity we may thank Science. For the remaining
part of it we may thank System.

The world is getting organized. Except in some of the professions
(and often even in them) we most of us start in on our life work at
some small subdivided job in a large organization of people. The
work of the organization is so systematized as to concentrate
responsibility--and remuneration--toward the top. In time, from job to
job, up an ascent which grows longer as the organization grows
bigger, we achieve responsibility. Till we do, we discharge minor
duties for minimum pay.

Thus the _mental_ immaturity resulting from Science is supplemented by
the _financial_ immaturity resulting from System.

Both kinds of immaturity last longest among the boys and girls who
come from that large section of society which is neither rich nor
poor.

This is not to say that rich and poor escape unaffected. Shall we ever
again, from the most favored of homes, see a William Pitt, Chancellor
of the Exchequer, by merit, at 23? And, in the mass of the people,
shall we ever again see that quickness of development toward adulthood
which gave us the old common-law rule validating the marriage of a
male at 14 and of a female at 12? The retardation of adulthood is
observable in all social groups. But it comes to its climax in what is
commonly called the "middle" group. For it is in that group that the
passion for education is strongest, or, at any rate, most effective.
It is from the families of average farmers, of average business men
and of average professional men that we get our big supply of pupils
for the most prolonged technical training of our schools and
universities.

In this matter, as in many other matters, the historian of the
nineteenth century may possibly find that while public attention was
being given principally to the misery of the poor and to the luxury of
the rich it was in the "middle" part of society that the really
revolutionary changes in family life were happening.

It is with the financial reason for prolonged immaturity