cessary for him immediately to earn the
greater part of his own living. It is not in the power of his father,
who lives from week to week, or even from day to day, to apprentice
his boys and put them to a trade. They must earn their living at once.
What are they to do?

At the very age when these boys have reached the point when the
intellect, already partly trained and the hand, not yet trained at
all, should begin to work together, they are faced by the terrible
fact--how terrible to them they little know--that they can be taught
no trade. They must go out into the world with a pair of unskilled
hands, and nothing more. Consider. A country lad learns every day
something new; he learns continually by daily practice how to use his
hands and his strength, by the time he is eighteen he has become a
very highly skilled agriculturist; he knows and can do a great many
most useful and necessary things. But the town lad, if he learns no
trade, learns nothing. He will never have any chance in life; he can
never have any chance; he is foredoomed to misery; he will all his
life be a servant of the lowest kind; he will never have the least
independence; he will, in all probability, be one of those who wait
day by day for the chance gifts of Luck. At the best, he can but get
into the railway service, or into some house of business where they
want porters and carriers.

There is, however, a great demand for boys, who can earn five
shillings a week as shop boys, errand boys, and so forth. Our clever
lad, therefore, who has done so well at school, becomes a fruiterer's
lad, cleans out the shop, carries round the baskets, and is generally
useful; he gets a rise in a year or two, to seven shillings and
sixpence; presently he is dismissed to make room for a younger boy who
will take five shillings. Shall we follow the lad farther? If he gets,
as we hope he may, steady employment, we see him next, at the age of
fifteen, marching about the streets in the evening with a girl of the
same age to whom he makes love, and smoking 'fags,' or cigarettes.
There are thousands of such pairs to be seen everywhere; in Victoria
Park on Sundays, or Hampstead Heath on Saturday evenings, every
evening in the great thoroughfares--in Oxford Street as much as in
Whitechapel, in the music-halls and in the public-houses. You may see
them sitting together on doorsteps as well as promenading the
pavement. If there is any way of spending the evenings more
destr