Pausing for a moment to remark, in regard to the methods in detail by which the improvement of education will most likely be sought, that to foresee what is probable is not necessarily to endorse it as ideal, and that the object of this book is not to formulate Utopia, but to predict the consequences implied by existing forces after the latter have been during a stated time in operation; and admitting that no reform ever practised within the recorded history of man has been without drawbacks inherent in its own constitution, it may be said at once that the work of instruction is capable of mechanical and instrumental improvement not less considerable than any other labour to be undertaken by ourselves and our successors. Even within a lifetime's limits all sorts of appliances for assisting the mind of the learner to apprehend the facts sought to be learnt have been invented, and our children, as we all know, are much more easily taught than we were ourselves. The laudator temporis acti is always pretty ready to depreciate the value of these improvements, and perhaps it is natural enough in most of us to find it difficult to believe that any plan of teaching can be better for our children than the one which produced results so pleasingly exemplified by ourselves. But at all events, it will be generally, if a little grudgingly, admitted that any form of apparatus capable of saving time and trouble in teaching is capable of being ranked as an improvement. Unquestionably appliances having this object will be constantly invented and used during the present century. For instance, it is hardly conceivable that something less than perfection in the teaching of a foreign pronunciation by the mouth of the best teacher who can be hired for the work will content us, when perfected talking-machines presently enable us to give examples of the still better speech. Evidently a boy would learn to speak French with a purer accent by listening to a phonograph which, freed of the present tin-trumpet timbre and whirring, repeated the speech of the Comédie Française, than by hearing an ordinary master read aloud. To say this is not to suggest that professors of languages will be dispensed with; but their teaching can be thus supplemented. Similarly the use of magic-lanterns and kinetoscopic pictures is capable of improving greatly upon the blackboard and chalk still used. But the plan of education in itself is so greatly more important to be foreseen than the mechanism by which the details can be worked out, and the latter can with so very little difficulty be imagined by anyone interested in them, that the reader shall not be troubled with any discussion of this branch of the subject, but will rather be asked to concentrate his attention upon the moral and intellectual aspects of it.