Consider the life of the working man at present. The State provides him as a boy with education up to the age of fourteen; provides him as a man with labour exchanges, insurance, and old-age pensions. The one period, which in the more fortunate ranks of Society is regarded as above all preparatory for life, is the one period of which the State takes no account. It is a fatal hole in the ballot. Why should not the workers have the privilege for their sons that belongs by mere good fortune to the wealthier classes—the privilege of a training that will give them greater health, greater knowledge and technical skill, better habits, more self-respect, and the power as well as the inclination to defend their country if need be? After this war the national readjustments that take place to meet the menace from without and the menace from within must surely have relation to fundamental necessities, and not merely be the top-dressing and timorous expedients that accompany the piping times of a long-unshaken peace. In the expenditure of large sums to achieve its ends the State need not look for its money back this year or next, so long as there is a certainty of the money back manifold ten and twenty years hence. The expense of a national scheme for the training and technical education of all boys from fourteen to eighteen would have been looked on before the war as an insuperable objection. But the truly wonderful example of faith shown by the Russian Government in cutting off their own colossal revenue from drink at the outbreak of the war, and the immediate incalculable advantage to the strength of the Russian nation that accrued thereby, has knocked penny-wisdom off its perch. This is not the time or place, nor am I qualified to examine the cost in detail. But, whatever that cost, can there be any doubt that the increased physical and industrial efficiency, coupled with the national security guaranteed by such training, would bring the outlay back tenfold within a generation? And can there be any question that it would conserve wealth, which adult training would but dissipate? When the war is over there will be great numbers of men whose lives have been hopelessly jolted, who have to find new occupations—men qualified, and probably only too willing, to take positions of technical instruction and military training under such a scheme. And the boys of the nation, already infected with desire to stand for something in the national security, would fall in with good spirit. Apart from the question of expense, opposition would come, no doubt, from the employers of boy labour, and from the working-class parents of boys who are contributing to the family purse.