But it is not only upward that the school age should extend, but also downward. It should be possible for poor parents who cannot afford a nursery to send their children to the people’s schools at a quite tender age. The children of prosperous people have a governess, or in towns go to some properly equipped infant school, by the time they are four or five. The children of the working-class woman knock about at home with a mother too busy to give them sufficient educational attention, and their only open air is the street. They miss the beginnings of drawing and modelling and such-like play; they do not get sufficiently talked to; they get little or no music; they start with that much handicap. Vile attempts at economy in British education have meant a grave retrogression in this respect. The schools have to be reopened to infants, and the facilities for infant teaching restored and extended. The public infant school must be the day-nursery of the poor. Both these extensions of the school age will require more teachers. And even as it is, the British schools are scandalously understaffed. Not only is that so, but many of the existing staffs are under-trained and under-educated for their work. I cannot conceive of British education as a satisfactory system with less than quadruple the number of teachers at work than are now employed. Moreover they have to be better teachers. When British elementary education was organised in the ’seventies of the last century it was done in the shabbiest and cheapest way possible. Those were the days when Englishwomen of the prosperous classes would become half frantic with jealousy and hate and derision at the idea of a housemaid wearing a fringe or the cook going out in pretty clothes on a Sunday. That was the spirit of the time. It was intolerable to them that the poor man’s “brats” should be taught by really educated persons. The prospective teachers of the general public, therefore, were not sent through the Universities and made a part of the general comity of educated men and women. They were put apart into mean, bleak, restricted training colleges of their own, and everything was done to establish and maintain a sense of social inferiority in their minds. They were intended to feel the superiority of the parson and the lordship of the manufacturer and the squire. Never has a profession risen to self-respect against such obstacles and disadvantages as the British elementary teachers. It is for Mr. Trevelyan to complete the expansion and liberalisation of these training colleges, to see that they get at last the staffs, libraries, laboratories, and facilities of interchange necessary to incorporate them completely in the university system of the land. Or else to hand them over to the local authorities as lunatic asylums or something of that sort or to reconstruct them to meet the housing shortage, or just simply to dynamite them and send the whole of