become their shelter, and the rest can easily be imagined--but it lasts for life. By raising the school age, the great bulk of this demoralization would be prevented. Technical training in their school years would give these youths a certain amount of aptitude and taste that would enable them to commence life under more favourable conditions, and though many of them would necessarily become errand-boys or van-boys, still, the age at which they would leave those occupations would find them nearer manhood, and in possession of greater strength and more judgment than they can claim at the present age of leaving such work. The step I am advocating would also remove another great cause of lifelong misery and its accompanying hooliganism. Look again, if you please, at the homes of the poor. Is it any wonder that when a youth finds himself earning twelve shillings a week, and has arrived at the mature age of eighteen, he enters into a certain relationship with a girl of seventeen, who has a weekly income of six shillings? This relationship may or may not be sanctioned by the law and blessed by the Church; in either case it is equally immoral, and the effects are equally blighting. How can healthy, virtuous, and orderly children come from such unions? Give the youth of our large towns a lengthened school-training, but at the same time remember that athletic and technical training must form part of that life; let healthy rivalry have a chance of animating them and a feeling of manly joy sometimes pervade them, and these horrible, wicked juvenile unions will be heard of no more; for at present their only chances of enjoyment are the streets, sexuality, or the public-house. This last word leads me to another cause of hooliganism. The public-house is bound up with the lives of the poor. To many it stands, doubtless, for enjoyment and relaxation, for forgetfulness of misery and discomfort, and for sociability. To many others it stands for poverty, suffering, unspeakable sorrow, and gross neglect. Where our streets are the narrowest, where the sanitary arrangements are of the most execrable description, there the public-house thrives, and thrives with disastrous effects. The home-life of the poor and the public-house act and react on each other. The more miserable the home and the greater the dirt, the more the public-house attracts; the more it attracts, the viler the home-life and the greater misery and dirt. It is no marvel that people who live thus demand fiery drinks; nor is it any great marvel that all the tricks of science and all the resources of civilization are brought to bear in manufacturing drinks for them. No wonder, when "the vitriol madness flushes in the ruffian's head," that "the filthy by-lane rings with the yell of the trampled wife." But the State shares the profits and the State shares the guilt. Long ago Cowper wrote: "Drink and be mad, then--'tis your country bids: Ye all can swallow, and she asks no more."