For ten years a group of men in America have been trying to convince Congress that we should set up a national program of secondary vocational education. As a precedent we have had a system of agricultural and mechanic-arts education of collegiate grade in existence for the last fifty years. But we have had in the past no system of national aid for promoting and maintaining a type of vocational education in agriculture, mechanic arts, and home-making, which would reach a much larger clientele than could possibly be touched through any land-grant college system. It has been an up-hill fight to get Congress to see the importance of providing vocational education for industrial workers. Bill after bill was introduced providing for national aid. These bills defined vocational education as including all types of industrial, commercial, agricultural, and home-making schools, between the upper grammar grades and the college, whose controlling purpose is to fit for specific profitable employments and which receive pupils 14 years of age and over. President Wilson in his second inaugural message called the country's attention definitely to the fact that a vocational-education bill was before Congress and that it ought to receive favorable consideration, not only on the grounds of educational advantages contained in the bill, but also on the grounds that it fitted in with a national economic and industrial policy. Perhaps the measure would have met the fate of its predecessors if war had not been declared. Friends of the measure feared lest discussion incident to national preparedness should overshadow the vocational-education bill, but fortunately Congress saw that vocational education and national preparedness were linked together, and the bill passed almost unanimously.