Germany and Switzerland have established compulsory continuation schools; Scotland has now followed their example. The Consultative Committee has now shown that England is ready, and has suggested a practicable scheme. Will the men and women whose hearts are torn, and whose national pride is wounded by the sight of so many workers unable to earn a living wage, and whose reason tells them that their unemployed are often incompetent, because their training stopped and licence began at thirteen years of age, and whose minds have now been informed by figures that it is for want of care during the most critical period of their lives that loafers and vagrants are made--will the men and women who thus feel and know make the Government understand that this one thing it is necessary shall be taken in hand without further delay? SAMUEL A. BARNETT. A RACE BETWEEN EDUCATION AND RUIN.[1] BY CANON BARNETT. March, 1912. [1] From “The Westminster Gazette”. By permission of the Editor. I. “Twenty years too late” is the reflection suggested by the report of the success of the Universities’ Experiment of Tutorial Classes for Working People. The present industrial situation needs, it may be agreed, a working-class able to take large and generous views, capable of shaping not only a class but a national policy, trained to separate the essential from the unessential, and to act consistently on principles tried and proved in the history of the past. The old Universities have the resources for giving the people this equipment. They have wealth; they have teachers penetrated by the traditions accumulated in Oxford and Cambridge; they exist, we are told, to give liberal culture a broader outlook, a historical perspective. The Universities, roused by the Workers’ Education Association, have, by means of the Tutorial Classes, achieved notable success. They have offered to groups of twenty or thirty working people in the great towns means by which they might enter a larger life, feel the years which are behind, and get a grasp of eternal principles. The means have been seized with surprising eagerness. Men after a hard day’s work have been found week after week at the tutors’ tables for the study of economics, political philosophy, or history; they have kept up attendance for three years, and they have learnt, to quote the words of some who attended a summer meeting in Balliol College, “the wonderful development which has taken place in my mind” now “that my prejudices have been dispelled and mental horizon widened”--that “study is a pleasure rather than a task”. The students, in a word, receive a share of that larger education which the Universities exist to give. But success over so small an area, affecting only a few thousand men, but serves to show what might have been if the movement had commenced twenty years earlier.