The idea of erecting an educational ladder by which all will proceed from the elementary to the secondary school and thence to the University, is a false one. Any such ladder must continue to be narrow at the top. It is impossible in any economic conditions that we are likely to see in our time that the majority of our people will be able to devote their whole lives to study until the age at which a University course can be finished. Indeed, for all classes there is a modern tendency to prolong the school period unduly, to keep boys under the discipline and following the methods of the secondary school until nineteen years of age, so that they finish a University course, which is also becoming more prolonged, after twenty-three, and then at last take up their vocational training. Neither parents nor the nation can afford to make such a course the normal one. It is no doubt of the greatest importance to secure a career for special talent so that poverty shall not prevent a really able boy or girl following such a course of study as would enable his or her talents to have their full scope. The old Grammar Schools, especially in the North of England, afford many examples of poor boys who by means of their school and University scholarships were enabled to obtain the best training the country could give, and so attain the highest positions in Church and State. These must necessarily be the few. It is a cruelty by means of scholarships to tempt those who have neither the financial means nor exceptional talent to try for a career in which there will really be no opening for them. Even with the limited number of scholarships which local authorities have been able to offer, there have been many cases in which bitter complaints have been raised that young people had been induced to prepare themselves for some walk in life in which there was no demand for their services. Of course, the more knowledge is required in various industries the more scope there will be for those who have had a long training, but there is nothing more injurious to the State than to turn out a number of persons who have had a prolonged academic training, but who are not able to do something for which there is a demand, and for which the world is willing to pay. The results of such a course of action may be seen on a large scale in India. In one of the colleges of an Indian University in a large manufacturing town, fourteen young men--very agreeable and frank, outspoken fellows--met at random in one of the hostels, were asked what, on completing their college course, they intended to do; twelve answered to become "pleaders," and two hoped for something in the Government service. None proposed to follow manufacturing industry, agriculture, or commerce. The legal profession which they proposed to enter was so crowded that pleaders are said to have been competing with each other to obtain cases by a kind of Dutch