If our educational efforts are conducted after the Chinese model; if we stultify the vigor and freshness of young brains by the weary, dull, and useless cramming of words and phrases; if we poison and pervert the growing intellect of British youth by feeding it upon the decayed carcases of dead languages, and on effete and musty literature, our progress will be proportionately Chinaward; but if we shake off that monkish inheritance which leads so many of us blindly to believe that the business of education is to produce scholars rather than men, and direct our educational efforts towards the requirements of the future rather than by the traditions of the past, we need have no fear that Great Britain will decline with the exhaustion of her coal-fields. The teaching and training in schools and colleges must be directly and designedly preparatory to those of the workshop, the warehouse, and the office; for if our progress is to be worthy of our beginning, the moral and intellectual dignity of industry must be formally acknowledged and systematically sustained and advanced. Hitherto, we have been the first and the foremost in utilizing the fossil forces which the miner has unearthed; hereafter we must in like manner avail ourselves of the living forces the philosopher has revealed. Science must become as familiar among all classes of Englishmen as their household fuel. The youth of England must be trained to observe, generalize, and _investigate_ the phenomena and forces of the world outside themselves; and also those moral forces within themselves, upon the right or wrong government of which the success or failure, the happiness or misery of their lives will depend. With such teaching and training the future generations of England will make the best and most economical use of their coal while it lasts, and will still advance in material and moral prosperity in spite of its progressive exhaustion. “THE ENGLISHMAN’S FIRESIDE.” During the investment of Paris, the _Comptes Rendus_ of the Acadamy of Sciences were mainly filled with papers on the construction and guidance of balloons; with the results of ingenious researches on methods of making milk and butter without the aid of cows; on the extraction of nutritious food from old boots, saddles, and other organic refuse; and other devices for rendering the general famine more endurable. In like manner, our present coal famine is directing an important amount of scientific, as well as commercial, attention to the subject of economizing coal and finding substitutes for it.