An opportunity for superior technical education is given in the Chicago Manual Training School, founded and sustained by the Commercial Club. It has a handsome and commodious building on the corner of Michigan avenue and Twelfth Street, which accommodates over two hundred pupils, under the direction of Dr. Henry H. Belfield, assisted by an able corps of teachers and practical mechanics. It has only been in operation since 1884, but has fully demonstrated its usefulness in the training of young men for places of responsibility and profit. Some of the pupils are from the city schools, but it is open to all boys of good character and promise. The course is three years, in which the tuition is $80, $100, and $120 a year; but the club provides for the payment of the tuition of a limited number of deserving boys whose parents lack the means to give them this sort of education. The course includes the higher mathematics, English, and French or Latin, physics, chemistry—in short, a high-school course—with drawing, and all sorts of technical training in work in wood and iron, the use and making of tools, and the building of machinery, up to the construction of steam-engines, stationary and locomotive. Throughout the course one hour each day is given to drawing, two hours to shop-work, and the remainder of the school day to study and recitation. The shops—the wood-work rooms, the foundery, the forge-room, the machine-shop—are exceedingly well equipped and well managed. The visitor cannot but be pleased by the tone of the school and the intelligent enthusiasm of the pupils. It is an institution likely to grow, and perhaps become the nucleus of a great technical school, which the West much needs. It is worthy of notice also as an illustration of the public spirit, sagacity, and liberality of the Chicago business men. They probably sec that if the city is greatly to increase its importance as a manufacturing centre, it must train a considerable proportion of its population to the highest skilled labor, and that splendidly equipped and ably taught technical schools would do for Chicago what similar institutions in Zurich have done for Switzerland. Chicago is ready for a really comprehensive technical and industrial college, and probably no other investment would now add more to the solid prosperity and wealth of the town.