In both the Borstal and the Preventive Detention Institution it is intended to teach the inmates habits and pursuits that will be useful to them in the world outside. What these are will altogether depend on what is to happen to them on liberation. No institution has yet been devised that even remotely resembles anything like the life that its inmates have to anticipate. A great deal has been written about the advisability of teaching trades to persons in institutions, but the writers are never themselves artisans, and if they had any practical knowledge of the subject they would not write; there would be nothing to write about. More goes to the learning of a trade than the handling of the tools. Men have not merely to learn how to do a thing, but how to do it in association with other workers. They learn the trade not from the lectures of a teacher or the instructions of a foreman, but from watching the work of others, and imitating or avoiding their methods, as seems most suitable. Take the two best tradesmen in almost any workshop, and you will find that they set about their work each in a different way--each in the way he has found best suited to himself. The apprentices learn from them; and the lad or man who wants to learn a trade, is ill-advised indeed if he goes to a workshop where there are as many apprentices as journeymen. It used to be said that the first year of a joiner's apprenticeship was served in sweeping the shavings and in boiling men's "cans"; and there was a good deal of truth in the statement. The best tradesmen I have known spent the first part of their apprenticeship knocking about the workshop, fetching and carrying for others, and unconsciously receiving impressions and gaining knowledge. The worst I have ever known were one or two whom the foreman thought, when they entered on their apprenticeship, to be too old for him to put to such work, and who were chained to the bench right away. In an institution where it is undertaken to teach lads or men trades, not only are the conditions less favourable than those outside, but they are actually opposed to them. In fact, you have a company composed almost entirely of apprentices. There are no journeymen. There is only a foreman in the shape of the instructor; and as the longer he is there the more out of touch he is with the changes in method that have taken place amongst his fellow-tradesmen outside, he is only capable of telling his apprentices how he would do the thing, which in a workshop they might do better by following a plan more suitable to them. If he has to overlook their work they cannot be overlooking his; and while he is criticising their efforts and keeping them in order he cannot be showing them an example.