Until the passing of the Elementary Education Act of 1870, learning in England amounted practically to a luxury. Only the rich might be permitted to know things. It was a case of schools, colleges, and universities for the sons of noblemen and gentlemen. The rascally lower classes might look after themselves. It is open to question whether the rascally lower classes were not, on the whole, educationally better off in that day than they are at present. That, however, is by the way. But in the later sixties the reformer got his eagle eye on the rascally lower classes. He perceived that the rascally lower classes were in bad case. They got drunk, they used foul language, they smoked short pipes, and, Heaven help them! they could not read. Anticipating the English or Scotch half of Lord Rosebery, as the case may be, the reformer said, "Educate, educate, educate!" And it was so. The English have been educating ever since. They educated to such purpose that thirty years later Lord Rosebery felt it incumbent upon himself to bid them educate, educate, educate! In those thirty years the rascally lower classes learned somewhat. They were supposed to discover, _inter alia_, that knowledge was power. They were told that a hodman who could write his name was a better hodman than the hodman whose sign-manual was a cross. They were led shrewdly to infer that their pastors and masters and general betters owed their supremacy to knowledge; and that if they, the rascally lower classes, would only instruct their children, these same children might wax great in the land and carry burdens no more. The rascally lower classes sent their children to school, some of them cheerfully, some of them with groans; and the stars began to shine over England's darkness. What has come to pass all men know. Every Englishman gets the smatterings of a literary education, and believes in his heart that he was cut out by the Almighty to be a clerk. The honest trades and handicrafts are no longer desirable in the minds of English youth. To take one's coat off with a view to livelihood is a business for dolts and fools. Advertise in England for an office-boy and you shall receive five hundred applications; advertise for a boy to learn plumbing, and you will be offered, perhaps, two daft-looking lads, who after much thrashing have managed to attain the age of fourteen years.