_The Tendency of Evolution._--With the passage of the years, the importance of education continually increases. The seductions and the temptations encountered by young people to-day are at once far more frequent and far more subtle than was the case in former times. To enable them to withstand these allurements, the young require a better and a more careful education. In the early stages of evolution, alike in the struggle for existence between individuals and in the struggle for existence between competing tribes, physical strength was the decisive factor of success; but in the later stages of human evolution it is upon intellectual and moral well-being that victory in the struggle depends. Hence intellectual and moral education become of ever greater importance. To-day, one whose intellectual and moral education has been neglected is far less able to meet with success the demands made by modern life than one living some hundreds of years ago, whose education had been neglected, would have been able to meet the demands made by the life of his own time. In such a case, in our own day, the likelihood that one whose education has been neglected will be useless and even dangerous to society, is far greater than it would have been in former times; and as time goes on the differences between those who have had an appropriate education and those whose education has been neglected will become more and more extensive. It is well known that the majority of habitual criminals are persons who began to commit punishable offences in the earlier years of their life. It is only in the rarest instances that by legal punitive methods we prevent a juvenile offender from developing into a habitual criminal; the object of the punishment is seldom attained. The question therefore presses itself upon our attention, whether the prevention of crime cannot best be attained in another way than by the use of penal methods, namely, by the proper education of children. Education has no bearing upon the life of persons living in complete isolation; it is a postulate of social life alone, and becomes impregnated to a continually greater extent with social elements. The modern tendency of social evolution is to relieve the family of the cares of education, which becomes to an increasing extent a communal duty; whilst the share of the parents in the education of their children is limited, social institutions providing more generally and more thoroughly for that education. England offers us a typical example of the working of this modern tendency; for England is commonly regarded as pre-eminently individualistic, and yet there is no country in which more limitations have been imposed upon parental authority, or in which compulsory and universal education is more thoroughly enforced by the State.