An enormous amount of responsibility must devolve on those who first take up the arduous task. One burning question, which ought to be settled for the whole country alike, is the relation between the grammar and high schools on the one hand, and the elementary schools on the other. Are we to have one upper department for both, or two? Some time ago the consensus of opinion seemed to be in favour of one; that was on the assumption that the proportion of children passing beyond the standards would be a small one. Some such idea seems to have been in the mind of the Duke of Devonshire when he spoke of ‘a sound system of secondary schools which will be open alike to the most promising children of the elementary schools and to the middle classes generally.’ But this view rests on the assumption that the primary departments of both sets of schools are very similar in their curriculum and methods. This is very far from being the case. ‘The elementary schools are not, under the present conditions in England, the common basis of secondary education, nor, though an increasing number of pupils proceed from them to secondary schools, are the public elementary schools the sole, nor, indeed, the chief channels through which pupils proceed in this country to day or boarding-schools of the secondary grades.’[22] The changes that would be necessary in the elementary schools would be so numerous and far-reaching, and the expense so enormous before they would be able to attract the great mass of the middle classes, that no one could seriously propose to abolish the primary departments in secondary schools, as long as parents are able and willing to pay the school fees. They are a necessity, and would have to be supplied by private adventure, as is done at Cardiff and other large Welsh towns, if a public system declined to acknowledge them. In the interest of what we might call the ‘secondary party,’ the primary department of the secondary school must be maintained. On the other hand, the teachers in Government schools seem equally unanimous in the view that their own special continuation schools are better suited to the mass of elementary pupils than the grammar or high school. Neither party seems anxious for the fusion, and so long as a liberal scheme of scholarships is maintained, it is possible to do full justice to those elementary scholars who can look forward to a school life sufficiently long to enable them to reach the highest classes of their new school. To allow pupils to enter upon an extensive and liberal curriculum, who are likely to be removed before its real meaning and unity has dawned upon them, is a thing we should never even contemplate, were our notions of curricula and grades of schools a little less hazy than they are at present in England. The board school child, who is sent at the age of thirteen by her proud parents to have a year’s finishing at a high school, is typical of the present confusion. There is really